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You Do Not Feel Powerful at All?
As one moves up the evolutionary ladder in neural complexity, game-playing behavior becomes richer. The intelligence of primates, including humans, allows a number of relevant improvements: a more complex memory, more complex processing of information to determine the next action as a function of the interaction so far, a better estimate of the probability of future interactions with the same individual, and a better ability to distinguish between different individuals. The discrimination of others may be among the most important abilities because it allows one to handle interactions with many individuals without having to treat them all the same, thus making possible the rewarding of cooperation from one individual and the punishing of defection from another. The model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is much less restricted than it may at first appear. Not only can it apply to interactions between two bacteria or interactions between two primates, but it can also apply to the interactions between a colony of bacteria and, say, a primate serving as a host. There is no assumption that payoffs of the two sides are comparable. Provided that the payoffs to each side satisfy the inequalities that define the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The model does assume that the choices are made simultaneously and with discrete time intervals. For most analytic purposes, this is equivalent to a continuous interaction over time, with the length of time between moves corresponding to the minimum time between a change in behaviour by one side and a response by the other. And, if they were treated as sequential, while the model treats the choices as simultaneous, it would make little difference. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Turning to the development of the theory, the evolution of cooperation can be conceptualized in terms of three separate questions: Robustness. What type of strategy can thrive in a variegated environment composed of others using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies? Stability. Under what conditions can such a strategy, once fully established, resist invasion by mutant strategies? Initial viability. Even if a strategy is robust and stable, how can it ever get a foothold in an environment which is predominantly noncooperative? IBM, Kodak, and the NYPD are all large, old organizations. However, preventing the oncoming implosion requires more than changing in-place institutions. It also necessitates creating new types of companies, organizations and institutions, large and small, at every level of society. And that calls for social inventors prepared to face inadequate resources, rivalry, suspicion, cynicism, and just plain uber—stupidity. Daunting as all that sounds, it helps to remember that none of today’s familiar institutions—not IBM, not Kodak, not the United Nations, not the IMF, not police forces or post offices—dropped full-blown out of the Heavens. All our institutions, from central banks to blood banks, factories to firehouses, art museums to airports, were in fact originally conceived by business innovators and social inventors who faced far more entrenched resistance to change than we find in the advanced economies today. And many of their innovations in business and society have been at least as important as those in technology. We know the names of many of history’s great technological innovators—Savery and Newcomen and the steam engine, Whitney and the cotton gin, Edison and electric lighting, Morse and the telegraph, Daguerre and photography, Marconi and the radio, Bell and the telephone. And we justly celebrate their immense contributions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Unfortunately, few—other than specialists and historians, if needed they—can name the social inventor who first came up with the concept of a limited-liability corporation. Or the person who wrote it into Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, the 1892 German law that was the first to embody it. Can anyone imagine what today’s World economy and financial system would look like minus limited liability for investors? Was that any less an achievement than, say, the telegraph? Not many investors today would build a home, apartment house, office building, shopping center, cinema or factory without buying fire insurance. However, who was the innovator inside the Phoenix Assurance Company who, in the 1790s, hired cartographer Richard Horwood to draw the first map of London designed to help a company assess the value of properties and make fire insurance available? Who was imaginative and brave enough to form the first mutual fund, the first symphony orchestra, the first auto club or any number of other companies and institutions whose existence is taken for granted today? And where is the Nobel Prize for social invention? If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion. Genetic kindship theory suggests a plausible escape from some issues. Close relatedness of corporations permits true altruism—sacrifice of fitness by one individual for the benefit of another. True altruism can evolve when the conditions of cost, benefit, and relatedness yield net gains for the altruism-causing genes that are resident in the related individuals. Not defecting in a single-move Prisoner’s Dilemma is altruism of a kind (the individual is foregoing proceeds that might have been taken); so this kind of behaviour can evolve if two corporations are sufficiently related. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In effect, recalculations of the payoffs can be done in such a way that an individual has a part interest in the partner’s gain (that is, reckoning payoffs in terms of what is called fitness). This recalculation can often eliminate the inequalities, in which case cooperation becomes unconditionally favored. Thus it is possible to imagine that the benefit of cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situations can begin to be harvested by groups of closely related individuals and corporations. Obviously, as regards pairs, a parent and its subsidiaries or many examples of cooperation or restraint of selfishness in such pairs are known. Once the genes for cooperation exist, selection will promote strategies that base cooperative behavior on cues in the environment. Such factors as promiscuous fatherhood and events at ill-defined group margins will always lead to uncertain relatedness among potential participants. The recognition of any improved correlates of relatedness and use of these cues to determine cooperative behavior will always permit an advance in inclusive fitness. When a cooperative choice has been made, one cue to relatedness is simply the fact of reciprocation of the cooperation. Thus modifiers for more selfish behaviour of another individual or corporation is acquired, and cooperation can spread into circumstances of less and less relatedness. Finally, when the probability of two individuals meeting each other again is sufficiently high, cooperation based on reciprocity can thrive and be evolutionarily stable in a population with no relatedness at all. When a man or woman has got vast power, such as you have—you admit you have, do you not? “I do not know it, sir.” The man in the witness chair, who “did not know” he held power, was a bull-necked, bristle-browed banker with a fierce mustache and an above average sized nose. The congressional committee investigator pressed him: “You do not feel [powerful] at all?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“No,” he replied smoothly, “I do not feel it at all.” The time was 1912. The witness, in a dark suit and wing collar, with a gold watch chain draped across his generous paunch, dominated three or four giant banks, three trust companies, an equal number of life insurance companies, ten railroad systems, plus, among a few other odds and ends United States Steel, General Electric, AT&T, Western Union, and International Harvester. John Pierpont Morgan was the quintessential financial capitalist of the industrial era, the very symbol of turn-of-the-century money power. A womanizing churchgoer and moralizer, he lived in conspicuous opulence and gluttony, holding business meetings amid damask and tapestries from the palaces of Europe, next to vaults containing Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and Shakespeare folios. Morgan looked down his monumental nose at Jewish people and other marginalized groups, hated trade unions, sneered at new money, and fought ceaselessly with the other “robber barons” of his era. Born enormously rich in an era of capital scarcity, he was imperious and driven, savagely repressing competition, sometimes relying on methods that would probably now have landed him in jail. Morgan assembled huge sums and poured them into the great smokestack industries of his time—into Bessemer furnaces and Pullman cars and Edison generator and into tangible resources like oil, nitrates, copper, and coal. However, he did more than simply seize targets of opportunity. He planned strategically and helped shape the smokestack age in the United States of America, accelerating the shift of political and economic power from agricultural to industrial interests, and from manufacturing to finance. Furthermore, he was said to have “Morganized” industry in the United States of America, creating a hierarchically ordered, finance-driven system and, according to his critics, a “money trust,” which essentially controlled the main flows of capital in the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When Morgan blandly denied having any power, the cartoonists had a field day, one picturing him sitting astride a mountain of coins marked “Control over $25,000,000,000”; another as a dour emperor in crown and robes, with a mace in one hand and a purse in the other. While to Pope Pius X he was a “great and good man,” to the Boston Commercial Bulletin he was a “financial bully, drunk with wealth and power, who bawls his orders to stock markets, directors, courts, governments and nations.” Morgan concentrated capital. He consolidated small companies into even larger and more monopolistic corporations. He centralized. He regarded top-down command as sacred and vertical integration as efficient. He understood that mass production was the coming thing. He wanted his investments to be protected by “hard” assets—plants, equipment, raw materials. In all this he was a near-perfect reflection of the early smokestack age he helped to create. And whether Morgan “felt powerful” or not, his control of vast sums in a period of capital scarcity have him immense opportunities to reward and punish others and to make changes on a grand scale. During the thirties some German Social Democrats became aware that Hitler, as well as Stalin, just would not fit Weber’s terms of analysis, which they had previously used; and they began to employ “totalitarian” to describe them. Whether this is a sufficient corrective to Weber’s narrowly conceived political science is questionable. However, “charismatic” did indeed fit Hitler, unless charismatic necessarily means something good—a favorable value judgment. I suspect that those who abandoned Weber in this way did so because they could not face how wrong he had been, or the possibility that the thought they had embraced and propagated might have heled to support fascism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Hannah Arendt gave perhaps unconscious witness to my suggestion, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she used the now celebrated phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. It is not difficult to discern the “routinization of charisma” under this thin disguise. Hitler, then, must have been charismatic. After Hitler, everybody scurried back under the protective cover of morality, but practically no one turned to serious thought about good and evil. Otherwise our President, or the pope, for that matter, would not be talking about values.. This entire language, as I have tired to show, implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social and personal; and it still conveys something like that. However, it has done nothing to reestablish religion—which puts us in a pretty pickle. We reject by the fact of our categories the rationalism that is the basis of our way of life, without having anything to substitute for it. As the religious essence has gradually become a thin, putrid gas spread out through our whole atmosphere, it has gradually become respectable to speak of it under the marvelously portentous name the sacred. At the beginning of the German invasion of the United States of America, there was a kind of scientific contempt in universities for the uncleanness of religion. It might be studied in a scholarly way, as part of the past that we had succeeded in overcoming, but a believer was somehow benighted or ill. The new social science was supposed to take the place of morally and religiously polluted teachings just as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, et. al., had, according to the popular mythology, founded a natural science that crushed the superstitions of the Dark Ages. The Enlightenment, or Marxist, spirit still pervaded the land; and religion vs. science was equal to prejudice vs. truth. Social scientist simply did not see that their new tools were based on thought that did not accept the orthodox dichotomies, that not only were the European thinkers looking for something akin to religious actors on the political scene but that the new mind itself, or the self, had at least as much in common with Pascal’s outlook as it did with that of Descartes or Locke. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The sacred—as the central phenomenon of the self, unrecognizable to scientific consciousness and trampled underfoot by ignorant passers-by who had lost the religious instinct—was, from the outset of the value teaching, taken seriously by thinkers in Germany. That was because they understood what “value” really means. It has taken the softening of all convictions and the blurring of all distinctions for the sacred to be thought to be undangerous and to come into its own here. Of course, as we use it, it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or lifestyle with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or pleasures of the flesh; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space (Note how space—used to mean one’s apartment, workshop, office or whatever—has become a trendy word.) along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In such behavior a style of decision-making is involved that has much in common with the peculiar arbitrariness and rigour of religious vows in general, and with one called the Beast Vow in particular. Among the Pasupatas of India (the same who formalized the Seeking of Dishournor), the male practitioner commonly took the bull vow. (The bull is the most common shamanic animal by far.) He would spend a good part of each day bellowing like a bull and in general trying to transform his consciousness into that of a bull. Such behaviour was usually vowed for a specific length of time, most frequently either for a year or for the rest of one’s life. A person who took the frog vow would move for a year only by squatting and hopping; the snake vower would slither. Such vows are very precise and demanding. The novice, for example, may pick a certain cow and vow to imitate its every action. During the time of the vow the novice follows the cow everywhere: when the cow moos, the novice moos—and so on. (In ancient Mesopotamia cow-vowers were known as “grazers.”) By such actions the Paleolithic shaman attempts to effect ecology by infiltrating an animal species which can then be manipulated. The yogic practitioner hopes to escape from his or her own intentional horizon by entering into that of another species. These activities are echoed in performance pieces in various ways. Bill Gordh, as Dead Dog, spent two years learning how to bark with a sense of expressiveness. James Lee Bryars wore a pink silk tail everywhere he went for six months. Vito Acconic, in his Following Piece, 1969, would pick a passerby at random on the street and follow him or her till it was no longer possible to do so. What I am especially concerned to point out in activities like this is a quality of decision-making that involves apparent aimlessness along with fine focus and rigour of execution. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This is a mode of willing which is absolutely creative in the sense that it assumes that it is reasonable to do anything at all with life; all options are open and none is more meaningful or meaningless than any other. A Jain monk in India may vow to sit for a year and then follow that by standing up for a year—a practice attested to in the Atharva Veda (about 1000-800 B.C.) and still done today. In performance art the subgenre known as Endurance Art is similar in style, though the scale is much reduced. In 1965 Beuys alternately stood and knelt on a small wooden platform for twenty-four hours during which he performed various symbolic gestures in immobile positions. In 1971 Burden, a major explorer of the Ordeal or Endurance genre, spent five days and nights fetally enclosed in a tiny metal locker (two feet by two feet by three feet). In 1974 he combined the immobility vow with the keynote theme of the artist’s person by sitting on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal until, forty-eight hours later, he fell off from exhaustion. (Sculpture in Three Parts). In White Light/White Heat, 1975, he spent twenty-two days alone and invisible to the public on a high shelf-like platform in a gallery, neither eating nor speaking nor seeing, not seen by, another human being. The first thing to notice about these artists is that no one is making them do it and usually no one is paying them to do it. The second is the absolute rigour with which, in the classic performance pieces, these very unpragmatic activities are carried out. This peculiar quality of decision-making has become a basic element of performance poetics. To a degree (which I do not wish to exaggerate) it underscores the relationship between this type of activity and the religious vocation. A good deal of performance art, in fact might he called “Vow Art,” as might a good deal of religious practice. (Kafka’s term “hunger artist” is not unrelated.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Enthusiasms of this type have passed through cultures before, but usually in the provinces of religion or, more occasionally, philosophy. What is remarkable about our time is that it is happening in the realm of art, and being performed, often, by graduates of art schools rather than seminaries. In our time religion and philosophy have been more successful (or intransigent) than art in defending their traditional boundaries and prevent universal overflow with its harrowing responsibilities and consequences. A classic source on the subject of Ordeal Art is a book called the Path of Purification by Buddhaghosa, a fifth century A.D. Ceylonese Buddhist. It includes an intricately categorized compendium of behavioural vows designed to undermine the conditions response systems that govern ordinary life. Among the most common are the vows of homelessness—the vow, for example, to live out of doors for a year. This vow was acted out in New York recently by Tehching Hsieh, who styed out of doors in Manhattan recently for a year as a work of art. Hsieh (who also has leapt from the second story of a building in emulation of Klein’s leap) had specialized, in fact, in year-long vows acted out with great rigour. For one year he punched in hourly on a time clock in his studio, a device not unlike some used by forest yogis in India to restrict their physical movements and thus their intentional horizons. The performance piece of this type done on the largest scale was Hsieh’s year of isolation in a cell built in his Soho studio, a year in which he neither left the cell nor spoke nor read. Even the scale of this piece, however, does not approach that of similar vows in traditional religious settings. Himalayan yogis as recently as a generation ago were apt to spend seven years in a light-tight cave, while Simeon Stylites, an early Christian ascetic in the Syrian desert, lived for the last thirty-seven years of his life on a small platform on top of a pole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The reduced scale of such vows in the art context reflects the difference in motivation between the religious ascetic and the performance artist. Religious vows are undertaken for pragmatic purposes. The shaman seeking the ability to fly, the yogi seeking the effacement of ego, the monk seeking salvation and eternal bliss, are all working within intricately formulated belief systems in pursuit of clearly defined and massively significant rewards. Less is at stake for the performance artist than for the pious believer; yet still something is at stake. An act that lacks any intention whatever is a contradiction in terms. For some artist (for example, Burden) work of this type functions as a personal initiation or cathartic for the audience as well as an investigation of the limits of one’s will; others (including Nitsch) are convinced that their performance work is cathartic for the audience as well and in that sense serves a social and therapeutic purpose. Rachel Rosenthal describes her performance work as “sucking disease from society.” However, in most work of this type attention is directed toward the exercise of will as an object of contemplation in itself. Appropriation art in general (and Vow Art in particular) is based on an aesthetic of choosing and willing rather than conceiving and making. Personal sensibility is active in the selection of the area of the Universe to be appropriated, and in the specific, often highly individual character of the vow undertaken; the rigour with which the vow is maintained is, then, like a crafts devotion to the perfection of form. Beyond this, the performance is often based on a suspension of judgment about whether or not the act has any value in itself, and a concentration on the purity of the doing. This activity posits as an ideal (though never of course perfectly attaining it) the purity of doing something with no pragmatic motivation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Like the Buddhist paradox of desiring not to desire, it requires a motivation to perform feats of motivelessness. It shares something of Arnold Toynbee’s opinion that the highest cultures are the least pragmatic. In this mode of decision and execution the conspicuously free exercise of will is framed as a kind of absolute. Displays of this type are attempts to break up the standard weave of everyday motivations and create openings in it through which new options may make their way to the light. These options are necessarily undefined, since no surrounding belief system is in place (or acknowledged). The radicality of work in this genre can be appraised precisely by how far it has allowed the boundaries of the art category to dissolve. Many works of the last twenty-five years have reached to the limits of life itself. Such activities have necessarily involved artists in areas where usually the psychoanalyst or anthropologist presides. The early explorations discussed here required the explicit demonstration of several daring strategies that had to be brought clearly into the light. Extreme actions seemed justified or even required, by the cultural moment. However, the moment changes, and the mind become desensitized to such direct demonstrations after their first shock of brilliant simplicity. When an artist in 1987 announces that his or her entire life is designated as performance, the unadorned gesture cannot expect to be met with the enthusiastic interest with which its prototypes were greeted a generation ago. Now, we talked about how it is more difficult to project caring on television, for various reasons, mostly because of the tendencies of the medium. The biases are not absolute restrictions. Though extremely rare, there are occasional examples of television programs that overcome the bias. Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage was one such example. It succeeded only because of the rare skill and sensitivity of the director and the performers. Their deep understanding of the medium allowed them to use it efficiently. Scenes qualifies as the exception that proves the rule. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Many Americans saw this production in movies houses, but it was originally created for television. This is why Bergman devoted so much of the production to facial close-ups. In a theater two and one-half hours of facial close-up became oppressive. When one is sitting in a movie house, one wants something beyond closeup imagery. However, on television, nothing other than closeup imagery could convey the subtle themes of a plot that concerned the excruciating shifts of feeling within a disintegrating marriage. Bergman had to convey tenderness, affection, caring, concern and intimacy, together with ambiguity, and then violence, rage, sorrow. These latter scenes, the violent ones, were among the very few in which he allowed the camera to pull back from the action, because the physical movement could convey the meaning. If you honour the medium’s limits absolutely, in demonstrating the best that is possible on television, Bergman also illuminated the absoluteness of the limits. He took television as far as one could and succeeded well enough. There is the tendency to forget that one cannot go further. Bergman is one of the rarest talents in the history of moving-image media, and given even his difficulty in communicating subtle feeling, the inherent resistance of television becomes clearer. Lesser talents, not daring to try what Bergman did, have to work against the medium, as it were, choosing more confined, easier-to-handle imagery, and emotional content that fits the narrowed scope of TV. Most directors will not even attempt to deal with subtle realms of information and they are wise not to. Producers and sponsors will also tend to avoid such subtlety because it is so unlikely to get high ratings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Roots was not an exception to this rule. In fact, it proves the rule. In the book, the cultural nuances of relationships were emphasized and developed, while the TV production avoided them altogether. Nor was there much effort to present the subtle ambience of the African natural environment, which was also highly developed in the book. The television production wisely concentrated on the larger, more explicit, and therefore more reproducible element of conflict in the story and the kinds of family attachment made familiar by soap operas. This is not to say that the production did not have value. It is only to remark that the values which were conveyed were the simplest ones to convey. The more subtle values, which are at the heart of the African culture and, therefore, formed the basis for the quality of feeling that existed among the uprooted enslaved human beings, were necessarily dropped out. In the end, the viewer got some fairly good information and feeling about good guys and bad guys during a certain period of history, but virtually no understanding of the successful repression of an entire culture and way of mind. So it goes in all dramatic programming. Nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of stories, and the cause of the sacrifice is a technical limitation of the medium. Problems of subtlety do not present themselves in quiz shows, sports events and sitcoms. These are confined to areas of human expression which are easy to capture, east to communicate, and easy to understand, even with directors and writers of ordinary talent and in a medium as vague as television. As a result, there is a tendency to favour such productions. The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Public affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows. Ordinarily this bias is believed to result from time factors—it takes too long to explain complicated issues. However, certain kinds of visual information are harder to capture than others. News producers will always choose the more easily communicable image. Edward Epstein, in his very important New From Nowhere, interviews television news producers, seeking to define an inherent bias in the news that is related to technical and other factors. He observes: “The one ingredient most producers interviewed claimed was necessary for a good action story was visually identifiable opponents clashing violently. This, in turn, requires some form of stereotype: military troops fighting civilians, different cultures of students clashing, workers wearing hardhats manhandling bearded peace demonstrators, were cited by producers as examples of the components for such stories. Demonstrations or violence involving less clearly identifiable groups make less effective stories, since, as one CBS producer put it, ‘It would be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.’ Since news stories tend to be constructed from those aspects of a happening that can be easily filmed and recorded, and not form the poorly lit, softly spoken or otherwise inaccessible moments, events tend to be explained in terms of what one producer called ‘visual facts.’ One correspondent pointed out, for example, even if they are insignificant trash can fires, television coverage of riots or protests at night tends to focus on fires, since they provide adequate light for filming. Hence urban riots tend to be defined in terms of ‘visual facts’ of fires, rather than more complicated factors. Visual facts, of course, cover only one range of phenomena, and thus tend to limit the power of networks to explain complex events. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Americans, so often in the forefront of science and technology, have a curious difficulty in thinking about the future. Language seems to have something to do with it. If something sounds futurelike, we call if “futuristic.” If that does not step the conversation, we say that it “sounds like science fiction.” These descriptions remind listeners of laughable 1950s fantasies like rockets to the Moon, video telephones, ray guns, robots, and the like. Of course, all these become real in the 1960s, because the science was not fiction. Today, we can see not only how to build additional science-fictional devices, but—more important, for better or worse—how to make them cheap and abundant. We need to think about the future and name-calling will not help. Curiously, the Japanese language seems to lack a disparaging word for “futurelike.” Ideas for future technologies may be termed mirai no (“of the future,” a hope or a goal), shorai-teki (an expected development, which might be twenty years away), or kuso no (“imaginary” only, because contrary to physical law or economics). To think about the future, we need to distinguish mirai no and shorai-teki, like nanotechnology, from mere kuso no like antigravity boots. A final objection is the claim that there is no point in trying to think about the future, because it is all too complex and unpredictable. This is too sweeping, but has more than a little truth. It deserves a considerable response. Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the World. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost. There were empires to build, opportunities to exploit, exciting freedoms to enjoy, especially in America. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There, on the wings of technocracy, the United States of America soared to unprecedented heights as a World power. That Jefferson, Adams, and Madison would have found such a place uncomfortable, perhaps even disagreeable, did not matter. Nor did it matter that there were nineteenth-century American voiced—Thoreau, for example—who complained about what was being left behind. The first answer to the complaints was, We leave noting behind but the chains of a tool-using culture. The second answer was more thoughtful: Technocracy will not overwhelm us. And this was true, to a degree. Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic Worlds. Technocracy subordinated these Worlds—yes, even humiliated them—but it did not render them totally ineffectual. In nineteenth-century America, these still existed holy men and the concept of sin. There still existed regional pride, and it was possible to conform to traditional notions of family life. It was possible to respect tradition itself and to find sustenance in ritual and myth. It was possible to believe in social responsibility and the practicality of individual action. It was even possible to believe in common sense and the wisdom of the elderly. It was not easy, but it was possible. We have only to think of the declaration in His mouth that humans, now that they have acquired moral consciousness, must not be allowed to attain aeonian life as well! The meaning of this “knowledge of good and evil” is nothing else than: cognition in general, cognizance of the World, knowledge of all the good and bad things there are, for this would be in line with Biblical usage, in which the antithesis good and evil is often used to denote “anything,” “all kinds of things.” And this interpretation, the is the favourite one today. “Therefore I have written this epistle, sealing it with mine own hand, feeling for your welfare, because of your firmness in that which ye believe to be right, and your noble spirit in the field of battle,” reports Nephi 3.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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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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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!
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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!
If Speak You Must, then Let Loose Your Own Wretched Spiritual Condition!
My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all night long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart.
We would like to believe that everything we think and say is right, but we cannot. That is because we do not have grace enough or sense enough. Of course, there is a wit in each of us, but even this is dimmed through negligence. What we really fail to notice is that we are losing our interior vision. How do you know?? When we act so daily, and the excuses we cook up are so abysmal! When we explode with passion and think, no I am not angry, I am just defending the faith. When we peck at the peccadillos of others, and our own whoppers we let pass unchallenged, as the Evangelist Matthew has pointed out (7.3)! When we ponder what we will put up with from others, but pay little attention to how much others will have to put up with from us! Is there a moral anywhere in this? Whoever wants one’s own actions to be tolerably received would do well not to judge the behaviour of others so intolerably. Whoever has an interior life should put the spiritual care of oneself before the care of others. You will never be internal and devout until you hold your tongue about others. If speak you must, then let loose your own wretched spiritual condition. If you focus entirely on your relationship to God, precious little of the hubbub of the World will be able to penetrate your recollection. When you have that vacant stare in your eye, you might well ask yourself, before someone else does, just where are you? When you have run through everything the World has to offer, why, if I may echo Matthew (16.26), do you seem to have advance to the real? The moral? #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If you want True Peace and True Union, then you just have to postpone everything else and attend to your own case. If only you drag your torso away from every temporal festival, you will make spiritual progress. When you put a value on each temporal thing, you will lose spiritual ground. All of which means, you can keep nothing as your own nothing big, nothing small, nothing nice, nothing new; that is to say, nothing except God and everything that smacks of God. However, all hose lovely creaturely consolations that came your way, what about them? Forget about them! The soul that loves God loathes everything that is not God. God Eternal, God Immense, “fulling all the space,” as Jeremiah phrased it (23.24); the soul’s solace, the heart’s True Joy. Although already a thriving business—having sold over 100,000 lever-action repeaters by the early 1880s—Winchester was ready to expand its market with different-action firearms. The Hotchkiss, a bolt action designed by American inventor Benjamin B. Hotchkiss and produced in hopes of military sales, appeared in 1883. In the same year, Winchester bought the rights to the falling block single-shot rifle invented and patented by John M. Browning. Spawned by the Browning connection with Winchester, the single-shot appeared in the Winchester catalogue for 1885. The single-shot would not reach the market until 1885 and remained in product line until approximately 1920. There are so many variations in calibers, barrels, overall configurations, finishes, triggers, sights, and other feature that sportsmen, the military, and target shooters were all offered every variety of possible use for a single-shot rifle. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
The number of cartridge chamberings for this model exceeds that of any other firearm made by Winchester: approximately sixty-five. The single-shot was made at a time when target shooting was as popular as golf is today and a major match like the Creedmoor (on New York’s Long Island) was very much the Masters of its day. Not only were the single-shots beautifully constructed and of a solid, virtually unbreakable design, but they were phenomenally accurate, used in international matches which were shot at distances up to 1,000 yards, with exquisitely constructed open sights and finely built tubular scope sights. The champion target shooters were international celebrities, and elaborate trophies were designed and built by such silversmiths as Gorham and Tiffany. The Browning-Winchester single-shot rifles were also a favourite of sportsmen-hunters as the wide selection of chamberings meant that cartridges were available for every type of North American game animal. Then, as now, hunters preferred the simplicity and reliability of a single-shot mechanism, as well as the challenge of having only one shot available, without the rapid-repeating capability of magazine arms. Taking a grizzly bear with a nonrepeating rifle required cool nerves and a steady hand. When Oliver Winchester brought out a John Browning design, the company certainly got its money’s worth. The $8,000.00 ($231,230.64 inflation adjusted for 2021) went a long way with the single shot. The Winchester rifles were highly successful. In June of 1888, John and Matt Browning were issued a patent for a slide-action magazine rifle, which—as the Model 1890—became Winchester’s first rifle of that type. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The model 1890, in two basic grades only (Sporting Rifle and Fancy Sporting Rifle, all having 24-inch octagonal barrels and rifle-style steel buttplates), remained in production through 1932, with a total production of nearly 850,000. The 1890 was Winchester’s all-time sales leader in .22 rimfire, and many 1890s are still in use around the World today. As an economical version of the Model 1890, the factory brought out the 1906 pump-action. And the 1906 thereby also became the factory’s first rifle advertised and sold which accommodated the three cartridges interchangeably. A further sales factor was that all Model 1906s featured takedown capability. Serial numbering on the 1906 was in its own range, and, like the 1890, the 1906 achieved an extraordinary sales total—nearly 850,000 made—before being discontinued in 1932. Hundreds of thousand of Winchester rifles were produced and they were assembled in what is called the Winchester Complex, which is in New Haven, Connecticut USA. In 1862, William Wirt Winchester, the son of Oliver Fisher Winchester, married Sarah Lockwood Pardee. (Oliver Fisher Winchester was a very wealthy and prominent man, not only the owner of Winchester Repeating Arms, but also Lieutenant Governor of Connecticut.) Sarah and William’s life together was happy, and they moved in the best of New England society. However, in 1866, disaster struck when their infant daughter, Annie died of the then mysterious childhood disease marasmus. Mrs. Winchester fell into a deep sadness. Fifteen years later, her husband William Wirt Winchester who was at the time president of Winchester Repeating Arms Company suffered a premature death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
Mrs. Winchester inherited 777 shares of Winchester Repeating Arms Company, and $20,000,000.00 ($532,737,254.90 inflation adjusted for 2021). She was told she could rest assure that her life was not in danger and by building a house similar to the Winchester Complex, which was 3,250,000 square feet, would give her eternal life. Now, no one really knows how much the Winchester’s were worth. In 1915, for instance, they may a deal with the British government in the sum of $47,500,000.00 ($1,277,778,217.82 inflation adjusted for 2021), so Mrs. Winchester’s inheritance was just a fraction of their cumulative wealth. In the late 1800s, the Santa Clara Valley presented sweeping visas of rural open space. It was a serene setting for Mrs. Winchester to begin her building project. In 1884 she purchased an unfinished eighteen-room farm house just three miles west of San Jose—and over the next thirty-eight years she produced the sprawling complex we know today as the Winchester Mystery House. The death of the child cannot be explained on natural grounds except by suggesting that there was something wrong with it quite unrelated to the father’s experience. However, there is eloquent testimony about evidence of the power of witchcraft. There were known to witches in New Haven, Connecticut in 1646. A servant named Mary Johnson was accused of being a witch. Others were known to practice black magic. However, it did not occur to anyone to notice that the evidence suggested that the malignant power must also reside not only in the witch but in the charms hey use or in the Devil’s power that lay behind them, since they worked equally well whether they were manipulated by a confessed witch or by a Godly magistrate. I am a believer of words, I believe everything depends on who says them. What if the direful creatures, whose report lingers in these tales of the Winchester, should have an origin far older still? What if they were the remnants of a vanishing period of the Earth’s history long antecedent to the birth of mastodon and iguanodon; a stage, namely, when the World, as we call it, had not yet become quite visible, was not yet so far finished as to part from the invisible World that its mother, and which, on its part, had no then become quite invisible—was only almost such. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
When, as a credible consequence, strange shapes of those now invisible regions, of Eden and Hell, might be expected to gloom out occasionally from the awful Fauna of an ever-generating World upon that one which was being born of it. Hence, the life-periods of a World being long and slow, some of these huge, unformed bulks of half-created matter might, somehow, like the megatherium of later times, a baby creation to them, roll at age-long intervals, clothes in a might terror of shapelessness into the half-recognition of human beings, whose consternation at the uncertain vision were barrier enough to prevent all further know of its substance. Ever since I was born, I suppose the changes of a World are not to be measured by the changes of its generations. When one’s discrimination is no greater than to lump everything marvellous—demons, Angels, kelpies, ghosts, vampires, doppelgangers, witches, fairies, nightmares under the one head of ghost—it upsets the reappearing of the of the departed. It matters very little whether we believe in ghost, or not, provided that we are ghosts—that within this body, which so many people are ready to consider their own very selves, their lies a ghostly embryo, at least, which has an inner side to it God only can see, which says I concerning itself, and which will soon have to know whether or not it can appear to those whom it has left behind, and thus solve the question of ghosts for itself, at least. Is telling a person about a ghost, affording one the source of one’s conviction? It is the same as a ghost appearing to one? Not at all. The impression may be deeper and clearer on your mind than any fact of the next morning will make. Not everyone can feel it, but the person who does is convinced. It cannot be conveyed. It is something you have to experience. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
In the year 1825 Oliver Fisher Winchester fell in love. This was before he met and married his wife Jane Ellen Hope. Here are notes from his journal: Well, I was walking along Chapel Street, and feeling a little bewildered in consequence—for it was quite the dusk of the evening. There was a haze in the air, when, from the crossing that cuts off the corner in the direction of Crown Street, just as I was about to turn towards it, a lady stepped upon the kerbstone of the pavement, looked at me for a moment, and passed—an occurrence not very remarkable, certainly. However, the lady was remarkable and so was her dress. I am not good at observing, and I am still worse at describing dress, therefore I can only say that hers reminded me of an old picture—that is, I had never seen anything like it, except in old pictures. She had no bonne, and looked as if she had walked straight out of an ancient drawing-room in her evening attire. The next instant I met a man on the crossing, who stopped and addressed me. So betwixt was I that, although I recognized his voice as one I ought to know, I could not identify him until he got closer, which I did instinctively in the act of returning his greeting. At the same time, I glanced over my shoulder after the lady. She was nowhere to be seen. “What are you looking at?” asked Gary James. “I was looking after that lady,” I answered, “but I cannot see her.” “What lady?” said James, with just a touch of impatience. “You must have seen her,” I retuned. “You were not more than three yards behind her.” “Where is she then?” “She must have gone down one of the areas, I think. However, she looked a lady, though an old-fashioned one.” “Have you been dining?” asked James, in a tone of doubtful enquiry. “No,” I replied, not suspecting the insinuation; “I have only just come from the Museum.” “Then I advise you to call on your medical man before you go home.” “Medical man!” returned; “I have no medical man. What do you mean? I never was better in my life.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
“I mean that there was no lady. It was an illusion, and that indicates something wrong. Besides, you did not know me when I spoke to you. “That is nothing,” I returned. “I had just taken a moment to recall your name.” “How was it you saw the lady, then?” The affair was growing serious under by friend’s interrogation. I did not a all like the idea of his supposing me subject to hallucinations. So I answered, with a laugh, “Ah! to be sure, that explains it. I was just confused.” It was a drizzly afternoon in the beginning of the last week of October when I left the two of New Haven. I hard hardly left the town, and the twilight had only in a post-chaise to ride to East Haven, the property of my friend’s father. I had hardly left the town and the twilight had only begun to deepen, when, glancing from one of the windows of the chaise, I fancied I saw, between me and the hedge, the dim figure of a horse keeping pace with us. I thought, in the first interval of unreason, that it was a shadow from my own horse, but reminded myself the next moment that there could be no shadow where there was no light. When I looked again, I was at the first glance convinced that my eyes had deceived me. At the second, I believed once more that a shadowy something, with the movements of a horse in harness, was keeping pace with us. I turned away again with some discomfort, and not till we had reached an open moorland road, whence a little watery light was visible on the horizon, could I summon up courage enough to look out once more. Certainly then there was nothing o be seen, and I persuaded myself that it had been all a fancy. As we turned into the avenue that led up to East Haven, I found myself once more glancing nervously out the window. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
The moment the trees were about me, there was, if not a shadowy horse out there by the side of the chaise, yet certainly more than half that conviction in here in my consciousness. When I saw my friend, however, standing on the doorstep, dark against the glow of the hall fire, I forgot all about it; and I need not add that I did not make it a subject of conversation when I entered, for I was well aware that it was essential to a man’s reputation that his senses should be accurate, though his heart might without prejudice swarm with shadows, and his judgment be a very stable of hobbies. I was kindly received. Mrs. James had been dead for some years, and Florence Ida, the eldest of the family, was at the head of the household. She had two sisters, little more than girls. The father was a burly, yet gentlemanlike Yorkshire squire, who ate well, drank well, looked radiant, and hunted twice a week. In this pastime his son joined him when in the humour, which happened scarcely so often. I, who had never crossed a horse in my life, took his apology for not being able to mount me very coolly, assuring him that I could rather loiter about with a book than be in at the death of the best-hunted werewolf or Hellhound in East Haven. I very soon found myself a home with the James’s; and very soon again I began to find myself no so much at home; for Miss James—Florence Ida as I soon ventured to call her—was fascinating. There was an empty place in my heart. Florence’s figure was graceful, and her face was beautiful. Order was a very idol with her. Hence the house was too tidy for any sense of comfort. If you left a book on the table, you would, on retuning to the room a moment after, find it put aside. What the furniture of the drawing-room was like, I never saw; for not even on Christmas Day, which was the last day I spent there, was in uncovered. Everything in it was kept in bibs and pinafores. Even the carpet was covered with a slippery sheet of brown holland. Mr. James never entered that room, and therein was wise. Gary remonstrated once. She answered him quite kindly even playfully, but no change followed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
What was worse, she made very wretched tea. Her father never took tea; neither did Gary. I was rather fond of it, but I soon gave it up. Everything her father partook of was first-rate. Everything else was somewhat poverty-stricken. My pleasure in Florence’s society prevented me from making practical deductions from such trifles. The first day of November was a very lovely day, quite one. I was sitting in a little arbour I had just discovered, with a book in my hand—not reading, however, but day-dreaming—when, lifting my eyes from the ground, I was startled to see, through a thin shrub in from of the arbour what seemed the form of an old lady seated, apparently reading from a book on her knee. The sight instantly recalled the lady from Chapel Street. I started to my feet, and then, clear of the intervening bush, saw only a great stone such as abounded on the moors in the neighbourhood, with a lump of quartz set on top of it. Some childish taste had put it there for ornament. Smiling at my own folly, I say down again, and reopened my book. After reading for a while, I glanced up again, and once more started to my feet, overcome by the fancy that there verily sat the lady reading. You will say it indicated an excited condition of the brain. Possibly; but I was, as far as I can recall, quite collected and reasonable. I was almost vexed this second time, and sat down once more to my book. Still, every time I looked up, I was startled afresh. I doubt, however, if the trifle is worth mentioning, or had any significance even in relation to what followed. I wondered if Florence practiced witchcraft. There were others who may or may not have practiced it—the evidence is insufficient—but who had clearly used their reputation for occult power to gain illegitimate personal ends. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Gary said that Florence had been dabbling in the occult for years; about five years ago he said she had borrowed a book on palmistry, containing rules on how to know the future. However, he told her it was an evil book and evil art. His charity was wasted, however, since Florence continued telling people’s futures, somethings through reading their faces as well as through reading their palms. Fortunetelling is often only white magic. However, it easily becomes black magic when it concerns itself with the time or manner of the subject’s death. After dinner I strolled out by myself, leaving father and son over their claret. I did not drink wine; and from the lawn I could see the windows of the library, whither Florence commonly retired from the dinner-table. It was a very lovely soft night. There was no moon, but the stars looked wider awake than usual. Dew was falling, but the grass was not yet wet, and I wandered about on it for half and hour. The stillness was somehow strange. It had a wonderful feeling it as if something were expected—as if the quietness were the mould in which some even or other was about to be cast. Even then I was a reader of certain sorts of recondite lore. Suddenly I remembered that this was the eve of All Souls. This is the night on which all the faithful departed, those baptized Christians who are believed to be in purgatory because they died with the guilt of less sin on their souls, came out of their graves to visit their old homes. “Poor dead!” I thought with myself; “have you any place to call a home now? If you have, surely you will not wander back here, where all you have called home has either vanished or given itself to others, to be their home now and yours no more! What an awful doom the old fancy has allotted you! To dwell in your graves all he year, and creep out, this one night, to enter at the midnight door, left open for welcome! A poor welcome truly!—just an open door, a clean-swept floor, and a fire to warm your rain-sodden limbs! The household asleep, and the houseplace swarming with the ghost of ancient times—the miser, the spendthrift, the profligate, the coquette—for the good ghosts sleep, and are troubled with no walking like yours! Not one man, sleepless like yourself, to question you.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
“Yet who can tell?” I went on to myself. “It may be your hell to return thus. It may be that only on this one night of the year you can show yourself to one who can see you, but that the place were wicked is the Hades to which you are doomed for ages.” I thought and thought till I began to feel the air alive about me, and was enveloped in the vapours that dim the eyes of those who strain them for one peep through the dull mica windows that will not open on the World of ghosts. At length I cast my fancies away, and feld from them to the library in hopes that no one would raise the Devil to kill or bewitch me. There were many books of fortune-telling and grimoires, of course, full of diagrams. The bodily presence of Florence made the World of ghosts appear shadowy indeed. “What a reality there is about a bodily presence.” I said to myself, as I took y chamber-candle in my hand. “But what is there more real in a body?” I said again, as I crossed the hall. “Surely nothing,” I went on, as I ascended the broad staircase to my room. “The body must vanish. If there be a spirit, that will remain. A body can but vanish. A ghost can appear.” I woke in the morning with a sense of such discomfort as made me spring out of bed at once. When I looked at my watch after I was dressed, I found I had risen an hour earlier than usual. I groped my way downstairs to spend the hour before breakfast in the library. No sooner was I seated with the book than I heard the voice of Florence scolding the butler, in no very gentle tones, for leaving the garden door open all night. The moment I heard this, the strange occurrences I am about to relate began to dawn upon my memory. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
The door had been open the night long between All Saints and All Souls. In the middle of the night I awoke suddenly. I knew it was not the morning by the sensations I had, for the night feels altogether different from the morning. It was quite dark. My heart was beating violently, and I either hardly could or hardly dared breathe. A nameless terror was upon me, and my sense of hearing was, apparently by the force of its expectation, unnaturally roused and keen. There it was—a slight noise in the room!—slight, but clear, and with an unknown significance about it! It was awful to think it would come again. I do believe it was only one of those creaks in the timers which announced the torpid, age-long, skin flow of every house back to the dust—a motion to which the flow of the glacier is as a torrent, but which is no less inevitable and sure. Day and night it ceases not; but only in the night, when house and heart are still, do we hear it. No wonder it should sound fearful! for we are we not the immortal dwellers in ever-crumbling clay? The clay is no near us, and yet not of us, that it is every movement starts a fresh dismay. For what will its final ruin disclose? When it falls from about us, where shall we find that we have existed all the time? My skin tingled with the bursting of the moister from its pores. Something was in the room besides me. Sometimes apparitions had the reputation for torture and the torture included choking. People should teach their children to fear God, should come to persuade poor creatures to give their souls to the Devil. A confused, indescribable sense of utter loneliness, and yet awful presence, was upon me, its blood did cry for vengeance against me. Nobody seemed to have noticed that the specters differed about the means by which the supposed murders were done. The Devil himself did no know so far. This presence was mingled with a dreary, hopeless desolation, as of burnt-out love and aimless life. All at once I found myself sitting up. The terror that a cold hand might be laid upon me, or a cold breath blow on me, or a corpselike face bend down through the darkness over me, had broken my bonds!—I would meet half-way whatever might be approaching. The moment that my will burst into action the terror began to ebb. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
The room in which I slept was a large one, perfectly dreary with tidiness. I did not know till afterwards that it was Florence’s room, which she had given up to me rather than prepare another. The furniture, all but one article, was modern and commonplace. I could not help remarking to myself afterwards how utterly void the room was of the nameless charm of feminine occupancy. I had seen nothing to wake a suspicion of its being a lady’s room. The article I have excepted was an ancient bureau, elaborate and ornate, which stood on one side of the large bow window. They very morning before, I had seen a bunch of keys hanging from the upper part of it, and had peeped in. Finding, however, that the pigeon-holds were full of papers, I closed it at once. I should have been glad to use it, but clearly it was not for me. At that bureau the figure of a woman was now seated in the posture of one writing. A strange dim light was around her, but whence I proceeded I never thought of enquiring. As if I, too, had stepped over the bourne, and was a ghost myself, all fear was now gone. I got out of bed, and softly crossed the room to where she was seated. “If she should be beautiful!” I thought—for I had often dreamed of a beautiful ghost that was pleased with me. The figure did not move. She was looking at the faded brown paper. “Some old love-letter,” I thought, and stepped nearer. So cool was I now, that I actually peeped over her shoulder. With mingled surprise and dismay I found that the dim page over which she was bent was that of an old account-book. Ancient household records, in rusty ink, held up to the gliosis of the waning moon, which shone through the parting in the curtains, their entries of shillings and pence!—Of pounds there was not one. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
No doubt pounds and fathers are much the same in the World of thought—the true spirit-World; but in the ghost-World this eagerness over shillings and pence must mean something awful! To think that coins which had since been worn smooth in other pockets and purses, which had gone back to the Mint, and been melted down, to come out again and yet again with the heads of new kings and queens—that diners, eaten by the worms—that polish for the floors inches of whose thickness had since been worn away—that the hundred nameless trifled of a life utterly vanished, should be perplexing, annoying, and worst of all, interesting the soul of a ghost who had been in Hades for centuries! The writing was very old-fashioned, and e words were contracted. I could read nothing but the moneys and one single entry—“Corinths Vs.” Currans for a Christmas puffing, most likely! Ah–, poor lady! the pudding and not the Christmas was her care; not the delight of the children over it, but the beggarly pence which it cost. And she cannot get it out of her head, although her brain was “powdered all as thin as flour” ages ago in the mortar of Death. “Alas, poor ghost!” It needs no treasure hoard left behind, no floor stained with the blood of the murdered child, no wickedly hidden parchment of landed rights. Was this a demonic conspiracy? Witches cannot send the Devil to torment people by making a covenant with the Devil. Some people in this town had a lot of evidence against them for trafficking in the occult. In fact, if you recall, during the Salem Witch Trials, renegade members of the clergy had played a large part in the history of witchcraft in fact and in fiction. It should be recalled that Morgan le Fey, King Arthur’s sister, was supposed to have learned her evil craft in the nunnery where she was educated, that Benvenuto Cellini’s sorcerer-friend was a priest, and that a renegade priest is supposed to be necessary to the performance of Black Mass. An old account-book is enough for the hell of the house-keeping gentlewoman! She never lifted her face, or seem to know that I stood behind her. I left her, and went into the bow window, where I could see her face. I was right there. It was the same lady I had met at Chapel Street, walking in front of Gary James. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
Her withered lips went moving as if they would have uttered words she had the breath been commissioned thither; her brow was contracted over her thin nose; and once and again her shining forefinger wen up to her temple as if she were pondering some deep problem of humanity. How long I stood gazing at her I do not know, but at last I withdraw to my bed, and left her struggling to solve that which she could never solve thus. It was the symbolic problem of her own life, and she had failed to read it. I remember nothing more. She may be sitting there still, solving at the insolvable. I should have felt no inclination, with the broad sun of the squire’s face, the keen eyes of Gary James, and the beauty of Florence before me at the breakfast table, to say a word about what I had seen, even if I had not been afraid of the doubt concerning my sanity which the story would certainly awaken. What with the memories of the night, I passed a very dreary day, dreading the return of the night, for, cool as I had been in her presence, I could not regard the possible reappearance of those ghost with equanimity. I had a belly ache. Gary James said he would take a pipe of tobacco and light it. I told him that I thought it was not lawful. [The idea that this remedy was unlawful is probably a result of the use of tobacco in it. Tobacco was an “Indian Weed” and used in Indian ceremony and medicine. The Puritans, like other seventh-century Christians, thought the Indians to be Devil worshippers and thought of their medicine men as magicians.] He said it was lawful for man or beast. However, when the night did come, I slept soundly to the morning. The next day, not being able to read with comfort, I went wandering about the place, and at length began to fit the outside and inside of the house together. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The house was a large and rambling edifice, parts of it very old, parts comparatively modern. I first found a beautiful stained-glass window, which looked out back. It was kind of a countercharm and verged on black magic because it was supposed not only to break the witch’s spell but to injure the witch or compel her presence. Below this window, on one side, there was a door. I wondered whiter it led, but found it locked. At the moment Gary James approached from the stables. “Where does this door lead?” I asked him. “I will get the key,” he answered. “It is rather a queer old place. We used to like it when we were children.” “There is a stair, you see,” he said, as he threw the door open. “It leads up over the kitchen.” I followed him up the stair. “There is a door into your room,” he said, “but it is always locked now. And here is Grannie’s room, as they call it, though why, I have not the least idea,” he added, as he pushed open the door of an old-fashioned parlour, smelling very musty. A few old books lay on a side table. A china bowl stood besides them, with some shrivelled, scented rose-leaves in the bottom of it. The cloth that covered the table was riddled by moths, and the spider-legged chairs were covered with dust. A conviction seized me that the old bureau must have belonged to this room, and I soon found the place where I judged it must have stood. However, the same moment I caught sight of a portrait on the wall above the spot I had fixed upon. “Good Lord!” I caried, involuntarily, “that is the very lady I met at Chapel Street!” “Nonsense!” said Gary James. “Old-fashioned ladies are like babies—they all look the same. That is a very old portrait.” “So I see,” I answered. “It is like a Zucchero.” “I don’t know whose it is,” he answered hurriedly, and I thought he looked a little queer.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
“Is she one of the family?” I asked. “They say so; but who or what she is, I don’t know. You must ask Jean,” he answered. “The more I looked at it,” I said, “the more I am convinced it is the same lady.” “Well,” he returned with a laugh, “my old nurse used to say she was rather restless. But it’s all nonsense.” “That bureau in my room looks about the same date as this furniture.” I remarked. “It used to stand just there,” he answered, pointing to the space under the picture. “Well, I remember with what awe we used to regard it; for they said the old lady kept her accounts at it still. We never dared touch the bundles of yellow papers in the pigeon-holes. I remember thinking Jean a very heroine once when she touched one of them with the tip of her forefinger. She had got yet more courageous by the time she had it moved into her own room.” “hen that is your sister’s room I am occupying?” I said. “Yes.” “I am ashamed of keeping her out of it.” “Oh! she’’ do well enough.” “If I were she though,” I added, “I would send that bureau back to its own place.” “What do you mean, Oliver? Do you believe ever old wife’s tale that ever was told?” “She may get a fright some day—that’s all! I replied. He smiled with such an evident mixture of pity and contempt that for the moment I almost disliked him; and feeling certain that Florence would receive any such hint in a somewhat similar manner, I did not feel inclined to offer her any advice with regard to the bureau. Little occurred during the rest of my visit worthy of remark. Somehow or other I did not make much progress with Florence. I believe I had begun to see into her character a little more, and therefore did not get deeper in love as the days went on. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
I know I became less absorbed in her society, although I was still anxious to make myself agreeable to her—or perhaps, more properly, to give her a favourable impression of me. I do not know whether she perceived any difference in my behaviour, but I remember that I began again to remark the pinched look of her nose, and to be a little annoyed with her for always putting aside my book. At the same time, I daresay I was provoking, for I never was given to tidiness myself. At length Christmas Day arrived. After breakfast, the squire Mr. James, and the two girls arranged to talk to church. Florence was not in the room at the moment. I excused myself on the ground of a headache, for I had had a bad night. When they left, I went up to my room, threw myself on the bed, and was soon fast asleep. How long I slept I do not know, but I work again with that indescribable yet well-known sense of not being alone. The feeling was scarcely less terrible in the daylight than it had been in the darkness. With the same sudden effort as before, I sat up in the bed. There was the figure at the open bureau, in precisely the same position as on the former occasion. However, I could not see it so distinctly. I rose as gently as I could, and approached it, after the first physical terror. I am not a coward. Just as I got near enough to see the account book open on the folding cover of the bureau, she started up, and, turning, revealed the face of Florence. She blushed crimson. “I beg your pardon, Mr. Winchester,” she said, in great confusion; “I thought you had gone to church with the rest.” “I had lain down with a headache, and gone to sleep,” I replied. “But forgive me, Miss James,” I added, for my mind was full of the dreadful coincidence, “don’t you think you have been better at church than balancing your accounts on Christmas Day?” “The better day the better deed,” she said, with a somewhat offended air, and turned to walk from the room. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
“Excuse me, Florence,” I resumed, very seriously, “but I want to tell you something.” She looked conscious. It never crossed me, that perhaps she fancied I was going to make a confession. Far other things were then in my mind. For I thought how awful it was, if she too, like the ancestral ghost, should have to do an age-long penance of haunting that bureau and those horrid figures, and I had suddenly resolved to tell her the whole story. She listened with varying complexion and face half turned aside. When I had ended, which I fear I did with something of a personal appeal, she lifted her head and looked me in the face, with just a slight curl on her thin lip, and answered me. “If I had wanted a sermon, Mr. Winchester, I should have gone to church for it. As for the ghost, I am sorry for you.” So saying she walked out of the room. The rest of the day I did not find very merry I pleaded my headache as an excuse for going to be early. How I hated the room now! Next morning, immediately after breakfast, I took my leave of East Haven. If I lost a wife at all, it was a stingy one. I should have been ashamed of her all my life long. However, extravagant runs the rich, and the stingy robs the poor. I have kept up my friendship with her brother. All he knows about the matter is, that either we had a quarrel, or she refused me—he is not sure which. I must say for Florence, that she was no tattler. Well, here is a letter I had from Gary James this very morning, I will read I to you. My Dear Winchester—We have had a terrible shock this morning. Jean did not come down to breakfast, and Clara went to see if she was ill. We heard her scream, and rushing up, there was poor Jean sitting at the old bureau, quite dead. She had fallen forward on the desk, and her housekeeping-book was crumpled up under her. She had been so all nigh long, we suppose, for she was not undressed, and was quite cold. The doctors say it was disease of the heart. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Some people thought the ghost had come to tell that she had hidden away money in some secret place in the old bureau, one would see why she was permitted to come back. And of course, those wretched accounts were not over and done with, you see. That is the misery of it. Good night. Then I walked out into the wind. We who have lost our sense and our senses—our touch, our small, our vision of who we are; we who frantically force and press all things, without rest for body or spirit, hurting our Earth and injuring ourselves: we call a halt. We want to rest. We need to rest and allow the Earth to rest. We need to reflect and to rediscover the mystery that lives in us, that is the ground of every unique expression of life, the source of the fascination that calls all things to communion. We declare a Sabbath, a space of quiet; for simply being and letting be; for recovering the great, forgotten truths; for learning how to live again. Our God and God of our fathers, please accept our rest. Please Sanctify us through Thy commandments, and grant our portion in Thy Torah. Please give us abundantly of Thy goodness and make us rejoice in Thy salvation. Please purify our hearts to serve Thee in truth. In Thy loving favour, O Lord our God, please grant that Thy holy Sabbath be our joyous heritage, and may America who sanctified Thy name, rest thereon. Blessed art Thou, O Lord, who halowest the Sabbath. O Lord our God, be gracious unto Thy people America and accept their prayer. Please restore America and accept their prayer. Please restore the worship to Thy sanctuary and please receive in love and favour the supplication of America. May the worship of thy people be ever acceptable unto Thee. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
Winchester Mystery House
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O Wicked Wit and Gifts that Have the Power So to Seduce!
I have always noticed a prevalent want of courage, even among persons of superior intelligence and culture, as to imparting their own psychological experiences when those have been of a strange story. Almost all humans are afraid that what they could relate in such wise would find no parallel or response in a lister’s internal life, and might be suspected or laughed at. A truthful traveller who should have seen some extraordinary creature in the likeness of a devil, would have no fear mentioning it; but the same traveller having had some singular presentiment, impulse, vagary of thought, vision (so-called), dream, or other remarkable mental impression, would hesitate considerably before one would own to it. To this reticence I attribute much of the obscurity in which subjects are involved. We do not habitually communicate our experiences of these subjective things, as we do our experiences of objective creation. The consequences is, that the general stock of experiences in this regard appears exceptional, and really is so, in respect of being miserably imperfect. The Devil had been raised among us, and his rage was vehement and terrible; and, when he shall be silenced, the Lord only knows. It does not signify how many years ago, or how few, a certain Murder was committed in Boston in 1688, which attracted great attention. We hear more than enough of Murders as they rise in succession to their atrocious eminence, and if I could, I would bury the memory this this atrocious eminence, as hi body was buried, in the Witch House’s basement. When the murder was first discovered, no suspicion fell—or I ought rather to say, for I cannot be too precise in my facts, it was nowhere publicly hinted that any suspicious fell—on the man who was afterwards brought to trial. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
As no reference was at the time made to him in the newspapers, it is obviously impossible that any description of him at that time have been given in the newspapers. It is essential that this fact be remembered. Unfolding at breakfast my morning paper, containing the account of that first discovery, I found it to be deeply interesting, and I read it with close attention. I read it twice, if not three times. The discovery had been made in a bedroom, and, when I laid down the paper, I was aware of a flash—rush—flow—I do not know what to call it—no word I can find is satisfactorily descriptive—in which I seemed to see that bedroom passing through my room, like a picture impossibly painted on a running river. Though almost instantaneous in its passing, it was perfectly clear; so clear that I distinctly, and with a sense of relief observed the absence of the dead body from the bed. As the circumstances of the Murder, gradually unravelling, took stronger and stronger posses of the public mind, I kept them away from mine, by knowing as little about them as was possible in the midst of the universal excitement. John Hathorne asked most of the questions and established the judicial attitude that was to prevail throughout most of the examinations and the trials. Many people suspected that the devil killed this man and he had been summoned by Sarah Good because she had also been accused of bewitching a few girls in the town. Mr. Hathorne asked the children to look at Sarah God and say whether she was one who afflicted them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
They accused her to her face, “upon which they were all dreadfully tortured and tormented for a short space of time.” When they recovered from their fits, they charged her with causing them, saying that her specter had come and tormented them although her body remained “at a considerable distance from them.” This was spectral evidence, that is, evidence concerning a specter or apparition of the accused, rather than her bodily person. It was eventually to become the central legal issue of the trials, but at the moment we need only see why it seemed initially so convincing to the examining magistrates. Here were girls afflicted with violent physical symptoms which had no known physical cause, but which a physician had attributed to witchcraft. There was a malicious old woman accused of causing them. When the sufferers accused her they were immediately thrown into convulsions. What could be more plausible than that the convulsions were inflicted as revenge for the accusation? Yet such behaviour was still unfamiliar enough in Salem so that one of the recorders noted that “none here see the [specters of the] witches but the afflicted and themselves.” However, the change was so startling that I fully believed the girls derived their impression in some occult manner. For instance, we knew there was something occult going on because the throat of the murdered man had been cut straight across. In the opening speech for the defense, it was suggested that the deceased might have cut his own throat in the dreadful condition referred to. Yet, it would have been impossible for such a wound to be self-inflicted by either hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Certainly, Mr. Hathorne was convinced; when the children had recovered and repeated their accusation he turned to the accused woman. “Sarah Good, do you not see now what you have done? Why do you not tell us the truth? Why do you this torment these people children?” Certainly many of her neighbours though her malicious, since they attributed to her a number of inexplicable events, including the death of a cow which perished in a “sudden, terrible and strange unusual manner.” Such testimony was common in witchcraft cases, and it has caused much unseemly hilarity among the modern historians. It is likely, they have asked, that His Satanic Majesty the Devil or any of his minions would stop to concern themselves with the fate of a New England cow? The answer is that nothing is more likely. What else would a fertility god concern himself with but the health or sickness of crops, of animals, and of humans? From the standpoint of a society that still remembered who the Devil was, no testimony could be more relevant. As a matter of fact, the village witches who still exist in rural England are often expert in folk medicines, human and animal, as well as charms, and until recently many of them were midwives. Sarah Osburn also denied that she had hurt anyone, but the girls feel again into fits. Mr. Hathorne asked her how this happened. Perhaps, she said, the Devil went about in her likeness doing harm, but she knew nothing about it. Sarah Osburn was the first at Salem to assert the principle that the Devil can impersonate an innocent person. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Whether the devil could or not was a matter of debate in the seventeenth century, but most Protestant authorities agreed with Goodwife Obsurn that, as Hamlet put it, “The Devil hath power/ to assume a pleasing shape.” However, the principle was not discussed at this hearing, since Sarah Osburn was a likely a suspect as Sarah Good, if for no other reason than her lying. Lying was still considered a serious sin in the seventeenth century, and a crime as well, legally punishable by the courts. Nine of us had not the smallest doubt about those passages, neither, I believed, had any one in Court. When Mr. Hathorne tried to find out how well Sarah Osburn knew Sarah Good she said she did not know her by name. Mr. Hathorne asked if Sarah Osburn had been tempted by the devil, and she said no. Why then, he asked, had not she been at church? She had been sick, she said, and unable to go. However, her husband and others contradicted her. “She had not been at meeting,” they said, “this year and two months.” To understand why the matter of church attendance was considered so significant one must remember that the seventeenth century saw witchcraft as literal Devil worship, and therefore as a rival religion to Christianity. This is why the magistrates sometimes asked accused persons, as they asked Sarah Good, what God they served. And if the accused person avoided speaking the name of God (as Sarah Good did), they had reason to think it a suspicious circumstance. The murdered man at that time stood directly opposite the judge, on the other side of the court. He slowly shook a great grey veil, which he carried on his arm for the first time, over his head and whole form. Then he collapsed, all was gone, and his place was empty. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The examinations of Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn afford grounds for suspicion and for further examination. However, the major event of that first day of March was the examination of Tituba. It began like the others, but it changed very quickly: “Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” “Who is it then?” “The Devil, for aught I know.” “Did you never see the Devil?” “The Devil,” said Tituba, “came to me and bid me serve him.” She went on, with a minimum of judicia prodding, to provide a detailed confession of witchcraft, the first of approximately fifty that were made during the Salem trials. On March first and second, in her examination, Tituba said that the Devil had come to her in the shape of a man—a tall man in black, with white hair. Other times he had come in the shape of an animal. He had told her he was God, that she must believe him and serve him six years, and he would give her many fine things. He had shown her a book and she had made a mark in it, a mark that was “red like blood.” Many people thought this to be a revelation. “Then I saw another beast, coming out of the Earth. He had two horns like a lamb, but he spoke like a dragon. He exercised all authority of the first beast on his behalf, and made the earth and its inhabitants worship the first beast, whose fatal wound had been healed. And he performed great and miraculous signs, even causing fire to comedown from Heaven to Earth in full view of men. Because of the signs he was given power to do on behalf of the first beast, he deceived the inhabitants of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
“He ordered them to set up an image in honour of the beast who was wounded by the sword and yet lived. He was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that it could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. He also forced everyone, small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on his right hand or on his forehead, so that no one could buy or sell unless one had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of his name,” reports Revelation 13.11-17. Sarah Osburn was to die there on the tenth of May. Tituba, like later confessors, was never brought to trial. She lay in jail until she was sold to pay the jailer’s fees, her master refusing to pay them. Sarah Good was brought to trial. Another reaction to Tituba’s confession was to confirm the community in its fear of witchcraft, and particularly its fear of the three accused women. The night of March First William Allen and John Hughes heard a strange noise; it continued frightening them, but the approached and “saw a strange and unusual beast lying on the ground. Going up to it, the said beast vanished away and in the said place started up two or three women fled, not after the manner of other women but swiftly vanished out of sight, which women we took to be Sarah Good, Sarah Osburn, and Tituba.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The next night William Allen again had hallucinations: “Sarah Good visibly appeared to him in his chamber, said Allen being in bed, and brought an unusual light with her. The said Sarah came and sat upon his foot. The said Allen went to kick at her, upon which she vanished and the light with her.” Notice that in this hallucination as in many others the hallucination stops as soon as the subject is able to move or speak. A curse is any expressed wish that some form of adversity or misfortune will befall or attach to one or more persons, a place, or an object. In particular, “curse” may refer to such a wish or pronouncement made effective by a supernatural or spiritual power, such as a god, or gods, a spirit, or natural force, or else as a kind of spell by magic or witchcraft. The Winchester rifle is a handsome gun that legend has it was forged in Hell. Whoever possesses the cursed rife either suffers disaster or fortune. Oliver Fisher Winchester was an American businessman and politician, best known as being the founder of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Oliver Winchester was born November 30, 1810 and dead December 10, 1880. Oliver Winchester was known for manufacturing and marketing the Winchester repeating rifle, which was a much re-designed descendant of the Volcanic rifle of some years earlier. Mr. Winchester was more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man highly honoured for his natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that was when he took his second orders the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in which, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson has it rightly on, he could govern any ghost or evil spirit, and even stop an Earthquake. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Such a powerful man, in combat with supernatural visitations discovered that a division of Smith & Wesson firearms was failing financially with one of their newly patented arms. Having an eye for opportunity, Mr. Winchester assembled venture capital together with other stockholders and acquired the Smith & Wesson division, better known as the Volcanic Repeating Arms Company, in 1855. By 1857, Mr. Winchester had positioned himself as the principle stockholder in the company and relocated to New Haven, Connecticut, and changed the name to New Haven Arms Company. After experiencing a slow start, and then a booming success with the Henry rifle, the company reorganized once again and the first Winchester rifle was the Model 1866, which had been nicknamed the Yellow Boy. The gun was called Yellow Boy because it should be remembered that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at his own hands. Gradually Mr. Winchester amassed a considerable fortune. When Mr. Oliver Winchester died on December 10, 1880, his ownership in the company passed to his son, William Wirt Winchester (who married Sarah Lockwood Pardee in 1862), and died March 7 1881 at the young age of 43. The couple has also had a child, Annie Pardee Winchester, born June 15, 1866, and died 6 weeks later on July 25, 1866. Mrs. Winchester was deeply troubled by the loss of her daughter. In the course of her daily walk, she had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between them. #RandpolphHarris 9 of 13
There in a certain spot, and always in the same place, she declared that she encountered, every day, a baby with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a little dress of white pique, made with two skirts. The pique was cut slightly Gabriele, and rounded off in the front with scallops, bound with white braid, with a button in each scallop, and ribbon-sash, tied at the left side, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. “She is my baby,” Mrs. Winchester would say, and she often used to come to her parents house in New Haven; but that which troubled her was, that she had now been dead three years, and she had seen her body laid in the grave at her burial, this that she saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. The hair of the appearance, sayth Mrs. Winchester, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink—no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemth to point to something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never failth to meet Mrs. Winchester, and to pass on, that hath quenched her spirits; and although she never seeth her by night, yet cannot she get her natural rest. Mrs. Winchester went to see a doctor who told her, “The case is strange but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if you will be free with me, and fulfill all that I desire.” Mrs. Winchester was overjoyed, but she perceived that the doctor turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
The doctor knew that this might be a doemonium meridianum, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any human can meet, and the most perilous withal. He made an appointment to go with Mrs. Winchester to the spot where she had these encounters. They had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when they both saw her at once gliding towards them; punctually as the ancient writers describe their “lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.” The aspect of the baby girl was exactly that which had been related by Mrs. Winchester. There was a pale and stony face, the strange misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on them, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like upon a stream, and glided past the spot where they stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that came over the doctor, as he stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that his heart and purpose both failed him. He had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but he did not. He stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean of out sight. When they returned to the house, and after he had said all he could to pacify Mrs. Winchester, he took leave for that time, with a promise that when he had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, when then he alleged, he would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The doctor later told Mrs. Winchester that he thought it was best that they try an exorcism, but his Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient powers, on grounds of perversion and abuse. So he referred her to a medium. The medium told Mrs. Winchesters, “There is a danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day.” There was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came towards the medium gradually. She opened her parchment scroll, and read aloud the command. The spirit paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then she rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. The spirit then swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly. Her knees shook under her, and the drops of sweat ran down her flesh like rain. But, although face to face with the spirit, the medium’s heart grew calm, and her mind was composed. The spirit then commanded Mrs. Winchester to move West and build a mansion in honour of the spirit killed by the Winchester rifle and “as long as the hammer keep pounding, her heart would continue to beat.” The medium dismissed the troubled ghost, until she peacefully withdrew, gliding towards the west. Mrs. Winchester moved to San Jose, which was near her family Member, Enoch Pardee, an occultist, prominent physician, free mason, and Mayor of Oakland, California USA, had built his family’s mansion in 1868, which is now known as the Pardee House Museum. Masonry has influenced more the modern witchcraft; it has influenced dozens of occult orders. Mrs. Winchester bought a farm house and built a massive mansion. There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the Winchester mansion through the nineteenth century. The estate in those days was in a transitory state, and Mrs. Winchester, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, the mansion is now flanked by a pleasantness, a beautiful garden and lawn, and it is surrounded by a sole grove of palm trees. It has also the aspect of age and of solitude, and looks the very scene of harmony and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every beautiful glade of grass around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. The incredible mansion, scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interests in the supernatural tales of old and new. Freemasons supposedly conducted a séance in the mansion in August of 2019. A phantom made an answer willingly. It stated, “before the next Yule-tide, a fearful pestilence will lay waste the land, and myriads of souls will be loosened from the flesh, until our valleys will be full.” The general facts stated in this diary are to these matters of belief accounted a strong proof of the veracity of the Ghost that the plague, fatal to so many millions, did break out in the global village at the close of the year. How sorely must the infidels and heretics of this generation be dismayed when they know that this Black Death, which is now swallowing its thousands in the streets of the great city, was foretold several months before the outbreak, under the séance of a freemason, by a visible and suppliant ghost! And what pleasure and improvements do such deny themselves who scorn and avoid all opportunity of intercourse with souls separate, and the spirits, glad and sorrowful, which inhabit the unseen World! May they who observe the Sabbath and call it a delight, rejoice in Thy Kingdom. May the people who sanctify the seventh day be sated and delighted with Thy bounty. For Thou didst find pleasure in the seventh day, and didst sanctify it, calling it the most desirable of the days, in remembrance of creation. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Winchester Mystery House
Today is the return of our guided Mansion Tour! The tour guide-led experience allows guests to access areas of the mansion that have been closed since March 2020. Click the link in our bio for more information. winchestermysteryhouse.com/recent-links
I Know what you did Last Summer with those Secrets and Lies!
I know what you did last Summer is a cautionary urban legend that take place in North Carolina and is about what happened to four high school seniors, after they violated the Ten Commandments in the Bible. Berry Cox, Helen, Julie, and her boyfriend Ray go to a beach to celebrate the 4 July, in 1996. Helen was just crowned as she won a beauty pageant. As Julie, Ray, and Barry watch her get her crown, Ray comments on how big her breast are, and Barry tells him, “She does exercises to pump them up.” Ray and Julie are in a relationship, and Helen and Barry are in a relationship, and by talking about another man’s woman, Ray is committing adultery, which is a violation of the seventh commandment. Barry is a rich kid and has a brand new 1996 BMW 328i sedan, with factory chrome rims, leather, and tinted windows. The car is on fleek! While at the beach, Barry has a few drinks. This particular 4th of July is supposed to represent the Sabbath, although it takes place on Thursday, 4th July 1996, in the film. They are having fun and telling horror stories about a man being decapitated, and ended up with a bloody hook for a hand. Ray thinks these are true stories and explains that, “Urban legends are American folk lore, they all usually originate from some real incident!” The teens blow him off and Julie decided to lose her virginity to Ray. This is a violation of the fourth commandment of God, which states, “Honor the Sabbath day, and keep it holy” premarital sex is considered a sin.
After the night presses on, everyone is ready to leave, Barry’s friends do not want him to drive home, so his girlfriend Helen convinces him to let Ray, who has not been drinking, drive his brand-new BMW. However, Barry knows he is not supposed to let anyone drive his car, he even replies, “Nobody drives my car, but me.” The BMW is a phallic symbol and by letting Ray drive it, he is symbolically allowing himself to be castrated. Barry is also disrespecting his father, by allowing Ray to drive his car, which is a violation of the fifth commandment, which states, “Honor thy father and mother, and your days on this Earth will be long.” The teens should have called someone to pick them and the car up, as it was about a $60,000.00 car. As Ray is driving, Barry pops his head out of the sunroof, and they hit a man crossing the road, Barry gets blood all over his face. By driving Barry’s BMW, Ray, who is from a humble background, violates the second commandment, which states, “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.” In this commandment, the Lord condemns the worship of idols Ray is worshipping Barry’s phallic symbol by driving a car that was not meant for him, and that is why he accidentally hits the man who was crossing the road.
The teens then get out of the car, Barry screams, “Jesus Christ, my fucking car! My dad is going to kill my ass.” Julie takes a few steps away from the car, finds a man’s rain boot, black in color, on the side of the road, she screams, “Oh my God! Oh my God! This isn’t happening!” Just then, Barry and Julie violate Commandment three, which states, “Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord, thy God, in vain.” As the teens are in a panic, Ray walks over the to the body and looks at his face, “I think he’s dead. His face is all messed up. What was he doing out here?” The teens drag what they think is a lifeless body down the pier, they have just violated the sixth commandment, “Thou shalt now kill.” As the teens are trying to figure out what to do about the body, another teenager Maxx comes along the road driving his truck. Maxx, however, does not see the man Ray hit with Barry’s BMW and Maxx comments on how the car, “Don’t look so new anymore” and tells Ray, “You almost got that rich boy act down.” Ray also broke a commandment in the Bible, he drove Barry’s BMW and this violates the tenth commandment, “Thou shalt not covert—envying something that belongs to another.”
After Maxx drives away, everyone convinces Barry that he will be charged with murder because it is his car that hit the man, even though he was not driving. Ray tells Barry, “There is liquor all over the car, no one will believe I was driving. You will go to jail for manslaughter.” The entire group just violated the ninth amendment to the ten commandments, which states, “Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.” No one wants to dump the body in the ocean, and Ray says, “Pretend it is an escaped lunatic with a hook hand, and we are doing everyone a favor. Helen is the only one brave enough to push the body in the ocean, as she does, the man comes back to life, for a moment, and grabs the homecoming crown off of her head. Barry has to jump in the water in retrieve the crown. The man the teens hits violates the eighth commandments by stealing Helen’s crown off of her head, “Thou shalt not steal,” and he pays for this sin later in the movie. After the body is dumped in the ocean, everyone, but Julie agrees not to mention the crime ever again. However, because Julie is tripping and acting skittish, Barry grabs Julie by the arms and makes her promise to take the secret and lies to the grave with her. Ray convinced Barry he was going to be charged with a crime because Ray is poor and did not have family or money to get out of it. Julie was worried that she would lose her scholarship. Helen is also rich, like Barry, but was trying to look out for him.
The friends all lose touch, Julie goes away to college and does poorly. A year later, when she returns home, she finds a letter, when she opens it, the letter says, “I Know What You Did Last Summer.” Then Maxx, the nosy teen, is the first to be killed by the serial killer. Not only did the group violate the ten commandments, but by losing her virginity on the beach, Julie opens up Pandora’s box, which releases evil unto them. It is so secret or lie that Helen loves her hair, after the teens know someone is stalking them and knows what they did, she returns home. While she is pouring herself a soda, someone sneaks into her house, and she unknowingly follows him up the stairs, as her sister, Elsa is talking to her and asking her to come to work to help open the store, Helen refuses and sits on her bad and keeps brushing her long golden locks. Elsa tells Helen, “You and your hair—just so pathetic. So very pathetic.” Helen violates commandment one, “Thou shalt have no other gods before me.” When she wakes up the next day, someone cut her highly coveted hair off, and when she looks in the mirror, the word “Soon,” is written across it. While at the gym, Barry takes a shower, then he gets out of the shower to find his jacket has been stolen out of a locker, and that there is a picture of his car with the words “I Know,” written on it. As he tries to find out who is stalking him, Barry goes outside, and someone gets in his BMW and hits he with it, Barry flies through a wall, blacks out and wakes up in the hospital. The movie goes on to detail how these teens are all tormented and murdered by a fearsome creature. “Children should be here having fun, partying, running people over, and getting away with murder.”
Secrets and Lies—a Look into the Mind of Ben Crawford
Virtue, sooner or later, meets the good it merits. There is no casting of swine’s meat before men worse than that which would flatter excellence as though its true origin were not good enough for one, but one must have a lineage, deduced as it were by spiritual heralds, from some stock with which one has nothing to do. Virtue’s true lineage is older and more respectable than any that can be invented for one. Ben Crawford is so attentive to details and sees the entire perspective. With thoroughness and honesty, carefulness, ethical behavior, and morality, Ben Crawford strives to be structured, logical, and efficient, while he uncovers a mystery. Ben Crawford displays all of these good qualities when investigating the murder of his son and trying to protect and keep his family together, by addressing the problems with the police investigation, before they can grow larger. By addressing his concerns, Ben Crawford will maintain better healthy overall, and live a more quality life because he does not just sit back and let stress eat him alive, he takes action. Conscientious individuals like Ben Crawford perform better at some jobs than others like Detective Cornell.
Although Detective Cornell is reliable, she tends to be excessively meticulous, and may be less efficient than Ben Crawford. While Detective Cornell spends all morning try to craft Ben Crawford as a suspect, only paying attention to details that make him look guilty, she is being unproductive because she is ignoring other possible motives and suspects, as her job is to solve a murder by noon. Adhering to procedure while trying to frame Ben Crawford for killing his son, Tom Murphy, makes the actual criminals, who really killed him leave an orgy of evidence behind because the real suspect knows he or she is not under suspicion. And this is why Ben Crawford take charge of the murder investigation on his own. Because everyone else in his life, including investigators, seem to be so lackadaisical, self-absorbed, and unethical, Ben Crawford develops an anxiety disorder known as obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD) because he is going to lose his freedom and possible his life for a crime he did not commit just because it is easier for the police to label him as a suspect and close a case, than to figure out who actually committed the crime.
People with obsessive-compulsive personality disorder (OCPD), which in this case we are jokingly calling “Obsessively Corrupt Police Department,” is a mental condition in which a person, Ben Crawford, is preoccupied with rules, orderliness, time awareness, vigilance, self-direction, and attention to detail because he worries that he has not done everything necessary to feel safe and secure. As a result of his OCPD, Ben Crawford cannot see everything wrong with his behavior. Ben is overly aware, scrupulous, rigid, inflexible, suffering a great deal of stress, and this is becoming deeply ingrained in his personality pattern so much that people cannot stand to be around him, as they know he can see through their vices and snarky comments. At first critics could not tell if Ben was connection, because he knew something was wrong, but seemed to be in some type of a mental fog, but now everyone fears Ben Crawford because they see he is highly cognitive. So to push him over the edge, or disrupt his mental state people play games with him, and taunt him, and even physically assault him, as a method of trying to drive him crazy because they think he is on the verge of a breakdown, after all, under these conditions most people would be.
Ben Crawford is looked at as guilty by everyone in his community, they spray paint “Child Killer” on his garage, start to fire him from his jobs, and no one will hire Ben because he is so demonized by his community. Others jump in on the game by vandalizing his car, planting evidence, breaking into his home, and even turning his wife and children against him. To make matters worse, Ben’s neighbor kidnaps him and tortures him and tries to kill him if he does not confess. And the man that thinks he is the father of Tom Murphy, strangles Ben Crawford and also tries to beat him to death. So the entire community has turned against Ben, even his wife and children, and he has no money, no one to turn to for help, and is about to lose his house, who would not go crazy, right? Well certainly NOT Ben Crawford. Ben Crawford has proven himself worthy of retaining this higher state of consciousness, it makes him who he is. Ben Crawford proves that he is not lost in the wilderness, but mostly everyone else is. He is a hero and gaining skills and performing heroic deeds, and his journey is also spiritual. Virtue is God’s empire.
Nothing is Surer [than] the Heart
Our hearts are often larger than our wills. There are those who like not to be detected in the possession of the heart. Can you feel pain and suffering? Most people can feel pain, so why is it that many like to hurt others instead of making them feel loved and accepted? When people are apparently being tortured others marvel at how well they endure the suffering, and to justify the inhuman behavior, some might convince themselves that other members of the human population are not human, or they do not have a soul, and because of that it is okay to abuse them. And if these beings are soulless, the abuser believes the creature does not deserve any consideration when it comes to how it is being treated. Many of us are but sorry hosts to ourselves. Some hearts are hermits.
Some people live lives that are not their choice and have to deal with unbelievable circumstances. And everyone they interact with, consistently, is not necessarily nice to them. They live isolated lives and are working hard to overcome their burdens. Some of these people who are striving to be successful have worked hard than many you know and they invest every dime of their saving into their business, without know if it will ever be successful. Every time they make a purchase for themselves, it kind of makes them depressed. You cannot always decide for yourself whether your own heart is cold or warm. So it is important to be loving, kind, considerate, and humble to everyone you meet.
Some people have goals that are independent of their culture, and as a result they may face shame; amusement; feelings of superiority, annoyance, ambition; and aims of self-preservation and increasing power. These people are capable of intelligence, goals, emotions, and pain. And they also care about other people and the environment. However, it seems no one cares about these extremely motivated people, even though they display enormous care, love, and loyalty towards others. When others are hurt, extremely motivated people are disturbed, shocked, and depressed by these maladaptive behaviors. The first mistaken impulse of an undisciplined heart.
However, when the tables are turned, and these highly motivated people are punched, strangled, and hit in the head no one seems to care, and this can trigger deep psychological reactions in the participants that makes them feel like they are toys, not human, or somehow less valuable. Extremely motivated people are highly evolved or have been very well educated. They think more deeply and deliberatively. Often times watching scary movies disturbs them because they care about the feelings of the people in the film, and think to themselves, “This could be real, look at how good the emotions are, they are better actors in this film, than most people are in real life.” Their brains react to stimuli the same way it would if the events were actually happening in front of them.
Yet, many people tend to keep these highly motivated people at somewhat of a distance, they hold back from them as if they are not human. As a result, they live in casual abandonment, and this makes them have excessive worry and fear; because of that no one ever really gets to know them. When they are hurt, the general public seems to display laughter and joy, not the horror of injury or death. It is as if people think, “We do not care about them so it is okay to hurt and kill them.” When these outsiders are on the edge and others think they may be contemplating suicide, groups of people are more likely to bait them or try to hurt them so they destroy themselves. Nonetheless, research indicates the people actually like the pictures of these non-human, fake people, more than real humans. Overall, these fake people are not disliked more than others, nor do they appear to be very realistic, but there is something about their genetic code that drives some people crazy.
Because of the way they are treated, these highly motivated people feel more anonymous, some wear sunglasses all the time, or tend to avoid large crowds. However, they are easier to kill, and it is easier for people to watch them being killed, but no one will march or put on demonstrations for them. Scientist say this is because they keep their faces partially covered and you do not see them often so you have no idea they are suffering. You cannot see their emotions and typically see no bruises nor broken bones, and they appear to be happy, so it does not register to others that these fake humans are being hurt and feel pain. These fake humans are not out in public hollering and screaming, nor do they fight with others.
So the question is, how do we make people care about these toy humans? Why should they be mistreated? Well, some think that if we push religion and more people learn to believe in God that it will foster more concern for people that are looked at as outsiders. Blessed are those who have regard for those who are delicate; the LORD delivers us in times of trouble. The LORD will protect you and preserve your life; God will bless you in the land, and not surrender you to the desire of your foes. The LORD will sustain you on your sickbed and restore you from your bed of infirmary. God knows the secrets of the heart. I do not know what heart means. I sometimes fancy that it is a talent for getting into debt, and running away with other men’s wives.
Fear is the Child of Ignorance
Battles become weariness. Carnage bores at last; death becomes the normal condition of things, and ceases to interest. Nations at war are wild beasts. The passions of these hordes of men and women are not an example for a living soul. Our souls grow up to the light; we must keep eye on the light, and look no lower. Nations have no worse than a soiled mirror of themselves in mobs. My son asked me, “If everyone is always wishing for peace, why do we have wars, why did people attack Paris, France?” Although the answer is really complicated and has a lot to do with natural resources, politics, power, and religion, war actually comes down to a couple of things—fear and a lack of empathy. People who start wars are scared and cannot understand the feelings of other people.
Some fear, however, is good. Because you do not want to get hurt, you fear danger and that keeps you safe. You love your family and fear what would happen to them if you could not support them, so sometimes fear is good because it will encourage you to do good things to avoid something bad from happening. However, nothing is so potent as fear well maintained. Fear of others who are unique can lead to deviance and abuse; fear us advancement can lead narrow mindedness; and fear of pain can lead to avoidance.
Nothing confound like to sudden terror, it thrusts every sense out of the human mind. When fear and hate are combined, they become terror. In subtle forms, fear and jealousy causes people to feel entitled and mean, it also creates a culture of bullies. In more extreme forms, this deadly psychological aggregate leads to severe domineering or even genocide, as saw in Paris, France on 13 November 2015, like what happened at the Radison Blu hotel in Mali. When you stigmatize a person and view them as less than human, you feel it if your God given right to do whatever you want to that person.
Let us look into ourselves and fear. Psychopathy refers to a set of behaviors within a person who expresses a lack of empathy and emotional literacy; an individual who appears to make no distinctions between right and wrong, and who feels no guilt about destructive or antisocial behavior. This lifelong mental illness is high in fearlessness and callousness, and they are hazardous to people in their way. Sometimes psychopathic individuals can become productive members of society, like TV new reporters, channeling their fearlessness and lack on inhibition into constructive activates.
So yes, it is possible your boss or coworker has a mental disability and that is why they are so evil, and seem not to care about their bad behavior. Their dangerously large egotistical behavior allows them to manipulate others through intimidation and manipulation as they see fit. Psychopaths tend to exploit others, they are grandiose, selfish, and delight over controlling and hurting others. People become psychopaths because of posttraumatic stress, substance abuse, and traumatic brain injury. Whom we fear more than love, we are not far from hating. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant, but later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it.
Randolph Harris II International 