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Everyone is Afraid of the Dark
Magnolias, orange trees, thick evergreen and palm trees sprouted from the sweeping lawns growing tall, as their green leaves beautifully filled the sky providing shade from the hot sun. Shielded behind the lush proliferation of gardens stood gorgeous Llanada Villa built in the Queen Anne Victorian style with soaring roofs and columned porticoes. The farmland provided crops for food. It was Sunday January, 1888, and the famers and servants were buoyant with excitement, undampened by undue religious solemnity. Good nature was inescapable that Sunday. Conversation abounded with joy and optimism. Several planters, dressed in gloves, hats, and cravat, strolled my estate. The road bustled with carriages and horses; men and women strolled along the green lawns in their Sunday finery; and the servants hunted and played games in the field. Somehow, in the midst of it all, I had grown tired and went to my bedroom to rest. It was past midnight when I awoke, and when I looked out the moon was rising over the Observational Tower. I heard a battle, but I could not see it for the smoke and flames, and the broken marble battering me from all sides. Doors were broken from their hinges, and the light bulbs exploded, and in the darkness, I was thrown against the walls or the floors. I felt an intense heat pass over me, and I struggled to get to my feet as the broken and fragmented tiles swirled about the chamber. Ghastly screams came from Arkie, the son of one of the farmers. “I have seen an evil thing this night,” he said. “Tell me what you have seen,” I replied. Arkie told me everything he had seen. “The estate was covered with smoke, through which, through which flashes were incessant, whilst the air seemed filled with shell, whose sharp explosions, with the hurling of their fragments hurling between flashes. Flashes that lit up the night sky. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
“We were at war against a monstrous progeny of demon-possessed men and women, wearing velvet tunics and stockings, and marvelous cloaks trimmed in rare fur. They brandished huge glittering swords. The fountains bulled over, flowing with blood. Several of the servant fled through the streets, yards, and orchards, many taking refuge in the Victorian cottages, outbuildings, and mansion already filled with the wounded and dying. The smoke was so dense we could not perceive an object ten feet in front of us. The gloom of the moment was beyond description. We felt and heard the tread of our enemy, our minds were in tumult, whether to lie still, to yield, or to die fighting. I jumped in and found myself confronted by a giant’s sword pointed by my breast. I grasped the blade and reversed the handle of my sword in a twinkle and offered to surrender. The beast said in the excitement, he thought I had run him through and he dropped his sword.” I was so thankful for each servant who fought for my home, their families, and their way of life, even though death was knocking on their door. A few days later, it was a dark moonless night, and as silent as a tomb. Arkie was still shaken up by the events that had recently taken place. There was a terrible fear, a physiological fear. Something beyond life that I was able to catch for a second. The air was cold now, icy all around me. It suddenly felt as though time stood still and yet as a foggy substance silently closed in the air was getting cold enough to freeze the blood. My nose, face, hands and feet felt ice cold. I was standing in silence, as I watched what was unfolding before my eyes. This misty essence was swirling noiselessly around us as we stood, observing a steam so fine the scene felt surreal. Along with the white mist came a whirl of emotions and confusion. What was happening in my home? I braced myself for some hellish effects. It swirled around us as though blown by a high wind, rising above our heads and dropping as it was moving quickly and yet we felt only a gentle breeze. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
Like a scene from the spectral World, the abnormal foggy essence swirled in vortex shapes and at time, it resembled horses running past us, but the curtains did not move, though we felt air currents around us. We felt vulnerable and somewhat uneasy. I could not for my life keep back a loud scream—the second I had emitted that night. It echoed and echoed through the dim vaultings of my mansion, and I had to choke back a flood of reaction that threated to burst out. Arkie saw a pale figure heading toward him as he ran from the parlor. He quivered when the thing growled at him. It stood out like white chalk on a black board, moving in darkness, seeking. It moved rapidly and just as suddenly as it have moved through the gallery, it suddenly was gone. When I looked around, I saw nothing of the foggy mist that surrounded and chilled us to the bone; it had vanished. The room was clear and felt warmer. What seemed like a long time in the fog had only been a few short minutes! When Arkie and I talked, we were both in awe at what we had experienced. Words were few as we tried to make sense of the incident. Arkie’s hair used to be dark brown, with grizzled streaks about the temples; in less than a month from that day he was a gray as badger, and he has never been quite the same man since that night. I do not believe anybody had ever felt so much sheer hell in one night. Gargoyles and chimeras, we saw all sorts of things, as if it was some passage from the Middle Ages. Arkie said my home repelled him more and more every day, and frightened him, as its features and expressions developed in a way he did not like; in a way that was not human. He felt like a ghoul had been feeding on his soul. He proceeded to leave the hose and suddenly jumped back a foot and started to cry. A dark figure draped in a black tattered robe with a deep hood that concealed his face stoop there, blocking the entrance. My heart sank centuries away as the soul goes as the awful, blasphemous horror touched quite beyond the power of words to classify. I shivered slightly. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
“What are you?” Arkie cried out desperately to the figure robed in black. There was only silence. He knew the horrible figure we be upon us soon. He flung his sword at the figure in black, and the dark robed figured answered back by point a half-rotted finger at Arkie. The sword flew backwards from his hand. He quickly spun around only to find, to his surprise, that the dreadful ghoul had not emerged from the hallway yet, but we could hear it coming. Arkie’s eyes widened in horror and his heart sank further as he looked to see that his sword hung in the air. Utter fear and hopelessness played on his mind. The ghoul was breathing like a wild beast; and I heard an evil sound also, with blows of something violently driven through flesh and bone, as the sword moved on its own, staking Arkie in the heart. I cried out for mercy as the ghoul approached, but was frozen in fear. Its deathly yellow eyes looked on me with hate and savage hunger. Yellow ooze dripped from its frightful maw. And its long fingernails danced in my hair, before it devoured what remained. As the ghoul kneeled, gnawing at Arkie’s head as a child nibbles at a stick of candy, the shadowy specter looked at me and spoke with it’s a hollow voice, saying “There is no shame in what you have done. Your former life is behind you.” I felt that any moment it might drop its present pray and seek a juicier morsal. But, the nearly eight-foot ghoul grabbed the blood-soaked sword and fled with it. This strange proceeding gave rise to many inquiries. Only a few could answer them. My home is dreaming gorgeously and overflowing with wonder and terror and escapes from the commonplace. It can truly catch the night spirit of antique horror, terror, as well a beauty from life. The haunting apparitions were seldom completely human. Occasionally things would leap through open windows at night, or could be seen squatting on the chest of sleepers, worrying at their throats. The utter inhumanity and callous cruelty of the things torture the brain and flesh. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
Unlocking the front doors, one is ushered into decorative hallways with splendid mahogany paneling—thrilling and suggestive of the time. Ancient paneled rooms, or simple vaults of masonry, there is even a narrow staircase the leads to the ceiling where a ghost is said to reside. Servants have felt temperature changes upon entering the room and sensed an unknown presence next to them. Others have glimpsed the blasphemous shapes that lope and trot and crawl up the stairs and through the ceiling. We saw the demons themselves and were afraid of them. My shocked scream had waked unaccustomed echoes in the labyrinth. It was more of the physical than the spiritual. I was paralyzed for an instant. I heard a faint scurrying sound somewhere, and a series of squeals or beats in a direction I could not determine. Then there came a subdued sort of clatter which somehow set me all in gooseflesh—a furtive, groping kind of clatter. It was like heavy wood falling on stone or brick—wood on brick—what did that make me think of? It came again, and louder. There was a vibration as if the wood had fallen farther than it had fallen before. After that followed a sharp grating noise. The archaic tunnels in my basement touched graveyard and witch-den. But whatever was in them was devilish anxious to get out. Accidents had happened, but I have never seen what I saw this night—that creature was neither alive nor dead, it abided neither above ground nor in the grave. It was a colossal and nameless blasphemy with glaring red eyes, and it held in bony claws a thing that had been a man. However, it was not even the fiendish apparition that made such an immortal fountainhead of all panic—not that, nor the face with its pointed ears, bloodshot eyes, flat nose and drooling lips. It was not the scaly claws nor the mould-caked body, nor the half-hooved feet—none of these, through any one of them might well have driven an excitable man to madness. It was the curse, the impious, the unnatural endless cycle of terror. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
These monsters were there—they glared and gnawed and gnawed and glared—and I knew that only a suspension of Nature’s laws would ever let a person be terrorized like this—it was truly some glimpse of the netherworld which no mortal unsold to the Fiend has ever endured. I had to hide this well-established horror-World which I saw fully, brilliantly, squarely and unfalteringly. Fair sized rooms, with wooden floors and furnished were bricked up with extreme care, to conceal the ghastly demons and nauseous monstrosities that leered around from every side of the rooms. I always knew William, no matter how beautiful and pure he was, was not strictly human. Either he was born in strange shadow, or he had found a way to unlock the forbidden gate. There are secrets, you know, which might come down from old Salem times, Cotton Mather tells even stranger things. In the Dark Ages, belief in apparitions, vampires, hell hounds, and demons were commonplace. While belief in ghosts declined in the eighteenth century, it was revitalized in the nineteenth century with the Society of Psychical research. While culture differ in their beliefs about what happens after death, most cultures believe that a ghost can return to the World of the living, with either good or bad intent. In Western cultures, it is most commonly believed that a ghost is the soul of the deceased who cannot find peace or does not know they are dead, leading them to haunt places where they lived or died or objects that caused their death, sometimes they even haunt bloodlines. It may be that they have unfinished business on the Earthly plane, perhaps to protect a loved one, or impart information or reenact the death. I do not think that any power on Earth could make anyone speak of what happened in my home, even old priests were too frightened to look in. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
It has been said that Mrs. Winchester slept in a different bedroom every night, supposedly in order to confuse evil spirts. Mrs. Winchester was deeply concerned with the welfare of her servants and their families. They were well paid and often additionally rewarded with gifts, even homes, or real estate and lifetime pensions. The full scope of her generosity charity and many kind acts will forever remain unknwn and such was her sincere desire. Her donations were never made public. She contributed to charities of all faiths. In 1911 in New Haven, Connecticut, she established the William Wirt Winchester Memorial Sanitorium for Tuberculosis (also known as low consumption), endowing it with $1,200,000.00 (2023 inflation adjusted $38,540,084.21). Visitors to The Winchester Mystery House are bound to run into others who are curious about the spirit World. It may seem that our intents have been to weave a cloak of vindication and protection covering our lady’s eccentricities, so many to this day still unexplainable. In truth, volumes could be written extolling her many virtues and justifying the construction of one of the largest and most significant architectural structures in the World. Still the Question remains—Why? Why? The enigma of The Mystery House that tragedy and a rifle built is perhaps unanswerable. The present generation must weigh and draw its own conclusions about this Valley’s most interesting, most controversial, most unappreciated and surely our most mysterious First Lady! No one will ever know, but this beautiful and bizarre mansion has, we think, allowed Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester, Lady of Mystery, to achieve a unique kind of eternal life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The spirit World and the human World were once so closely interwoven as to be indivisible. Look at monument, such as The Winchester Mystery House, that our ancient predecessors erected, and the traditions devised, to house, honour, and succor the dead. We still retain enough of our ancestors’ belief that our dead are aware of how we treat them, that we try to ensue they do not have anything thing to complain about. And we listen with widening eyes and quickening heartbeats to the stories told about the ghost that exist and have been recorded throughout time. The Winchester Mystery Houses catches the overtones of the soul, and you will not find those in a modern or renovated home because it has had no time to pick memories and attract local spirits. Placed like Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester’s home was not merely made, but it actually grew. Generation after Generation lived there and felt and died there, and in days when people were not afraid to live and feel and die. This house has stood for almost two centuries and what it has witnessed would make a modern house crumbled into powder. What do modern know of life and the forced behind it? This mansion once had a set of tunnels that kept it in touched with over Victorian houses on the estate. There is hardly a month that you do not read of carpenters finding bricked-up arches and wells leading nowhere in this or that old section of the house. During the time of the construction of this mansion, there were witches and what their spells summoned; pirated and what they brought in from the sea; smugglers; privateers—and I tell you, people knew how to live, and how to enlarge the bounds of life, in the old time! #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
While cleaning the mansion one night, a tour guide noticed a man in 19th century clothes, very pale, with pale blue eyes approaching the Venetian Dining Room. The tour guided continued to work until the mane came very close and stood directly over him. Becoming a bit uneasy at the man’s silence, the tour guide finally asked him, without looking of, if he wished to tour the mansion. When the “guest” did not reply, the tour guide stopped dusting underneath the table, and looked up at the silent man. The man’s face was contorted with rage; his lips moved furiously and he gestured as if he were shouting, but he made no sound. The tour guide fell onto the floor. Before he could turn and flee, the guest disappeared. Terrified, the tour guide ran until he came to an assistant manager. “I saw a ghost,” the tour guide grasped, out of breath. “The ghost of one of the carpenters has come back.” The ghost appeared in August of 2006, to another tour guide. He had entered the Daisy Bedroom and found a fellow tour guide leaning against the wall. Surprised by his presence, he had begun to question the man when he melted into the wall. When he reported the incident, one of his coworkers dismissed it as imagination. A few days later, two tour guides saw the same carpenter. They were locking up the mansion and the lights had not been off more than a few minutes when the sound of footsteps caused both tour guides to stop in their tracks. Before either of them could move, a door swung open and a young man entered. He gestured wildly and seemed to be shouting at the two tour guides, neither of whom could testify that any sound issued from the angry visitor. When one of the tour guides turned on the light, the figure faded before their astonished eyes. They quickly had the mansion secured and order all exists guarded. Guards reported that no person had attempted to leave the building. After the guards had conducted a search of the rooms, they were convinced that their visitor had not been a living man. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
The room count of California’s most mysterious mansion has just increased by one, rounding out at 161 chambers (that we know of). Preservationists at The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose have found a previously unknown room in the attic of the house, and in it was a pump organ, a dress form, a sewing machine, a Victorian sofa, and several paintings.
For further information about tours, including group tours, weddings, school events, birthday party packages, facility rentals, and special events please visit the website: https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Please visit the online giftshop, and purchase a gift for friends and relatives as well as a special memento of The Winchester Mystery House. A variety of souvenirs and gifts are available to purchase. https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
If you forget to purchase something during your visit, you can order any gift item by calling 408-247-2000 and charging them to your credit card. You can also place an order through the mail. Be sure to include a daytime telephone number with area code. Write to: Winchester Mystery House.
An Artifact from Another Level of Being
The silence closed in. Something was building in Llanada Villa. Something was happening in the very air itself. Something changed in the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. And as I heard the music, a long stab of terror drove through my heart. I assented to the window. As I looked out, I saw a handsome old-fashioned carriage, with a troop of couriers and footmen. I saw the slim figure of the pale gentleman in black, as he held a thick velvet cloak. He looked about him at the others as he went on, his voice ringing clear in the silence. “Never such a place as this has existed before. A place where demons have been invented by aggrieved souls. I wondered if Mrs. Winchester was perhaps a member of the Freemasons, or some other secret society. Maybe she holds some exalted rank.” I felt a great shudder pass through me at these words. However, there had been a conviction in those appalling words. Secret societies were very fashionable just then. Secret societies and psychiatry were the contrasting en vogue activities of the moment. I folded my arms and leaned against the frame of the door, obscuring for the moment the light behind me. I had an urge to venture outside, to walk in silence amongst the trees. However, the fruit orchard was dark enough even in daylight; by moonlight it would be all too easy to imagine terrors—as I keep imagining I can hear soft footsteps moving across the floor above my head. But when I sit on the sofa to listen, I hear only the beating of my heart. I walked for hours examining the trees and the splendid fruit that would be harvested. Before long, I was overtaken by night while still in the fruit orchard. Utterly bewildered and overcome with fatigue, I had lain down near the root of a large plumb tree and fallen into a dreamless sleep. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8
It was hours later, in the very middle of the night, that one of God’s mysterious messengers, gliding ahead pronounced the awakening word in my ear. Waking from a deep sleep at night in the midst of what seemed like a forest, front among the tree on either side I caught broken and incoherent whispers in a strong tongue which I partly understood. They seemed to me fragmentary utterances of a monstrous conspiracy against my body and soul. It was now long after nightfall, yet the interminable fruit orchard through which I journeyed was lit with a wan glimmer having no point of diffusion, for in its mysterious lamination nothing cast a shadow. A shallow pool in the guttered depression of an old well met my eye with a crimson gleam. I stooped and plunged my hand into it. It stained by fingers; it was blood! Blood, I then observed, was about me everywhere. The fallen fruit showed blots and splashes of blood. The girds of the orchards were pitted and spattered as with red rain. Defiling the trunks of the trees were broad maculations of crimson, and blood dripped like dew from their foliage. All this I observed with a terror which seemed not incompatible with the fulfillment of a natural expectation. It seemed to me that it was all in expiation of some crime. So frightful was the situation—the mysterious light burned with so silent and awful a menace; the noxious plants, the trees that by common consent are invested with a melancholy or baleful character, so openly in my sight conspired against my peace; from overhead and all about came so audible and startling whispers and the sighs of creatures so obviously not of Earth—that I could endure no longer, and with a great effort to break some malign spell that bound my faculties to silence and inaction, I screamed with the full strength of my lungs! #RandolphHarris 2 of 8
My voice was broken, it seemed, into an infinite multitude of unfamiliar sounds, went babbling and stammering away into the distant reaches of the orchard, died into silence, and all was as before. Despair succeeded hope. Gratitude gave place to curse. As I preceded down the path, sobbing quietly to myself, in the misery of fear, the stern light of the Observational Tower became a tiny speck, yellower but scarcely bigger than some of the stars, which here and there shone between the clouds. Nearly twenty minutes passed, and my fatigue began to change to exhaustion. The overpowering sense of the inevitable pressed upon me. With the weariness came a strange comfort. On, and on I went through the thicket of trees. I knew of my probable presence in the spirit World. The moon, then in her third quarter, pushed out from behind the concealing clouds and shed a pale, soft glitter upon my mansion. My last appeal had been heard. I made it home. About half an hour after getting home, I still felt energized but I began to feel a sensation around my forehead as I have many times since. I suddenly felt weak. I went in and sat at the foot of my bed and passed out. I have never been given to fainting or passing-out spells, but I did not fall asleep—I passed out cold. When I woke up, I had no concept of time. When I woke up, a low, wild peal of laughter broke out at a measuresless distance away, and growing even louder, seemed approaching ever nearer; a soulless, heartless, and unjoyous laugh, like that of loon; a laugh which culminated an unearthly shout close at hand, then died away by slow gradations, as if the accursed being that uttered it had withing over the verge of the World whence it had come. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8
Sitting here in my temple of a house, I felt trapped and compromised, and even terrified. I got a feeling that the presence was still nearby and had not moved. A strange sensation began slowly to take possession of my body and my mind. I could not say which, if any, of my sense were affected; I felt it rather as a consciousness—a mysterious mental assurance of some overpowering presence—some supernatural malevolence different in kind from the invisible existences that swarmed about me, and superior to them in power. I knew that it had uttered that hideous laugh. And now it seemed to be approaching me; from what direction I did not know—dated not conjecture. All my former fears were forgotten and merged in the gigantic terror that now held me in thrall. Powers were traversing my haunted mansion. My senses were heightened as I found myself starting into the sharply dawn face and blank, dead eyes of my own mother, standing white and silent in the garments of the grave! The apparition confronting me—the thing so like, yet so unlike my mother—was horrible! It stirred no lover nor longing in my heart; it came unattended with pleasant memories of a golden past—inspired no sentiment of any kind; all the finer emotions were swallowed up in fear. I turned to turn and run from before it, but my legs were as lead; I was unable to life my feet from the floor. My arms hung helpless at my sides; of my eyes only I retained controlled, and these I dared not remove from the lusterless orbs of the apparition, which I knew was not a soul without a body, but that most dreadful of all existences infesting my haunted mansion—a body without a soul! #RandolphHarris 4 of 8
In its blank state was neither love, nor pity, nor intelligence—nothing to which to address an appeal for mercy. For a time, which seemed so long that the World grew gray with age and sin, and the haunted forest, having fulfilled its purpose in this monstrous culmination of its terrors, vanished out of my consciousness with all its sights and sounds, the apparition stood within a pace, regarding me with a mindless malevolence of wild brute; then thrust its hand forward and sprang upon me with appalling ferocity! The act released my physical energies without an unfettering my will; my mind was still spellbound, but my powerful body was and agile limbs, endowed with a blind, insensate life of their own, resisted stoutly and well. For an instant I seemed to see this unnatural contest between a dead intelligence and a breathing mechanism only as a spectator. Despite my struggles—despite my strength and activity, which seemed wasted in a void, I felt the cold fingers close upon my throat. Brorne backward to the floor, I saw above me the dead and drawn face within a hands breadth of my own. Its eyes were shallow to the point of blankness, and then all was black. Until I awoke, the passage outside my room had been pitch dark. Now the gasoliers illuminated the hall, but the glass was so blackened that they yielded only a dim, murky light. The air was stale and close. Expecting at every turn to find a housemaid awaiting me with a smile, I made my way through the gloom to the landing. The double doors to the gallery stood open. Along each wall, a row of wavering light receded. Transom windows shone with a faint cold light; higher still, the ceiling was shrouded in darkness. Some twenty feet away from me, candles burned upon a small round table, lighting of the face of the pale man and Mrs. Haas. “Ah, there you are, my dear,” said he, just as if he had last seen my five minutes—rather than several days—ago. I moved reluctantly to join them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8
Mrs. Haas, resplendent in crimson silk and displaying a large expanse of white bosom, greeted me with disdain. Behind them, the wall at the far end of my gallery was dominated by the immense fireplace, and the armour towering in the shadows beside it. The sword glittered beneath its gloved hand; in the shifting light it seemed alert, alive, watchful. Within the fireplace was a massive chest of dark metal. “Dr. Cottam was about to tell us,” said Mrs. Haas impatiently, “of a discovery he had made amongst your late husband’s papers.” He spoke as if I had kept them waiting. “Indeed I was.” His tone was as cordial as ever, but with an edge of anticipation. His teeth caught the light as he smiled; the pupils of his eyes shone like twin flames. “Now, in going through his study the other day, I found a page of notes you must have missed after relocating from New Haven—scrawled in haste, and sometimes quite impenetrable—which had slipped behind a row of books.” On the table was a crumpled sheet of paper. “I shall not weary you with the tale of my efforts to decipher this. He believed that if he were inside the armour when lighting struck, he would pass unharmed into the next World, jut as the risen body, according to Scripture, will ascend to Heaven upon the day of judgement.” “Oh dear Heavens,” cried Mrs. Haas. “Mrs. Winchester, I have been dying for a grand tour of your estate. My companion Dr. Cottam is rather a bore with such foolish tales of science fiction!” “There is a theory, you know, that the basis of spirit may be electrical. For spirits to communicate with the living,” expressed Dr. Cottam, the man with the very pale face. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8
“Dr. Cottom, I have begun to wonder whether your obsession with William Winchester is not, perhaps, quite as mad as I assumed,” explained Mrs. Haas, “but I do wish to get on with this tour. Mrs. Winchester has already delayed us several hours after he invitation, and I am growing quit weary.” “Well, Mrs. Haas, as I do recall, Gods are often said to wield lightening; and whilst this represents primitive awe at the power of nature, it may also shroud a genuine intuition. The same applies to the spiritualist practice of linking hands around a table. Ghosts and spirits are generally depicted as emanations of light; one thinks of St. Elmo’s fire or the very rare phenomenon of ball lightning…a far fetched analogy, you may say, but just as a magnetic field will cause a heap of iron filings to arrange themselves into a complex pattern, so the soul, the vital principle—call it what you will—animates the Earthly body. Might it not be that the vital principle is electrical, perhaps in some subtler form that science has not yet grasped?” said Dr. Cottam. “Dr. Cottam, while your theories are very fascinating, I fear Mrs. Haas is growing impatient and I should like to give her a tour now,” I explained. I liked Mrs. Haas more and more every minute. Her gossip, without being ill-natured, was extremely diverting to me, who had been so long out of the great World. I thought what life she would give to my sometimes-lonely evenings at home. There was a ball going on in the Grand Ballroom, this house seemed to run itself sometimes, which would not be over until the morning sun had almost reached the horizon. It pleased the Grand Duke to dance till then, so loyal people could not go away, or think of bed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8
We had just got through a crowded parlor, when Dr. Cottam asked me what had become of Mrs. Haas. I though she had been by his side, and he fancied she was by mine. The fact was, we had lost her. All my efforts to find her were in vain. I feared that she had mistaken, in the confusion of the momentary separation from us, other people for her new friends, and had, possibly, pursued and lost them in the extensive grounds which were thrown open to us. Morning broke. It was clear daylight before I gave up my search. It was not till near two o’clock next day that we heard anything of Mrs. Haas. At about that time a servant knocked at my door, to say that he had been earnestly requested by a young, who appeared to be in great distress, to make out where she could find Mrs. Winchester and Dr. Cottam. There could be no doubt, notwithstanding the slight inaccuracy that my friend had turned up. I had a housemaid go to the guest room and summon Dr. Cottam. I went down to the parlor and reunited with Mrs. Haas. She told me a story to account for having failed to recover us for so long. Very late, she said, she made a detour and wandered around, not before long becoming afraid and getting lost. She got into the Crystal Bedroom in despair of finding us, and had then fallen into a deep sleep which, long as it was, had hardly sufficed to recruit her strength after the fatigues of the ball. It the midst of my perplexities, an anxiety of far more urgent kind presented itself. My dear friend began to lose her looks and health, and that in manner so mysterious, and even horrible, that I became thoroughly frightened. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8
People, since as long ago as the 1800s, have reported a vast array of unexplained events, experiences, and sightings at what is now known as The Winchester Mystery House. Over the years, people have reported bone-chilling sightings ghosts, angels, demons, fairies, giants, orbs, lights, mist, vampires, witches, warlocks and werewolves. In 2007, a man was attending Santa Clara University, and he was lucky enough to get hired as a tour guide at The Winchester Mystery House. He had no sooner moved into his apartment and had the telephone installed when he received a call warning him never to return to Sacramento again. During a later call, a woman with a high-pitched voice informed “G” that he was being kept under surveillance by a group who felt that he had acted unjustly in the past by not returning things to their proper owners. G emphasized that he had led a very quiet life as an undergraduate.
Yet he probably received 30 or more telephone calls from anonymous voices advising him not to return to Sacramento. The voices reprimanded him for having taken something that did not belong to him. G said that he did not carry anything with him that was from Sacramento and did not often visit the beautiful city, and he seldom discussed his life with any but a few of his closet acquaintances. He wondered who could have possibly taken such a long-term interest in him? About the third year after working at The Winchester Mystery House, a guest unknown to him stopped to say hello. G knew that such an act was hardly unusual, since guests will often do this to find out interest facts about tour guides and secrets about Sarah L. Winchester’s mansion. However, he noticed the boy was strangely inquisitive. G was astonished when the teenager drew a design on a piece of paper that he had seen somewhere in the mansion. He smiled at G, then asked if he knew what the symbol meant.
When G pressed the boy, in turn for some answers, the guest threw away the design, laughed, and said that he was just fooling around, that he did not mean anything about it. G never saw the alleged guest again. He descried him to a could of tour guides, but no one was able to identify him. After several years of watching at The Winchester Mystery House, G graduated from University. He had not been in possession of his diploma for more than four days when someone rang his apartment and scolded him for taking things that did not belong to him. The voice told G that he should always leave things where they were. He reported to his supervisors that he kept receiving mysterious calls. On one occasion the voice told G that he has discovered a strange key to other dimensions, but the entities had long since reclaimed it. However, apparently, some spirit masqueraders were determined that he should never forget the day he came into contact with an artifact from another level of being. What is The Winchester Mystery House?
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Los Angeles Will be Two and a Half Hours from Tokyo
Given that burglars are disproportionately young, poor, city-dweller, they tend to have frequent contact with other habitual offenders. There are various structures and processes that go along with the “stolen property system”—the underground market through which in-demand goods are stolen, housed, marketed, and resold on the street of America. Burglary is a crime that is marked by varied levels of social organization. Only on rare occasions do we find burglars who work as loners or within formal organizations. More often, burglars will operate as colleagues—the offender commits the crime along but relies on other members of the criminal subculture to supply him or her with inside information or to assist in converting stolen property into cash. Burglars who take the situation to the next level and enlist help in the actual break-in follow a more peerlike existence. Here, loose partnerships are maintained and invoked when a burglary opportunity presents itself. A primitive example of the peer model would be two or three drug users who randomly stumble upon an unlocked home or unsupervised business and decide to work together to take it down. In some cases, burglary offenders will align themselves in a teamlike format. These offenders invoke a division of labor with each participant serving an owned predetermined role and duties. One person might be assigned to lookout/driver role. Another might serve as the entry specialist, defeating any lock and alarms that are confronted. Still another person can take on the “muscle” role, responsible for doing the heavy lifting. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Socialization scripts play an important part in how and why burglars commit their crimes. Interview-based research suggests that novice or occasional burglars often rely on the tutelage of more seasoned offenders as a way of learning the proverbial ropes of burglary. Novices receive advice and instructions on issues such as target selection, how to foster informants, how to defeat burglary countermeasures, and how to best convert stolen goods into cash. This socialization generally takes shape as informal street corner conversations or jailhouse bravado. On paper, burglary appears to receive serious treatment from the criminal justice system. The Model Penal Code classifies burglary as a felony in the third degree. In most jurisdictions, such as offense is subject to 1 to 5 years in prison. If the burglar is armed or threatens or inflicts bodily harm on another while unlawfully within a dwelling, that individual might see the charges elevated to second degree felony. In practice, however, burglary receives mixed levels of formal response from the various components of the criminal justice system. First, let us consider the response of law enforcement authorities. Police agencies were able to effect an arrest for only 13 percent of the nearly 2.1 million burglaries that were reported to them in 2022. No other form of index crime yields such a dismal clearance rate. Some of this slippage can be attributed to the covert nature of the crime—police often have no witnesses and minimal clues to guide the investigation. However, these low clearance rates are also impacted by the fact that many police officers and police agencies afford a low priority to burglary cases. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Court data reveal a different trend in terms of the veracity with which burglary cases are adjudicated. U.S.A. courts produced nearly 90,000 felony burglary cases in 2022. This figure represents 10 percent of all felony convictions that year. In fact, 68 percent of the burglary cases that were tried resulted in a conviction for the same offense and only 24 percent avoided some sort of conviction. The researchers found that burglary defendants do not receive a reprieve from the courts when it comes time for sentencing. A full 74 percent of the convicted burglars were sentenced to time behind bars. This rate was surpassed only by murder, robbery, drug trafficking, and driving-related offenses. While the median prison sentence for a convicted burglar was 41 months, nearly 10 percent received sentences in excess of 10 years. Our correctional system does not appear to be particularly forgiving to persons who are convicted of burglary. On average, burglary offenders can expect to serve almost half of their sentence—roughly two years. These time-served figures are on par with those of other property offenses (theft, fraud, and motor vehicle theft) but somewhat lower than that observed for violent (54 percent) and weapon-related offenses (60 percent). Accounts from known burglars clearly suggest that informal social control efforts go as long way to deter and/or displace burglary activity. A minimal amount of vigilance on the part of homeowners can go a long way. Measures designed to combat the relatively small population of high incidence “professional” burglars tends to overemphasize the skill and determination of most burglars. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Burglaries are expensive, complex, and require long term commitment at many levels. In fact, most burglars are young, unskilled, and opportunistic. This suggests that emphasis should be directed at such factors as surveillability, occupancy, and accessibility. More specifically, dogs, good locks, and alarm systems deter most burglars. Community-level informal social control can also play an important role in burglary prevention. When it comes to surveillability cues, burglars tend to avoid neighborhoods with a lot of foot traffic or active neighborhood watches. This implies that observant or even nosy neighbors can have a measurable impact on burglary. However, these types of collective efforts are difficult to enact and maintain in the areas that burglars most prefer—urban neighborhoods. If nothing else, tenants of “crime prevention through environmental design” should be considered at a neighborhood level. Simple environmental characteristics such as cul-de-sac street design, high levels of lightening, and well pruned landscaping that minimizes unobservable entry and exit points can have a significant impact on burglary victimization levels in a given community. The aforementioned informal social control efforts represent examples of target hardening strategies aimed at deterring would-be burglars from victimizing a given house or displacing offenders from a given community. Also, measures should be designed that aim to undermine offenders’ strong attachment to street culture. Expanded employment opportunities are one possible, but foreboding avenue to lure offenders out of street life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
There exist even more simple and realistic measures that might effect change in this area. For example, a coordinated burglary prevention program that was implemented in a midsize U.S.A. city during the early 1980s. Community activism and community involvement (id est, block meetings, neighborhood cleanups, and raised awareness of vulnerabilities and potential offenders) showed promise for reducing burglary. If community members care about the condition of their neighborhood and are willing to take steps to clean it up and exercise vigilance over problem people and places, there is hope for reducing burglary and other forms of street crime. Most crime occurs during the nighttime. A close examination of NCVS and UCR data suggests that 50 percent to 60 percent of all residential burglaries go unreported. The figure reported here was derived by adding the NCVS data on residential burglaries to an adjusted estimate of nonresidential burglaries that were reported in the UCR—one that factors a 60 percent nonreporting rate. These data must be viewed with caution because 50 to 60 percent of all burglaries go unreported to police and only 14 percent of these lead to arrest. Over time, the crime of burglary has slowly slipped down the list of crime fighting priorities. At present, less than half of all burglaries get reported to police, and only 13 percent of those result in an arrest. What kinds of social and legal factors have contributed to this present level of empathy when it comes to the formal and informal society control of burglary? #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Adjudication data suggest that accused burglars face a high certainty of being convicted and sentenced to prison. This should send a message to police that burglary is a high priority for our nation’s prosecutors and judges. Still, burglary investigation and arrest efforts remain lukewarm at best. What kinds of factors contribute to police officers’ attitudes and behaviors regarding burglary patrol and enforcement? Considerable evidence suggests that burglars refine strategies and cues that help them identify soft and potentially lucrative targets. Does this mean that burglars are more rational and planful than other types of criminals? The Lord has declared that “no unclean thing can inherit the kingdom of Heaven,” reports Alma 11.37. Our sins make us unclean—unworthy to return and dwell in the presence of our Heavenly Father. They also bring anguish to our soul in this life. Repentance is sometimes a painful process, but it leads to forgiveness and lasting peace. The power of sin is great. To become free from it, we must turn to your Heavenly Father, pray in faith, and act as He asks us to. The Holy Spirit should never become the center and object of thought and worship, place which He Himself does not desire, and which it is not the purpose of the Father in Heaven that He should have or occupy. “He shall not speak from Himself,” reports John 16.13, said that Lod Jesus before Calvary, as He foretold the Spirit’s coming at Pentecost. He would act as Teacher (John 14.26), but teaching the words of Another, not to Himself (John 15.26); He would only glorify Another, not His own; He would bear witness to Another, not Himself (John 16.14); He would only speak what was given Him to spear by Another (John 16.13). #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The Spirit’s entire work would be to lead souls into union with the Son and give proper knowledge of the Father in Heaven, while He Himself directed and worked in the background. If a man who is untaught in the scriptural statements about the work of the Triune God makes “obeying the Spirit” his supreme purpose, the deceiver will aim to counterfeit the guidance of the Spirit, and even the presence of the Spirit Himself. It is just here that the ignorance of the seeker about the spiritual Word now opened to one, the working of evil powers in that realm, and the conditions upon which God works in and through one, gives the enemy his opportunity. It becomes the time of greatest peril for anyone unless one is instructed and prepared by the Lord, as the disciples were for three whole years. The danger lies in the area of supernatural “guidance,” for one must know the conditions of cooperation with the Holy Spirit in order to discern the cooperation with the Holy Spirit in order to discern the will of God and be able to recognize counterfeit manifestations. The “discerning of spirits” is required to detect the workings of the false angel of light, for he is able to bring about counterfeit gifts of prophecy, tongues, healing, and other spiritual experiences connected with the work of the Holy Ghost. Those who have their eyes opened to the opposing forces of the metaphysical realm understand that very few believers can guarantee that they are obeying God and God only, in directly supernatural guidance, because there are so many factors liable to intervene, such as the believer’s own mind, spirit, or will and the deceptive intrusion of the powers of darkness. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Knowledge is essential here. Scripture teaches that there is a God-given gift of “discerning of spirits” (1 Cor. 12.10) which enables one to detect that an unwelcome spirit is at work, but there is also a test of spirits which is doctrinal (1 John 4.1-6). In the former, a believer can discern in his spirit that lying spirits are at work in a meeting, or in a person, but one may not have the understanding needed for testing the doctrines being set forth by the teacher. One needs a level of knowledge in both cases: knowledge to read one’s spirit with assurance in the face of all contrary appearances, that the supernatural workings are not “of God,” and knowledge to detect the subtlety of “teachings” bearing certain infallible indications that they emanate from the pit, even while appearing to be from God. As to personal obedience to God, the believer can detect whether or not one is obeying God in some “command” by judging its fruits, and by being aware of the character of God—such as the truth that God has always a purpose in His commands, and He will give no command out of harmony with His character and Word. Often times people wait for something to happen, for some sure way to nurture oneself, to live from within. Music, art, poetry, hot baths, savory foods, wind, rain—nothing affects them. In the past, within days after a solitary retreat, many had found solace and strength in their loneliness. They had always found a way, at least a beginning that would lead to action and to life with others. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
However, it is impossible to find what one is looking for, and one is still on a lonely journey, waiting from a spark from within. Because some people feel empty and eroded inside, they avoid all significant communication. More than anything else the interpersonal aspects of living exhaust some and move them to withdraw from real meetings with others. This leaves an individual certain that one does not want to struggle anymore. Doubt, risk and anxiety—inherent elements of faith—can be overcome only by another of its elements, courage. Courage is an ontological concept, the self-affirmation of being in spite of non-being. Faith is the experience of the holy; it is the state of being grasped by the power of being-itself. From this experience flows the power to assert oneself in the face of anxiety. Faith is participation in the object of faith, and yet is the separation from it. In spite of separation, courage expresses participation in the power of being and meaning. This in spite of element is the courage that takes all doubt, risk, and anxiety into itself and overcomes them without removing them. Faith, then, is the basis of courage, and courage is the manifestation of faith. In the extreme situation of a person seized by radical doubt and confronted with the specter of universal meaninglessness, the question arises: Is there such a thing as the courage of despair? Such a courage is entirely possible, for that act of accepting meaninglessness is in itself a meaningful act. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The courage of despair enables one, even while in the grip of meaninglessness, to declare one’s situation, and this declaration has meaning. In other words, there cannot be an infinite regression of negatives—in this case, negativity of meaning. At least, one has to admit, negation of meaning is meaningful, or meaninglessness will have lost all meaning. The faith which feeds the courage of despair is called “absolute faith,” for it can have no specific content. Its content is indefinable, since everything defined is dissolved by doubt and meaninglessness. However, certain elements that constitute absolute faith can be discerned. There is an experience of the power of being in the face of nonbeing, an awareness of a hidden meaning within the destruction of meaning. There is the dependence of nonbeing upon being, of meaninglessness upon meaning, of the negative upon the positive. And, lastly, there is the acceptance of the power to accept meaninglessness. Thus, absolute faith is faith which has been deprived by doubt of any concrete content, which nevertheless is faith and the source of the most paradoxical manifestation of the courage to be. Faith is without a special content, yet it is not without content. The content of absolute faith is the “God above God.” When people speak of God, they usually refer to the God of theism. Now theism can mean either a vague, unspecified affirmation of God, or a divine-human encounter of persons, or theological theism which makes God a being beside other beings. However, the God of absolute faith is above and beyond the God of any theism, for the God above God is the power of absolute faith as experience of the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The morning traffic from Oakland to San Francisco across the Bay Bridge gets backed up from 7.30 to 11.00 A.M. Until the jam clears at 11.00, each additional car that enters the traffic makes all those who come later wait just a little longer. The right way to measure this cost is to sum up the additional waiting-times across everyone who is delayed. What is the total waiting-time cost imposed by one additional car that crosses the bridge at 9.00 A.M.? You may be thinking you do not know enough information. A remarkable feature to this problem is that the externality can be calculated based on the little amount you have been told. You do not need to know how long it takes the cars to cross the toll plaza, nor the distribution of cars that arrive after 9.00. The answer is that same whether the length of the traffic jam stays constant or varies widely until it cleans. The trick is to see that all that matters is the sum of the waiting time. We are not concerned with who waits. (In other circumstances, we might want to weigh the waiting times by the monetary value of time for those caught in the jam.) The simplest way to figure out the total extra waiting time is to shuffle around who waits, putting all the burden on one person. Imagine that the extra driver, instead of crossing the bridge at 9.00 A.M., pulls his car over to the side and lets all the other drivers pass. If he passes up his turn in this way, the other drivers are no longer delayed by the extra car. Of course, he has to wait two hours before the traffic clears and the road is clear. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
However, these two hours exactly equal the total waiting time imposed on all the other drivers if he were to cross the bridge rather than wait on the sidelines. The reason is straightforward. The total waiting time is the time it takes for everyone to cross the bridge. Any solution that involves everyone crossing the bridge gives the same total waiting time, but distributed differently. Looking at the solution in which the extra car does all the extra waiting is the easiest way to add up the new total waiting time. Looming on the horizon is a dangerous de-coupling of the fast economies from the slow, an event that would spark enormous power shifts throughout the so-called South-with big impacts on the planet as a whole. The new wealth-creation system holds the possibility of a far better future for vast populations who are now among the planet’s poor. Unless the leaders of the less developed countries (LCDs) anticipate these changes, however, they will condemn their people to perpetuated misery—and themselves to impotence. For even as Chinese manufacturers wait for their steel, and traditional economies around the World to crawl slowly through their paces, the United States of America, Japan, Europe, and in this case the Soviets, too, are pressing forward with plans to build hypersonic jets capable of moving 250 tons of people and cargo at Mach 5, meaning that cities like New York, Sydney, London, and Los Angeles will be two and a half hours from Tokyo. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Jiro Tokuyama, former head of the prestigious Nomura Research Institute, and now a senior adviser to the Mitsui Research Institute, heads a fifteen-nation study of what are called the “three T’s:” telecommunications, transportation, and tourism. Sponsored by the Pacific Economic Cooperation Conference, the study focuses on three key factors likely to accelerate the pace of economic processes in the region still further. According to Tokuyama, Pacific air-passenger traffic is likely to reach 134 million…at the turn of the century. The Society of Japanese Aerospace Companies, Tokuyama adds, estimates that five hundred to one thousand hypersonic jets must be built. Many of these will ply Pacific routes, speeding further the economic development of the region, and promoting faster telecommunications as well. In a paper prepared for the Three T’s study, Tokuyama spells out the commercial, social, and political implications of this development. He also describes a proposal by Taisei, the Japanese construction firm, to build an artificial island five kilometers in length to serve as a “VAA,” or “value added airport,” capable of handling hypersonics and providing an interactional conference center, shops, and other facilities to be linked by high-speed linear trains to a densely populated area. In Texas, meanwhile, billionaire H. Ross Perot is building an airport to be surrounded by advanced manufacturing facilities. As conceived by him, planes could roar in a day and night bearing components for overnight processing or assembly in facilities at the airport. The next morning the jets would carry them to all parts of the World. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Simultaneously, on the telecommunications front, the advanced economies are investing billions in the electronic infrastructure essential to operations in the super-fast economy. The spread of extra-intelligence nets is moving swiftly, and there are now proposals afoot to create special higher-speed fiber optic networks linking supercomputer all across the United States of America with thousands of laboratories and research groups. (Existing networks are regarded as too slow. The proposed new nets would send 319 Terabits per second streaming across the country). The new network is needed because the existing slower nets are already choked and overloaded. They argue that the project merits government backing because it would help the United States of America keep ahead of Europe and Japan in a field it now leads. This, however, is only a special case of a more general clamor. In the words of Mitch Kapor, a founder of Lotus Development Corporation, the software giant, “We need to build a national infrastructure that will be the information equivalent of the national highway-building of the ‘50s and ‘60s.” An even more appropriate analogy would compare today’s computerized telecom infrastructures with the rail and road networks needed at the beginning of the industrial revolution. What is happening, therefore, is the emergence of an electronic neural system for the economy—without which any nation, no matter how many smokestacks it has, will be domed to backwardness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
In its commercial service trade, in 2021, India trade balance for 2021 USD$-79.19, a 665.96 percent increase from 2020. The United States of America is the largest services exporter in the World. In 2019, U.S.A. exports of service were USD $875.8 billion, up 1.6 percent (USD $13 billion) from 2018. U.S.A. exports of services account for 35 percent of over all U.S.A. exports in 2019. Germany World Development Indicators (WDI) 2020: trade balance in USD$221,534 million. Trade services as a percentage of GDP is 5.82 percent. Trade in services with the United Kingdom (exports and imports) totaled an estimated USD $140.7 billion in 2019. Services exports were USD $78.3 billion; services imports were USD $62.3 billion. The U.S.A. services trade surplus with United Kingdom was USD $16.0 billion in 2019. Trade in services with China (exports and imports) totaled an estimated $56.0 billion in 2020. Services exports were USD $40.4 billion; services imports were USD $15.6 billion. The U.S.A. service trade surplus with China was USD $24.8 billion in 2020. Trade in services with Japan (exports and imports) totaled an estimated USD $68.6 billion in 2020. Services exports were USD $38.0 billion; services imports were USD $30.6 billion. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The U.S.A. services trade surplus with Japan was USD $7.4 billion in 2020. Japan was the United States of Americas’ 4th largest goods export market in 2020. As for the services, France exported around USD $303 billion worth of services in 2021, while it imported services for the total value of USD $258.3 billion. Service trade in Italy in 2020, Italy exported $73.1B worth of services. The outsized U.S.A.-Ireland commercial relationship, which exceeded USD $1 trillion in 2021 is significant by international standards and is particularly impressive relative to the country’s population of five million people. In 2021, U.S.A. good exported to Ireland exceeded USD $13.8 billion. The statistics for services from 2012 record the value of U.S.A. service exports to Ireland at $74.8 billion. In 2021, global services exports were valued at USD $6.1 trillion, representing 6.3 percent of total World trade in both goods and services. Overall, as far as the nations’ trade balances are concerned, the picture in the services sector is almost the opposite of the one in the merchandise trade. In services, the West has a significant competitive edge versus China and is in a good position to establish a much wider presence in the Chinese market. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Hypnotized, Mesmerized by What My Eyes Have Seen?
Hostility—Probably the most common expression of aggression, ranging from mildly edgy to snarling. Being on the receiving end of hostility can be not only very unpleasant but also sometimes scary, because we know that whoever is delivering it has us in their sights and out of their heart, with attack weaponry ready for reloading. The majority of gang rapes by students are women. This behavior simply cannot be understood—although the volumes of commentary and analysis generated about the Central Park gang rape case in the Spring of 1989 have attempted to do so—without consideration of the perpetrators’ attitudes toward women and of women’s roles in the society and subcultures in which group sexual assaults are practiced and tolerated. A large number of recent studies of college students have identified the relationship between traditional sex-role attitudes to be more strongly correlated than antisocial personality with tolerance to rape. Traditional gender-role orientation are associated with rape-tolerant attitudes, and traditional attitudes toward female sexuality are associated with higher levels of sexual aggression. Some fraternity men are seen as more sexually aggressive than other college men and this may be due to a combination of reasons such as fraternities that are investigated are disproportionately ones with aggressive sex-role attitudes and socialization. For example, 156 tribal societies are been discovered and classified as rape-free or rape-prone. Most of the rape-probe cultures have prescriptions for gang rape, rather than individual rape. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Fraternities can be described as tribal societies as they form their own culture and associate with their own people. One cultural characteristic that was strongly associated with the prevalence of rape was having special places for men and special places for women. Among many fraternities and sororities, for example, each college campus (village) has a men’s house, where all the men live together; women and children live in separate dwellings. Thus, it is postulated here that group sexual assaults are most likely to occur in sex-segregated men’s housing or college campuses. Perhaps recognition of this patterned was formulated by democrats who want to do away with gender segregation and make it seem like requiring admission of women to fraternities will reduce aggressive and antisocial behavior. However, men should be able to have boys clubs, boys sports, which are allowed to remain segregated. If someone wants sports and clubs to have coed admission, perhaps they should form another society. Some parents do not want their boys to be distracted by hanging out with females. They would rather have them learn to socialize with other men, focus on their studies and work, and occasionally have coed parties. What should be done to reduce aggression and inform students of what rape is needs to be accomplished through education and keeping students from binge drinking by teaching them their limit. All we can do is provide people with better educations, but we cannot prohibit everything, nor change everything. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
In rape prone societies, the genders are separated not only physically but also by rigid gender-role differentiation in which the male role is more valued. Thus, we might expect gang rapes to be most common among men who not only live apart from women but also perform roles closed to women (exempli gratia, football players and fraternity members). Allowing men to become cheerleaders is seen as welcomed because they are able to help the women highlight their skills and talent, but it is still a female dominated sport. Many people would actually like to see more cheerleaders perform on campus and on TV because dance has become so advance these days that it is impressive. Also, the traditional looking men and women, in their respective uniforms, is a sign of assimilation, which people from the old World like because it looks neat, much like the cookie-cutter houses in the suburbs. People like clean lines and organization. Nonetheless, in rape prone societies, which are sometimes labeled as male-dominated, a woman’s violation of her prescribed gender role may be punished by rape or the threat of rape. One of these prescriptions is that women are supposed to be sexually naïve and inexperienced. Gang rape is a punishment for promiscuity and can be seen as means of controlling women’s sexuality. Adulterous or promiscuous women are punished with gang in some cultures. Cultures believe they much discipline female receptivity to maintain the family structure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
However, one of our goals in society should be to teach men and women to have more respect with each other. It has been noted that men who grow up around women and are taken in by them and seen as an individual, tend to have more respect for women, and are less likely to be interested in them sexually, even if they are heterosexual. The idea in our culture is that all boys and men should be taught to respect women and ask themselves, how would they want someone to treat their mother, daughter or sister in that particular situation in which they find themselves in. And women should also ask themselves the same questions when it comes to dealing with men. How would they want someone to treat their brother, son, or father. We have to go from this thesis that these are the end of days and the World is a wild and out of control savage land and understand that we are not savages and can do better. We have to live in accordance with God’s rules and laws and treat others as we would want to be treated. Nonetheless, male student attempted to explain to me why a woman who charged several football players with rape and assault had not in fact been raped. Hi explanation was that, by dating two of the men who were close friend and having sex with each, she had hurt their feelings. They were angry at her for being sexually indiscriminate and, joined by other players, “ganged up” on her in revenge when she came to visit. The norm is that women are supposed to be sexually selective. If they are not, they may be “fair game,” or worse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
However, we are a society that is very advance and we have words. Perhaps we need to teach our children what rape is, how to avoid it, and to learn to communicate with each other when their feelings are hurt, instead of acting like heathens and assaulting people or damaging property. You also have to understand that while a man or a woman may flirt with you, even to the point of rolling around in your bed with you, that is they say “Stop!” that they may not be ready to have sex. They may want to wait or may need to attend to hygiene matters and will be more willing at another time. In the 1970s, women would say things like, “Let me go powder my nose” or “Let me freshen up a bit.” Those phrases may be safe ways of saying stop or giving one a chance to actually freshen up and may be accept by a man better than a hard “No!” or “Stop!” That way, he may not get angry or feel rejected, and it could give one a chance to escape a dangerous situation. A student at another college told me of plans his fraternity made for “running a train.” The woman was selected weeks in advance. They believed she was sexually promiscuous and therefore would not “mind.” If a young unmarried women in some societies takes a lover, she is supposed to be available to all men. If she refuses, she will be gang raped. Therefore, also have an idea about the type of person you are getting involved with, get to know them and their culture. They may not be the right one for you. Characteristics of gang-rape victims—the mean age of the victim in the 24 cases of campus gang rapes discussed in this view was 18; usually they were first-year students who were inexperienced with campus life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Victims of group assaults b acquaintances at fraternities and men’s dorms tend to have to characteristics: They are naïve, but they have somehow gained a reputation among the men for being promiscuous. A “perfect victim,” from that point of view, was the complaining witness in a Sacramento State case. At the age of 21, he was divorcing the man she had dated from the age of 15; she had been at the university for a few weeks. To the 18- and 19-year-old men she accused, she seemed a racy character. Not only was she older and a divorcee, but also she had sneaked into the men’s form on prior occasion. One mad told the other, as they rode a bus to a football game that she looked like a “fourth of July slut,” and that he had had sex with her that first evening, within hours of meeting her. (She denied it.) Generally, women who habitually socialize with a group of men, and therefore are more often available to them, are no more likely to be victims of a group sexual assault than social outsiders are. The reason seems to be that social insiders are cognizant of the group mores. Sorority women learn from their sisters what different behaviours “mean” within the system. For example, they learn not to go upstairs to the bathroom at a fraternity party unless accompanied by another woman and that getting drunk is taken by the men as a signal of availability. Also, many of these men may be drunk and have no idea what they are doing. They could be in the “blackout” state and not even realize it. Women who are not part of the same social set as the men may be ignorant of the rules. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Consequently, they miscommunicate their intentions by violating the norms or may unknowingly take risks, and become target of sexual assault. Despite their knowledge of these rules, several of the victims in the 24 case were girlfriends or long-term friends of the perpetrator who were lulled into trust, thought they were protected in violating the rules, and found themselves betrayed. The measures being taken on college campuses to reduce the frequency of sexual assault may not ameliorate the problem of acquaintance gang rapes. Such measures include having separate forms for men and women, restricting visitation, and having better campus lighting. These policies and practices admittedly re designed to prevent sexual interactions among college students altogether or are orientated toward reducing the incidence of stranger rape. The cultural and attitudinal correlates of group sexual assault and the conditions under which campus gang rapes have occurred demonstrate that restricted access between the genders have occurred demonstrate that restricted access between the genders will not remedy the problem. Profound attitude change is necessary. With a few notable exceptions, educational efforts to reduce rape are primarily directed at or attended by college women rather than men. Although such education may help women to recognize when they have been raped, it will be less effective in reducing group assault than would educating those who have a choice about engaging in it. Prevention must begin with education of young men, particularly those who belong to male groups. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Attitude change in two areas will be necessary for men in groups to desist from joining in sexual assaults. The first such needed change is in attitudes toward women and understanding of women’s sexuality. It seems to be particularly important to convey that a woman who chooses to be sexual, perhaps with several different individuals, is still sexually selective and is not available to the population at large. Also, women should be allowed to dress sexy without being seen as whores of sluts. It is a misconception common among society that any woman who dresses or behaves “provocatively” is thought to be directing her seduction at all men who happen to see her and not at a particular men. Some people who dress provocatively are only doing so as a means of seeing how attractive they are or because they really like the fashion trends and want to be on the cutting edge of high fashion. For some women, dressing sexy boosts their self-esteem, not because of the attention they get, but because it makes them feel better about themselves. Wear as wearing baggy jeans, sneakers, messy hair and a sweatshirt every day might depress them because that is not what they consider attractive. It does not mean she is inviting you to harass her, that is just how she likes to look and she has every right to. An even more difficult area of change that would effectively reduce sexual assault is men’s attitudes toward themselves and their own sexuality. It is instructive to consider how men involved in group sexual assaults or “trains” may differ from those who find the practice unappealing and would not participate. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
My interviews have yielded two characteristic attitudes of men who are repulsed by the notion. They feel that sex is private (they reject sex as an arena for “cooperation and competition”); and they feel tht sex is intimate (they reject sex without caring about their partner). Although attitude change at the individual level might reduce the campus acquaintance rape rate, it does not address the problem of group norms and group pressure. Yet, attempts to educate the groups as such will probably succeed only when the perspective presented is endorsed by highly regarded group members. In the absence of such leadership, an alternative is to diminish group cohesion and decrease opportunities for group assaults by dispersing members throughout campus residences. Comparing practical strategies, breaking up male groups would probably be more effective in reducing group assault than attempting to keep women out of men’s dorms, but it also could cause men to drop out or not enroll in college. Kids from wealthy families may simply go work for their parents after high school and universities would lose out on a lot of funding and they may start downsizing and shutting down. The anti-hero exhibits some of the qualities associated with the villain, ranging from brutality to cynicism to an apparent lack of empathy, yet is capable of taking heroic action, albeit in a far less glamorous or admirable way than the hero. The anti-he is a shadow-infused hero, a tortured rebel, brooding visionary, a morally complex revolutionary, a deeply flawed doer of good alone with considerable damage. The anti-hero is messy. Our darkness unleased with just enough light and care, seizing our attention and perhaps also our begrudging admiration. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
As an example of the utility of the situational view, consider this. In mental hospitals, we usually find that behavior is tolerated which would cause witnesses great anxiety on the outside. In fact, patients are often employed within the hospital community in the most exacting of tasks for persons of their socioeconomic status, even while exhibiting the most garish situational improprieties. This functioning is called “a good hospital adjustment,” and the apparent capacity of these patients tend to be attributed to the “protectiveness” of the hospital environment, an explanation that allows everyone to go on thinking of the patient as sick. Upon examination, however, we find that a basic way in which social life on the inside differs from that on the outside is that insiders are persons whose threat to the situational order has been beautifully met by according them the status, with its accompanying incarcerations and stigmatization, of hospitalized mental patients. There is no need to sanction negatively each infraction because the very setting in which these infractions occur is, in itself, a continuous negative sanction. The infraction is something that has been paid for in advance. What was dangerously offensive to the public weal on the outside is an unimportant thing on the inside. The patient who actually come to like the hospital life may do so partly for this very reason. Being thoroughly accused of insanity, they need not fear the profound humiliation and embarrassment which often follows when this accusation is made by previously unsuspecting people. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A situational analysis, then, suggest some alternatives to the psychiatric view, but in so doing points up the social functions of the medical model. Psychiatry and mental hospitalization in part can serve as the therapy that our society gives to its threatened proprieties. However, this is, alas, a costly cure, one part of which is grimly borne by the state, and one part by the offender. There remains at least one serious question. Granted that symptoms of mental disorder are often instances of situational impropriety, it cannot be because of this (it is argued) that psychiatry is concerned, because there are other situational offenses and situational licenses with which it is not concerned. Insolence, contempt, indifference, presumption—all are qualities expressed through situational impropriety, and yet it is appreciated that persons expressing these qualities need not be sick. Similarly, men at conventions may indulge in all kinds of antics; but no one would automatically claim that such persons were insane. So, too, there have been notable aristocratic eccentrics who have affronted many proprieties and in spite of this escaped the charge of insanity. “Given the situation,” one would say, all of these antics are understandable and perfectly consistent with mental health. A problem here is the term “situation,” for in this context is has a special meaning. The situation’s gathering, as used in this report, is affronted in many of these cases. However, the social circumstances of the offender are such as to render one immune to penalization. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Whether we deal with one offender or with a group of them indulging jointly in the same offensive practice is not the issue; the question is whether the offender is in a position to commit situational offenses. Society, indeed, might get hopelessly clogged without such deviation. A mental symptom, however, is a situational offense that the offender does not get away with; one is in a position neither to force others to accept the affront nor to convince them that other explanatory grounds ought to be accepted. Situational requirements are of a moral character: the individual is obliged to maintain them; one is expected to desire to do so; and if one fails, some kind of public cognizance is taken of one’s failure. However, once this character of situational obligations is granted, we must see that a study of them leads off in may different directions. We may expect to find many different motives for complying with them, many different reasons for breaking them, many different ways of concealing or excusing infractions, many different ways of dealing with offenders. We may also expect to find that rules maintained or broken before one audience will not be handled in the same way by the same person when one is before another audience. And, of course, we find that an involvement ruling upheld in one community will not be honored in the next. One theme of this study, then, is that a moral rule is not something that can be used as a means of dichotomizing the World into upholders and offenders. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Indeed, the more comparative information we gather about a moral rule, the less easy it becomes to make statements about an individual who breaks it. Certainly we should hesitate to accept without further evidence the common-sense and psychiatric view that there is a unique class of situational offense that requires the student to shift from the social plane to a special one bearing on the profoundest aspects of the personality. If, then, we see inmates of mental hospitals as individuals who infringe involvement rules, and if we obtain a more sophisticated view of these rules, it will be possible to question somewhat the hard-earned conception that inmates necessarily are “sick persons.” Even a loosely defined social gathering is still a tight little room; there are more doors leading out of it and more psychologically normal reasons for stepping though them than are dreamt of by those who are always loyal to situational society. The regulation of communication conduct is not all there is to public order, but certainly this regulation is important enough to consider on its own, with concepts tailored to its particular demands. A special concern is that the symptomatology of the “mentally ill” may sometimes have more to do with the structure of public order than with the nature of disordered minds. By virtue of being in a social situation that is itself lodged within a social occasion, individuals modify their conduct in many normatively guides ways. The persons present to one another are thus transformed from a mere aggregate into a little society, a little group, a little deposit of social organization. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Similarly, the modifications in their behaviour which they suffer by virtue of finding themselves in a particular social situation—their enactment of situational proprieties—constitute, when taken together, a little social system. May I repeat: when in the presence of others, the individual is guided by a special set of rules, which have here been called situation properties. Upon examination, these rules prove to govern the allocation of the individual’s involvement within the situation, as expressed through a conventionalized idiom of behavioural cues. This allocation entails appropriate handling of matters we can discern as occasioned main involvements, “aways,” occult involvements, auto-involvements, mutual-involvements, margin of disinvolvement, and so forth. The enemy is a deceiver, and as a deceiver one will work and prevail in the later times. “Success” or “defeat” is no criterion of a work being of God or Satan. To some Satan is an anti-hero, he is not the Anti-Christ. The Anti-Christ is opposite of God. There could be an entity, other than Satan, who is by far darker and more destructive. Recall, Satan was the bringer of light and has some evil qualities. Nonetheless, calvary stands forever as the revelation of God’s way in working out His redemptive purposes. Satan work for time, for he knows his time is short, but God works for eternity. Through death to life, through defeat to triumph, through suffering to joy—this is God’s way. Knowledge of truth is the primary safeguard against deception. The “elect” must know, and they must learn to test and “prove the spirits” until they do know what is of God and what is of Satan. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
The words of the Master, “Take heed, I have told you,” plainly imply that personal knowledge of danger is part of the Lord’s way of guarding His own. Those who blindly rely upon “the keeping power of God” without seeking to understand how to escape deception, when forewarned to “take heed” by the Lord, will surely find themselves entrapped by the subtle foe. Mechanical decisions and mechanical actions always contradict the methods of the work, and harm your work and your position in the work. If you cannot decide yourself what is more important and which way to choose, you must ask me. If you are seriously in the work and want to be in the work, you must not make any decision which may affect your life without first asking my opinion. Your own decisions in serious cases are bound to be based on self-will. However, you cannot ask my opinion or my decision when your decision is already made and you have already begun to act on the basis of it, because that means self-will in action, and in such a case it I too late to ask me. Questions as to my opinion and my decision when your decisions are already made, are really manifestations on insincerity with yourself and attempts to deceive me by false pretences. Try to realize that mechanical actions and mechanical decisions are always based on considerations outside the work (even if you persuade yourself that the result will be useful for your work), considerations of pleasure, of convenience or comfort; or they result from negative emotions or imagination. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
If you are in the work and wish to be in the work, try to understand the most mechanical manifestation is lying to me or suppressing the truth for me. Demand for complete truth does not refer to people only beginning to work with me. They must make long preliminary work on mind and consciousness before complete truth becomes necessary and obligatory. However, when they realize the necessity for personal help, and when I find that they are ready and can help them, the principle of complete truth becomes obligatory. And it is certainly obligatory for all people who have been in the work for five years and also for some who have been in the work much less but have already formulated their aim. Remember that your chief work mut be on self-will. One begins to give up one’s self-will by accepting rules, but one must be sincere about it. Later one must give up one’s self-will in all serious matters and accept another person’s will, in this case, mine. Only by doing this, and doing it with full understanding of the necessity for doing so, one will begin to acquire slowly one’s own will. Really, the very act of giving up one’s self-will is the first act and the first manifestation of real will. The four lines of work on oneself can be designated: intellectual work—preparation; work on consciousness—aim; work on emotions—means, energy; work on will—control, and also energy. There can be discovered a beautiful insight into the human soul. One must become aware of the loneliness we experience as human beings. The truth is that no one can actually experience the deep emotions another person feels. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
When one is forced to search further within oneself and accept the feelings one has repressed and refused to remember, the truly disturbing memories will be revealed. One can then think about one’s illness in terms of something real that has occurred in one’s life. When reliving all the memories that had been previously buried, it will release a tremendous need to relate to how one feels. You may not even want to suppress your thoughts any longer because they are so very real and need to be communicated to someone. When another person becomes a significant part in your self-awareness and helps you to become more of a real person, this can make one want to express one’s feelings to you. Only one knows the torment of one’s pain and somehow is able to endure it. No one else can feel the terror you hide deep in yourself. People need to speak to you, love you, and attempt to experience your distress. Violent convulsions and pangs are attached to the soul and medication may only provide temporary calm. A person’s eyes can reveal one’s agonies. And when people gaze into a tortured person’s eyes, the heartache the see and feel can sometimes only be described through tears. Sometimes we can only respond to one who has been hurt in the depths of their heart and to the bottom of their soul with love, our heart, and by sending our sweet soul to them. We want so desperately to help other, but sometimes there is so little we can do to eliminate their despair. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
The process in which the diseases of violence and hate destroys a victim’s mind and body is heartbreaking. One’s body may become completely rigid, the head may lean backwards creating a sort of backward arc. It is in this rigid state that the body becomes so strained that one is in the most pain they have endure physically and emotionally. To the victim, this can be terrifying, and those who care are unable to part from the victim’s side. Thankfully, the hospital staff and the doctors are often warm and understanding because sometimes only bedside manner is what keeps people alive. However, even medical staff are unable to restrain from becoming emotionally distressed when observing the terrible pain. Words cannot adequately describe how empathy and compassion can save a life. Each stage of a victim’s degeneration is hard to endure. The high fevers, bleeding, weakness. The best thing that can be done in these cases is praying to God to let the torment cease and that He allows the victim to find his or her peace. Payers may not be answered for what seems like an eternity. Every part of one who loves you can feel your pain; their hearts, their body, their very soul wants to help the victim, to somehow make one aware of how you know they are suffering and that you too are feeling the pain deep within your heart. You loved ones want you to always be aware of their love, your warmth, and their compassion. They hope within their heart and soul that the victim knows that he or she is deeply loved by every heart that takes care of them and has tried to ease their pain. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
When it comes to hindrances in system negotiations, one important element that determines how the pie will be split is each side’s cost of waiting. Although both sides my lose an equal amount of profits, one party may have other alternatives that help partially recapture this loss. Suppose that the member of the union can earn $300 a day in outside activities while negotiations with the hotel management go on. Now each time the management’s turn comes, it must offer the union not only what the union could get a day later, but also at least $300 for the current day. The entries in our table change in the union’s favor; we show this in a new table. Once again the agreement occurs at the season opening without any strike, but the union does much better. #RandolphHarri 19 of 21
The result can be seen as a natural modification of the principle of equal division, to allow for the possibility that the parties start the process with different “hinderance,” as in golf. The union starts at $300, the sum its members could earn on the outside. This leaves $700 to be negotiated, and the principle is to split it evenly, $350 for each side. Therefore the union gets $650 and the management only $350. In other circumstances the management could have an advantage. For example, it might be able to operate the hotel using substitute employees while the negotiations with the union go on. However, because those workers are less efficient or must be paid more, or because some guests are reluctant to cross the union’s picket lines, the management’s profit from such operation will be only $500 a day. Suppose the union members have no outside income possibilities. Once again there will be an immediate settlement with the union without an actual strike. However, the prospect of the substitute employee operation will give the management an advantage in the negotiation, and it will get $750 a day while the union gets $250. If the union members have an outside income possibility of $300 and the management can operate the hotel with a profit of $500 during negotiations, then only $200 remains free to be bargained over. The management gets $600 and the union gets $400. The general idea is that the better a party can do by itself in the absence of an agreement, the higher will be its share of the pie that is the subject of the bargaining. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
To “fusion” must be added “diffusion,” for no part of the World is now completely cut off from the rest. Messages get through the most tightly guarded borders. Despite Mr. Ceausescu’s perceived cruel censorship, many Romanians were able to pick up Bulgarian television from across the border. (Many Bulgarians, in turn, preferred Soviet television to their own.) Even before the revolution, Romanians knew the names of the anti-Ceausescu dissidents who risked imprisonment by calling for human rights. Their names were familiar from foreign broadcasts beamed into Romania. Most East Germans were able to watch West German television stations, which told them things their Communist government would have preferred to suppress. (Much like FOXNEWS on cable tells us things the communist democrats want to suppress.) Thus in 1989, when big anti-government demonstrations occurred in Leipzig, East Germans learned about it from West German transmissions. In the same way, they found out when Hungary opened its borders to East German refugees and where cracks were opening in the Berlin Wall. Those out of reach of these West German TV transmissions lived mainly in the Dresden region, which was spoken of as the “Valley of Ignorance.” These “valleys” are getting smaller. Cross-border television “leakage” is hardly new, nor is the fact that Voice of America and Radio Free Europe, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), and others beamed shortwave programming into the communist countries. The Voice of America broadcast eleven and a half hours day, reaching an estimated 100 million Chinese listeners. It even broadcast simple instructions on how to avoid government attempts to “jam” the transmissions. What is different now, however, is the subversive media strategy employed by today’s revolutionaries. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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You Do Not Know My Pain
From ancient times, people have looked for positive guidance from the spirit World. However, they believed demons caused most of the World’s problems. Demons were said to cause comets, volcanic eruptions, and eclipses. Some people believed demons were the reason for illness, while others believed that demons possessed great powers of healing. For instance, pilgrimages to Epidaurus, in Greece, became World famous, and a night’s sleep in the sacred temple cured thousands. Appolonius of Tyana (3 B.C.—A.D. 96) was a well-known miracle worker who effected magic cures and was regarded by many as “a heathen Christ.” In the temple of Serapis at Alexandria, Egypt, multitudes of pagans were remarkably healed. The World in which Sarah Winchester lived was full of demons. Unlike most, Mrs. Winchester knew that demonic powers did not exist in just in the imagination of frightened men, and that they could not only cause harm, but she also knew of miracles through demon-energized healers and magic workers. It was a lustrous motionless day. Autumn bloom lay on the Winchester Estate, on heavy trees of the weald, on streams moving indolently, far across the fruit orchards. Mrs. Winchester held her breath and gazes. A silence distilled from years of solitude lay on the lawns and Victorian garden. Vying in evil, sorcerers cursed the Winchester family and their fortune. A succession of deaths, allowed Mrs. Winchester to build one of the most unique and beautiful mansions in the World and made her heiress to the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. Evil spells casted by Witches claimed the life of Mrs. Winchester’s husband, William Wirt Winchester, and her new born daughter, Annie Winchester. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
Although she was stricken by grief, Mrs. Winchester went on to led an active, independent, and decided life. Her home became the focus of her life, and her mission was to continue its construction to ward off any demonic curse. “I shall never leave it!” she said, her heart swelling as if she had taken the vow to a lover. Legions of souls preserved the house in its integrity; and that was worthwhile. Mrs. Winchester was satisfied to carry on such a legacy. That even, when supper was finished, Mrs. Winchester sat with her niece Daisy by the fire she had lit in the salon. It provided a sense of radiance and gave the great room an air of expectancy and welcome. The portraits, the Italian Baroque Walnut cabinets, the Victorian needlepoint parlor Cherub face arm chairs, and charming English needlepoint rugs all look as if they had just been produced. “My dear, what a fine room!” said Daisy. “Yes! It is a delicious room. One of the warmest of the house. This is perfect.” Daisy had still to see the library, cozy and inviting, the Venetian dining room, the breakfast parlor, and the many bed rooms. As they crossed the threshold of the Blue Séance Room, guided by some light from its western window, someone was in the room already; they felt rather than saw another presence. Daisy, behind her, paused also; she did not speak or move. What she saw, or thought she saw, was simply a man in a hooked black cloak turning away from the mahogany desk. Almost before Mrs. Winchester had received the pression there was no one there; only the slightest stir of the needlework curtain over the widow. She heard no step or other sound. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
They drank coffee in the Blue Séance Room. Daisy was a lovely woman, delicate of feature and voice, she could speak home décor one moment and her usual Parisian French the next. A faint shadow of pain passed over Mrs. Winchester’s face. Daisy looked out the window at the drifts of ivy hanging from the evergreen trees. Mrs. Winchester had exulted in her resolve to keep the Winchester Mansion to herself until she and the house should have time to make friend. But the uneasy feeling she had left her wanting to take the chill off. The house was enormous, mysterious, and drawn into its own secret past. “Why not come stay with me?” she said. “I know you would like to settle down somewhere in the country where you will not be disturbed, and I have plenty of room.” “Well, Aunt Sarah, your home certainly does provide the requisite seclusion. I would be honored to.” “I promise no one shall bother you—” Mrs. Winchester added, half-nervously: “Not even the spirits.” Was the solitude already making Mrs. Winchester superstitious? Mrs. Winchester walked Daisy to the bedroom she was to sleep in. They parted ways. While Daisy was dressing for bed she heard a knock, and saw Kaspian Gosta, the Butler’s round face just inside the door. “Is there anything wrong with your accommodations, my lady?” “Yes, what’s wrong is that it freezes in here.” “Nothing can be done, my lady. Everything has been tried.” “That will do, Mr. Gosta. I want a fire to be lit in the fireplace,” said Daisy.” “Yes, my lady.” The door closed on the butler. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
It was the witching hour, or so it seemed. Lights out, and only far-off sounds: a woman laughing hysterically, the crack of a gun. It seemed for a while there had been the faint thudding of drums. Daisy awoke. There was a man standing over her, he was hot, covered with sweat, he stretched uneasily in his clothes. The man emitted inhuman sounds: a piglike squeal. This reduced Daisy to a nervous wreck. She screamed and the made quickly faded away. She heard rapid foot steps in the hallway and then a knock at the door. “Come in,” she said. “My lady, are you okay?” “No, Mr. Gosta. There was someone in my room,” Daisy explained. “That is what I tried to warn you about, my lady. The specter like to keep the heat down in the house.” The next morning, she did not want to be alone in the house for more than a few minutes at a time. However, whenever she would go to Mrs. Winchester there was a strange wind that seemed to repel her from her door. Always, there was something not quite right about the Winchester Mansion, as far back as Daisy could remember. Neighbors and friends suggested that the Winchester fortune was cursed. “I never would believe it,” Daisy said. “That is not how I was brought up.” In her bedroom, she undressed and lied down, holding her rosary beads to her heart, as she hoped and prayed, just as she has over so many nights, that the freezing cold and the specters would stop. Mrs. Winchester employed a small workforce of men and women. By December, the fruit harvest in the orchards had been picked, packages, and dispatched to the respective buyers. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
On October 25, 1896, shortly after she had gone to sleep, Daisy was wakened by a series of loud poundings and scratching noises on the ceiling. She could not tell where they were coming from. She left her bed—and met Mrs. Winchester on the stairs. She was agitated. “Were you making that racket?” Mrs. Winchester asked. “No, Aunt Sarah. I thought it was someone else.” They found all the first-floor gasoliers on and no one about. Mrs. Winchester asked who was last downstairs, if perhaps Mr. Gosta forgot to switch off the lights. However, Daisy was the last one and she swore she had turned everything off. There was a tangible presence in the Winchester mansion. One could hear it at all hours of the day and night. “I would be sitting and would hear it shuffling about,” Daisy recalls. “Not footsteps as such, but rustling and shuffling. I could not see anything. Not at first.” As the months passed, the presence gradually made itself known. Around the middle of January 1897, the Winchester mansion was awakened by a blood curdling scream in the night. Daisy was crying and shaking with fear. After a few hours she calmed down and went back to sleep when she felt something on her back. It was pushing her out of bed, but when she looked around, there was no one there. However, it felt as though someone was trying to eject her from the bed, as if she did not belong there. Then suddenly, the duvet was ripped off the bed, leaving her shivering. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
The next morning, Mrs. Winchester glanced about the great room, with its circle of warmth and light by the hearth, and the sullen shadows huddled at its father end, as if hungrily listening. She noticed that things moved in the room. Doors were left opened—drawers and things have shuffled through. In the night she would hear a lot of running and banging and the sound of horses’ hooves. It was like a cavalry of horsemen passing through the halls. When Mrs. Winchester drew back the curtains and looked out, the lamps on the gateposts were bathing the roadway in a soft light. There were no horses, but the sounds were still coming from the hallway. When she opened the door of her bedroom, the noises got louder, and she could hear men conversing, and shouting at each other. Mrs. Winchester could not understand what they were saying. She had no idea if it was even English. But the galloping and hammering and sawing continued, which was always followed by a terrible howl at dusk. As the peered through the sky, Mrs. Winchester would open her door and be surprised to find that certain rooms had been sealed off and new additions added to the house, along with the most exquisite furnishings. The next night while she was sleeping. Mrs. Winchester was awakened by a ferocious thud on the floor, and she heard Daisy screaming and hollering like she was in great pain. Mrs. Winchester quickly rushed to see what was wrong and found her limp on the floor, unable to move. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
Mrs. Winchester was terrified. The room was as cold as an icebox and seemed darker than usual. Daisy’s face was white as milk. Dr. Odin rushed to the Winchester Estate, finding Daisy immobile and unable to communicate. He said that Daisy’s vocal cords were hoarse and that she had suffered a serious spinal injury with resultant loss of sight. After months of suffering and pain, on April 22, 1897, she was suddenly cured of her blindness. On May 31, 1897, Daisy was cured of her spinal trouble. The cures had apparently been wrought by Mrs. Winchester through séances. Satan is willing and able to perform diabolic miracles. Satanic healings, however, shift the physical disorder into the psychic plane by bringing the “healed” person into some type of occult bondage. The ability of such magicians is conditioned on the human plane by their inherent psychic power, and on the supernatural plane. Black magicians differ in strength and psychic ability to perform magical feats often described as Satanic Miracles. Strong magicians usually own their success to innate psychic powers. Very frequently they come from a family where the occult arts have flourished for generations. Their innate and inherited occult powers are frequently cultivated and enhanced by séances. To enlist the help of Satan and demons, a pact is often made with the powers of evil. The subject consciously and willingly gives oneself over to Satan and demonic agencies who will help one perform healing conjurations and other supernatural feats. Ordinarily the body is cut and the compact with the devil is written and signed in one’s own blood. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
Everything was all right for a while, but the house became disturbed again at night by the sawing of wood. Daisy pushed on the gasoliers and could not believe her eyes. Men were in the hallway sawing wood really fast. She was surprised to find Mrs. Winchester and Mr. Gosta in the front parlor. “What’s going on?” Daisy asked? Mrs. Winchester was in a flood of tears. “Mrs. Winchester thought she saw a black monster with hooves in the bathroom,” Mr. Gosta explained. “But it is gone now.” What was happening in the Winchester Mansion was unnatural. The things were real, but they were not only under attack, the were also being protected by demons. The next time, Daisy was awakened by a loud thud in the far corner of the bedroom. There was an old woman with long, gray hair falling over her face, and a young man with heavy boots, and a dark stain down the front of his shirt. The old woman came towards her with her arms outstretched. Daisy ran to the door but it would not open. And through the door came a deep set of ancient eyes with a demonic face starting into her eyes. From that day on, the smile on her face died. She was always trembling. She stared almost blankly, and was always cold. Never had things in the mansion been so scary. Mrs. Winchester was amazed to see the change in her. Daisy was positively shaken. Mrs. Winchester would ask Daisy, “My dear, what is the matter.” And in a flat, cold tone, Daisy would reply, “You do not know my pain.” And she would look away. Although it heals, many people are psychically ruined through magic. Sometimes violet and sinister forces appear. This indicates that the origin of the damage is primarily of a spiritual nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
I conjure thee, O fire, by him who made thee and all other creatures for good in the World. Welcome Spirit Botis and your 60 Legions of Spirits, O most noble King! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by the which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this Circle so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; and not to depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed my will without any falsity. BY THE PENTACLE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. Please blessed this house with great prosperity, abundance, wisdom, power and longevity. I think you for your empowerments which have served to assist my evolution toward divinity and power. Please take the spiritual wisdom that you bring and open the paths for more prosperity to flow into my life. Allow this sorcerous current to be a conduit of information which comes with it, and become more away of the precise reasons for the work upon the Pathway of Pacts. Allow me to understand this symbolism as well as the most powerful goal of the process. Meratsav tadad oybugird miy a iaruha acmerhtahsx iadzam hsuehgna mananahtoayhs ohgnanam adzad hsuehgnav acah tictahas hsutar ahta oyriav uha ahtay x7. Show various paths to self-mastery through the seven powers. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
The Winchester Mystery House
The Winchester Mystery House is elegant, powerful, beautiful, mysterious and insidiously successful in whatever it does. It is a powerful aphrodisiac for certain occultists who are impatient with “parlor” esoteria. Where old systems weakened or visions grew dim, new ones were invented. It is impossible to find a single ideological thread uniting the Winchester Mystery House in its spiritual pilgrimage. One might glace at some choices, none of which stands up to scrutiny. Come and take a tour of the 110 of the remaining 160 rooms of amazement and wonder. Perhaps you will make contact with something special? https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
And be sure to visit the online gift shop: https://shopwinchestermysteryhouse.com/
Computer Output is Still Regarded as Gospel
Criminal behaviour is a topic that captures the attention of the average American. There is simply something about the darker side of human behaviour that peaks our interest. Consider the familiarity of the following scenarios. While involved in a manic run of high-speed channel surfing, an image of Charles Manson or Osama bin Laden suddenly flashes across the television screen. The image is gone as fast as it arrived and your eyes adjust to the next channel. Almost instinctively, you find yourself flipping back to the previous channel and you proceed to fixate upon what is being said about these individuals some people perceive as monsters of modern time. You are sitting alone in public place. Suddenly, you hear a nearby voice telling a friend how he broke the law the past weekend but presumes that he was lucky enough to evade suspicion…perhaps the person is describing how he filed a false tax return or got into fisticuffs at the local pub the night before. Your ears quickly perk up as you anxiously eavesdrop on the crime-related confessional. These anecdotes speak to the armchair criminologist that seems to exist in all of us. When we see or hear about criminal behaviour, we want to know more. When the topic comes up in conversation, we are always willing to add our proverbial two cents. Americans clearly have a healthy appetite for crime. Day in and day out, television viewers have a long list of reality-based/ crime drama network television shows (exempli gratia, SWAT, Chicago P.D., Criminal Minds, Blue Bloods, FBI, FBI International, FBI Most Wanted, CSI, X-Files, Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Organized Crime), or cable station documentaries (exempli gratia, Court TV, The Discovery Channel, A&E) from which to choose, as network executives scramble to quench our thirst for crime-related subject matter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
What is more, it is rare to find a front page of a newspaper or popular magazine that does not flaunt a crime-related story prominently in the headlines. Even mainstream lifestyle magazines, such as women’s Cosmopolitan and Glamour or their male equivalents, GQ and Maxim, now include regular features on “true crime.” Having established that crime sells, the obvious question becomes, Why? The answer is simple—we are feverishly attracted to that which we do not fully understand. Like a puppy chasing its tail, we spin around and around searching for ever-elusive answers. The average citizen is not alone in this ongoing quest for enlightenment. Year in and year out, legions of scholars, criminal justice practitioners, and politicians spend billions of dollars, kill millions of trees, and exhaust countless hours trying to understand, explain, and prevent the exorbitant amount of criminal behaviour that exists in today’s society. Just think about how much written and spoken commentary has ever been directed toward understanding the behaviour and mindset of modern terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden! Efforts to describe and explain crime and criminality overload shelves with books, journals, and reports that details various theoretical and policy initiatives. What is the net gain of this sustained investigation? Or, have we made any substantial progress toward solving this problem? The harsh reality is that we as “learned professionals” have not made nearly as much progress as we would like; and we certainly have not made anywhere near as much progress as the general public expects. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Part of the problem with the criminological enterprise is that it is difficult to come to grips with the parameters of our substantive discussion and approach. First, one must address two fundamental questions: (1) What is the subject matter that we should be studying? (2) What is the best way to study it? Surely, coming up with an acceptable definition of crime should be enough. After all, crime is a routine topic in our daily conversations, it is a mainstay in media reports, and serve as a popular topic for books. However, upon closer examination, we see that “crime” is a relatively slippery concept. By crime do we mean all those acts or omissions of act that are defined by criminal law? Many sociologists consider this sort of legally bound definition of crime to be overly constraining. The “collective conscience” of society can be far more offended by non-criminal acts of deviance (id est, social norm transgressions) than it is by some violations of the law. For example, although it may not be illegal to shout racial lurs in public, there tends to be a much more resounding public outcry against this form of behaviour than there is when a minor law violation such as speeding or littering takes place. Many scholars acknowledge this point, but opt instead to pursue the path of least resistance—they contend that the subject matter in question should include only violations of the criminal law. This definitional parameter is convenient because it immediately limits the discussion to a much more identifiable and manageable set of behaviours. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
More importantly, violations of the criminal law (id est, criminal act) are subject to formal, state-imposed sanctions, while violations of customs or norms (id est, deviant acts) are subject to informal, peer-imposed reprimands. This difference in the nature and process of social control efforts has long been seen as a critical issue that separates crime from deviance. The laws of the land are passed by a legislative body and recorded for dexterity purposes in a document knows as the criminal code. This is the document that police officers and prosecutors use to guide their daily activities. One must recognize, however, that a definition of “crime” that is based solely on existing criminal codes will still produce an exceedingly long list of offense. At the most basic level, one must content with the fact that there exists no single, definitive criminal code. Instead, each jurisdiction, ranging from the federal to the state to the thousands of local jurisdictions, has in place a slightly different criminal code that it calls its own. As such, an effort to compile an exhaustive list of every law violation that is currently “on the books” would result in a truly massive, unmanageable, and often conflicting list of criminal statutes. So let us assume that you could settle on a single criminal code, one from the federal, state, or local jurisdiction of your choice. Such a code would include high-profile offenses such as murder, rape, robbery, and theft. However, the complete list would be far more expansive, including thousands of law violations—everything from jaywalking to murder. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
In addition, criminal codes routinely contain a host of obscure, outdated, and rarely enforced statutes. Seuling (1975) provides a long list of the more ridiculous examples, including: In Kansas City, Missouri, it is illegal for children to buy cap pistols, but not shotguns. Killing an animal with “malicious intent” can result in first-degree murder charges in Oklahoma. It is illegal to have a bathtub in your house in Virginia. Few people are willing to afford equal weight to all of the behaviours detailed in a given criminal code. Instead, one is inclined to set aside the “petty” and “outdated” offenses and focus the discussion on the more “serious” categories of crime. Most scholars follow suit Some turn to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for direction. The UCR is an annual effort to document the number of reported and cleared (id est, a perpetrator has been identified) cases (and arrests) of murder, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson that are encountered by the various law enforcement agencies across the United States of America. These eight offense types are called Part I offenses. The FBI asks all law enforcement agencies to provide host of offense and offender data tht are then used to generate descriptive crime statistics (exempli gratia, demographic profiles and crime rates). #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
The difficulty of keeping in touch with the social occasion while at the same time becoming spontaneously involved in situated engagements is often reduced by the arts of concealment. Apparently one of the most significant involvement shields is that afforded by a conversational circle itself. In fact, there seem to be few conversational clusters in which control of facial and bodily expression is not employed to conceal either a deadness to the content of the encounter or an improper drift from the spirit of the occasion. A conversation occurring within a situation, then, is likely to present something of a collusion against the gathering at large; Mrs. Toplofty’s multiplication tables, previously cited, are merely an extreme instance. And yet, of course, the very possibility that conversational content can be shieled from the gathering as a whole removes some of the threat that such smaller circles might have for the larger inclusive one if the drift or deadness were open and visible. We can thus appreciate why some “informal” sociable gatherings are deemed “successful” when each cluster carries away its participants to the point where they can barely conceal their departure. The possibility of sustaining a concealed activity within conversations can become somewhat recognized and institutionalized, so that two different phases of a social occasion can simultaneously occur in the same place among the same participants, one phase being restricted to unfocused interaction and the other to matters that can be parceled out to conversations and concealed in them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
One phrase is likely, then, to be defined as dominant and the other subordinate. For example, in Lincoln, California it was obligatory for male neighbours and male extended kin to attend funerals dressed quite decorously in black, even to the point sometimes of wearing a black cap reserved only for such occasions. It was also obligatory for these male mourners to stand quietly and sedately outside of the cottage in which the deceased was laid out. However, while thus standing, it was quite permissible to carry on entertaining conversational chats with one’s fellow-mourners. To be sure, the sound level of these talks and the features of the talkers were respectfully modulated to fit funeral requirements, but the content of the talk went in another direction. In some cases it was even understood to be in bad taste to turn the topic from the ordinary pleasantries of neighbourly talk to the deceased; attendance and funeral garb were what one owed the other present. The involvement shield provided by a conversation is somewhat portable, because the participants can together move about a room and take their talk with them. Perhaps the most important recently developed portable shield for encounters is the automobile. The protection provided by the back seat has already made social history, and use of the front seat in drive-in movies has become a kind of inadvertent outdoor shrine for paying homage to our society’s use of shielding arrangements. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
Mutual-involvement has been treated simply as one variety of situated involvement; the rules regulating situated involvements apply, in fact, with extra force. There are differences, however, between mutual-involvements and other kinds. For one thing, mutual-involvements improperly maintained by the individual necessarily involve others directly; further, of all objects of involvement, other individuals seem to be the most enticing and hence, in turn, the most in need of social control. However, further issues are also to be found. An unengaged individual may easily exhibit the kind of involvement which gives others the impression that one is indeed in a pathological state; the same consequence, however, is rarely possible for persons improperly involved together. Except for the very marginal phenomenon of folie a deux (or a trois, a quatre, etcetera), it seems to be assumed that as long as two individuals are in communication with each other—as long as they are joined in an encounter—whatever they are doing is not occult, however esoteric and opaque it may appear to be. This helps to explain why a person who is “with” another tends to feel free to engage in all kinds of antics, since one can assume one’s contact with the other will guarantee one’s sanity to bystanders. A parallel phenomenon has been observed in connection with the frame of reference by which criminality is imputed (as opposed to mental illness). Apparently there are depredations which can be interpreted as a game when committed by a group of youths, but which are viewed as crime when committed by a solitary offender. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Let us speak about the relation of false personality to other parts of man. In every man at every moment, his development proceeds by what may be called a static triad. This triad is called aa static triad because body, soul, and essence always stay in the same place and act as the neutralizing force, while the other force change only very slowly. So the whole triad is more or less in the same place all the time. There is Body, Soul, Essence at the top of the triangle, the “I” and the left, and False personality at the right. The first triangle forms the state of man in ordinary life; the second forms his state when he begins to develop. There are long period between the state of the first and the state of the second triangle, and still longer between them and the third triangle. Actually, there are many intermediate stages but these three are sufficient to form the way of development in relation to false personality. It is necessary to remember that none of these states is permanent. Any state may last for about half an hour and then another state may come, then again a different state. The triad is made by the body, the soul and the essence at the apex. At the second point if “I”; that is, the many “I”s which are the person, that is to say, all feelings and sensations which do not form a part of false personality. The third point of the triangle is held by false personality (id est, the imaginary picture of self). In an ordinary man false personality calls itself “I”, but after some time, if a man is capable of development, magnetic center begins to grow in one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
One may call it “special interests,” “ideals,” “ideas,” or something like that. However, when one begins to feel this magnetic center in one, one finds a separate part of oneself, and from this part of one’s growth begins. This growth can take pace only at the expense of false personality because false personality cannot appear at the same time as magnetic center. If magnetic center is formed in a man one may meet a school, and when one begins to work one must work against false personality. This does not mean that false personality disappears; it only means that it is not always present. In the beginning it is nearly always present but when magnetic center begins to grow it disappears, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes even for a day. Then it comes back and stays for a week! So all our work must be directed against false personality. When false personality disappears for a short time, “I” becomes stronger, only it is not really “I,” it is many “I”s. The longer the periods for which false personality disappears, the stronger the “I” composed of many “I”s becomes. Magnetic center may be transformed into deputy steward, and when deputy steward acquires control of false personality it really transfers all the unnecessary things to the side of false personality, and only the necessary things remain on the side of “I.” Then, at a still further stage, it may be that permanent “I” which will come on the “I” side with all that belongs to it. Permanent “I” has quite different functions, quite a different point of view from anything we are accustomed to. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
The static triad shows that either personal work or degeneration is going on in relation to different manifestations of false personality, but that body, soul, and essence remain the same all the time. After some time they too will be affected, but they do not enter into the initial stages. Body will remain the same body, essence will change later, but it does not enter the beginning of the work. According to this system, essence enters only as much as it is mixed with personality. We do not take it separately because, as already explained, we have no means of working on essence apart from personality. “What is it,” someone asked, “that makes the real ‘I’ begin to develop and false personality to fade?” First of all it is a question of time. Say false personality in ordinary life is there for twenty-three hours our of every twenty-two hours only and magnetic center will be present for an hour longer than usual. Then, in time, all false personality will diminish and will become less important. (This is shown in the second stage of the where false personality has become passive and the man “I”s surrounding magnetic center have become active.) You cannot diminish false personality in the sense of size but you can diminish it in the sense of time. Somebody else said, “I had the impression until now that false personality was the collection of all the many ‘I’s. This concept has made things a little obscure to me.” Among these many “I”s there are many passive “I”s which may be the beginning of other personality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
False personality cannot develop; it is all wrong. That is why I said that all work has to be against false personality. If one fails it is because one has to be against false personality. If one fails it is because one has not given enough attention to false personality, has not studied it, has not worked against it. False personality is made up of many “I”s and they are all imaginary. “I do not understand what you mean by passive ‘I’s.” “I” which are controlled by some other, active “I.” For instance, good intentions are controlled by laziness. Laziness is active, good intensions passive. The “I” or combination of “I”s in control is active. The “I”s which are controlled or drive are passive. Understand it quite simply. There are three different states of man beginning from the most elementary. In the most elementary state false personality is active and “I” is passive. Body, soul, and essence always remain neutralizing. When, after many stages, permanent “I” comes, then “I” becomes active, many “I”s become passive and false personality disappears. Many different examples can be drawn between these two extremes, and further than that there are several possibilities. In 1944, the Allies were planning an operation for the liberation of Europe, and the Nazis were planning their defense against it. There were two possibilities for the initial landing –the Normandy beaches and Pas de Calais. A landing would surely succeed against a weak defense, so the Germans would have to concentrate their attention on one of these two places. Calais was more difficult to invade, but more valuable to win, being closer to the Allies’ ultimate targets in France, Belgium, and Germany itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
The payoffs are given on a scale of 0 to 100. The Allies count a successful landing at Calais as 100, a successful landing at Normandy as 80, and a failure at either place as 0 (and the Germans get the negative of these payoffs). Put yourself simultaneously in the boots of General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, and Field Mashal Rommel, the German commander of their coastal defenses in France. What strategies would you choose? There is no equilibrium in the basic strategies, and we must look for mixtures. Allies should choose to land at Normandy or Calais with the odds of (100-20): (80-60), or 4:1, while the Germans should deploy their defenses at Normandy or Calais with the odds (80-20): (100-60), or 3:2. The average point score for the Allies when both use their best mixture is 68. The probabilities and point scores we chose are plausible, but it is hard to be precise or dogmatic about such matters. Therefore let us compare our results with what actually happened. In retrospect, we know that the Allies’ mixing proportions were overwhelmingly weighted toward Normandy, and that is what they in fact chose. For the Germans, it was a closer call. It is less surprising, therefore, that the German decision-making was swayed by the Allies’ double-agent trick, differences of opinion in their commanding ranks, and some plain bad luck, such as Rommel being away from the front at the crucial time. They failed to commit their reserves on the afternoon of D-Day when the Allied landings at Normandy seemed to be succeeding, believing that a bigger landing at Calais would come. Even then, the fate of Omaha Beach was in the balance for a while. However, the Allies gained and consolidated their foothold on Normandy. The rest you know. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
When it comes to voter fraud, the vulnerability is not just inside the computers, or at election times, but in the way computer-generated data, information, and knowledge are used and misused. Smart politicians and officials, of course, do what smart people in general have always done when presented with new information. They demand to know more about its source and the reliability of the data behind it; they ask how samples were drawn in polls and what the response rates were; they note whether there are inconsistencies or gaps; they question statistics that are too “pat”; they evaluate the logic, and so forth. Smarter power players also take into account the channels through which the information arrived and intuitively review in their minds the various interests who might have “massaged” the information in transit. The smartest people—a minority of a tiny minority—do al the above, but also question assumptions and even the deeper assumptions on which the more superficial assumptions are based. Finally, imaginative people—perhaps the fewest of all—question the entire frame of reference. Government officials are found in all four categories. However, in all the high-tech countries they are so harried, so pressured, that they typically lack the time and attention span, if not the brains, to think past the surface “fact” on which they are pressures to make decisions. Worse yet, all bureaucracies discourage out-of-frame thinking and the examination of root premises. Power-players take advantage of this fact. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
When David Stockman , who headed the U.S.A. Office of Management and Budget, proposed budget cuts to the President and White House staff, he carefully chose the reductions from programs accounting for only 12 percent of the total budget. In discussing these cuts with high higher-ups, he never provided context. Telling tells out of school, he later wrote: “What they did not realize—because I never made it clear—was that we were working in only a small corner of the total budget. We hadn’t even looked at three giant programs that accounted for over half of the domestic budget: Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and Medicare. Those three alone cost $250 billion per year.” (As of 2023, that figure is $1.8 trillion per year.) “The projects we had cut saved $25 billion. The President and White House staff were seeing the tip of the budget iceberg; they were not finding out about the huge mass which lurked below the waterline. No one raised any questions about what wasn’t being reviewed.” Were they willfully ignorant, too much in a hurry to ask or blinded by Stockman, a master of statistical legerdemain? Or were they just “snowed” by all the computer-generated numbers? A political speech is barely worth making these days unless it is stuffed with computer-derived statistics. Yet most decision-makers seldom question the numbers that have been crunched for the. Thus Sidney Jones, a former Under Secretary of Commerce, once proposed setting up a Council of Statistical Advisers to serve the President. Presumably they would have been able to tell the President how the notorious “body count” statistics during the Vietnam War were being massaged. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Or why the CIA and the Pentagon could not agree on how powerful Soviet nuclear tests were, and therefore on whether or not the U.S.S.R. was violating the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1975. Or why the Commerce Department figures on gross national output were wildly exaggerated at one time, then corrected down to show the economy in a near-recession. The reasons in every case were highly technical—but they were also, inevitably, political. Even the most objective-seeming numbers have been hammered into shape by the push and pull of political power struggle. The U.S.A. Census Bureau takes more pains than most agencies to make public its definitions and statistical procedures so that users can form their own judgments about the validity of its figures. Its top experts readily admit, however, that such reservations and footnotes are routinely ignored in Washington. Accord to one Census staffer: “The politicians and the press do not care. All they say is ‘Gimme a number!’” There are two reasons for this. One is mere naivete. Despite all we have learned in the past generation about the spurious quality of much seemingly hard computer data, according to the Census official responsible for automatic data processing and planning, “Computer output is still regarded as Gospel.” However, there is a deeper reason. For political tacticians are not in search of scholarly “truth” or even simple accuracy. They are looking for ammunition to use in the info-wars. Data, information, and knowledge do not have to be “accurate” or “true” to blast an opponent out of the water. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Some truisms: Almost any technology is subject to use, misuse, abuse, and accident. The more powerful a technology is when properly used, the worse it is likely to be when abused. Any powerful technology in human hands can be the subject of accidents. Nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing replaces modern industry, and if its nanotechnological products replace most modern technologies, then most future accidents will have to involve nanotechnology. Another truism: In a diverse, competitive World, any reasonably inexpensive technology with enormous commercial, medical, and military applications will almost surely be developed and used. It is hard to envision a scenario (short of the collapse of civilization) in which nanotechnology will not make its appearance; it seems inevitable. If so, then its problems, however tough, must be dealt with. Like trucks, aircraft, biotechnology, rockets, computers, boots, and warm clothes, nanotechnology has the potential for both peaceful and aggressive uses. In peaceful uses (by definition), harm to people occurs either by accident or as an unintended consequence. In aggressive uses, harm is deliberate. In a peaceful context, the proper question to ask is Can fallible people of goodwill, pursuing normal human purposes, use nanotechnology in a way that reduces risk and harm to others? In an aggressive, military context, the proper question to ask is Can we somehow keep the peace? Our answer to the first will be a clear yes, and to the second, an apprehensive maybe. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
Throughout this discussion, we assume that most people will be alert in matters concerning World safety. During the 1970, people awakening to the new large-scale, long-term problems of technology was out of their control, in the hands of shortsighted and irresponsible groups. Today, there are still battles to be fought, but the tide has turned. When a concern arises regarding a new, obvious technology, it is now much easier to get a hearing in the media, in the courts, and in the political arena. Improving these mechanisms for social vigilance and the political control of technology is an important challenge. Current mechanisms are imperfect, but they can still give a big push in the right directions. Though we assume alertness, alertness can be a scarce resource. The total amount of concern and energy available for focusing on long-term problems is so limited that it must be used carefully, not squandered on problems that are trivial or illusory. Part of our aim is to help sort out these issues raised by nanotechnology so that attention can be focused on problems that must be solved, but might not be. For instance, fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and poultry products are potential vehicles for the transmission of human pathogens leading to foodborne disease outbreaks, which draw public attention to food safety. Therefore, there is a need to develop new antimicrobials to ensure food safety. Because of the antimicrobial properties of nanomaterials, nanotechnology offers great potential for novel antimicrobial agents for the food and food-related industries. The use of nano-antimicrobial agents added directly to foods or through antimicrobial packaging is an effective approach. As a result, the use of nanotechnology by the food and food-related industries is expected to increase, impacting the food system at all stages from food production to processing, packaging, transportation, storage, security, safety and quality. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
Cresleigh Homes
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Them that Has, Gets!
In more fluid, changing societies we are more apt to find controls that are internalized—that do not depend to so great an extent on control and enforcement by external agents. However, regardless of the congruence between socialization practices and adult norms, any extreme pattern of training will produce stress for the individuals involved. The deviations that have been considered all deny in some way the domination of the individual by the social occasion in which he finds himself. From this, however, it should not be assumed that propriety in situations can be guaranteed by a complete investment of self in an occasioned main involvement. Whatever the prescribed main involvements, and whatever their society, that the individual is required to give visible evidence that he has not wholly given himself up to this main focus of attention. Some slight margin of self-command and self-possession will typically be required and exhibited. This is the case even though this obligation often must be balanced against the previously mentioned obligation to maintain a minimum of an acceptable main involvement. Ordinarily the individual can so successfully maintain an impression of due disinvolvement that we tend to overlook this complete absorption in a situated task, the crisis itself, as a new social occasion, may conceal, exonerate, and even oblige what would otherwise be a situational delict. During minor crises, however, when the individual has cause to withdraw from general orientation to the gathering but has no license to do so, we may witness wonderfully earnest attempts to demonstrate proper disinvolvement in spite of difficulties. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
Thus, when a man fully invests himself in running to catch a bus, or finds himself slipping on an icy pavement, he may hold his body optimistically stiff and erect, wearing a painful little smile on his face, as if to say that he is really not much involved in his scramble and has remained in situationally appropriate possession of himself. There are, apparently, different kinds of overinvolvement in himself in cheering at an amateur boxing match or silently overimmerses himself in a chess problem. Again one sees how activities which differ so very much on the surface can have the same expressive significance. Interestingly enough, evidence of the quieter kind of overinvolvement often comes to us through a special class of fuguelike side involvements, these repetitive acts implying that the individual is very deeply involved in a task, often an occasioned one. Along with these fuguelike signs we are likely to find disarray of posture (and by implication some evidence of rules regarding posture). One of the early—and one of the few—students of ordinary social gatherings comments: “When a student in the class-room becomes really absorbed in the problem in hand, he is likely to slip down on his shoulder blades, spread his feet, ruffle his hair, and do any number of other unconventional deeds. Let the spell be broken, and he sits, rearranges his clothes, and again become socially proper. There seem to be few situations defined to allow such withdrawal into an activity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
Therefore, when an intensely involved individual is caught out in one of these dissociated side involvements, he typically reacts with embarrassment, hastily reallocating his involvement is firmly tied to the purpose of the occasion, are deep risk involvements likely to be tolerated. A very common form of involvement control occurs at mealtimes, where in many sections of Anglo-American society, the individual is expected to eat relatively slowly, not to take food from his neighbour’s plate, and in general to conduct himself as if getting his fill were not the most important thing in the World—as if, in fact, eating required very little attention itself. (In Shetland Isle, for example, a community in which most persons were always a little hungry, it was difficult to find an instance where an individual accepting a second helping of food did not first avow that he had had enough and next proclaim that he had been given too much.) In mental hospitals, staff pay tribute to these rulings by constructing social types to epitomize patients who flagrantly break them. There is, for example, the “stuffer,” who presses food into his mouth until his cheeks bulge and he turns red and grasps for want of air; there is also the “food grabber,” who, not being trusted to respect his neighbour’s plate, will either be served alone or tied to his chair during mealtime by means of a sash looped through his shirt collar, like a dogs on a leash, to keep him out of other people’s territory. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
Other, less extreme instances found in the hospital form a bridge to behaviour found in free society. At Central Hospital, for example, it was characteristic of some of the “sicker” adult patients to eat their dessert first, thus suggesting too little control of their desire for sweets and too much involvement in eating. This, of course, is a delict often found in small children, who must be taught to conceal both “overeagerness” for oral indulgences and “oversatisfaction” while consuming them. Appetitive self-control and other involvement rulings are an important part of what parents must teach their children. One basis for the often-stated similarity between mental patients and children is that both groupings must be pressed into compliance with involvement rulings by those in charge. It can be claimed, then, that “regression” is not a return to an infantile state of libidinal organization but rather a manifestation of those problems of situational discipline that incidentally are found among children. In our society, one interesting sign that is taken as evidence of overinvolvement is perspiration; another is a “shaky” voice. More important than these is the phenomenon of shaky hands, a problem for senior citizens. Individuals with chronic tremors of this kind become “faulty persons,” burdening all ordinary interaction with a display of what can be take as insufficient control over the self. Certain strategies, perhaps independently hit upon, are employed to conceal this sign and to prevent it from giving the lie to the front of proper involvement maintained by the rest of the individual’s body. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
One technique is for the individual to put his hands in his pockets’ another, to hold them fast on the table; a third, to hold one shaky hand with the other, while resting one elbow on the table for support. It may be suggested that the tendency to hold something of himself in reserve may so colour an individual’s activity that, in those special situations where relatively complete abandonment to a main involvement is required, he may find that he is unable to let himself go. Perhaps the incidence of middle-class frigidity can be understood partly in these terms. In any case, pleasures of the flesh in our society is preferably carried on under the involvement of shield darkness, for darkness can allow participants to enjoy some of the liberty of not being in a situation at all. This problem, but not this solution, is found, of course, in other settings. Thus, the sharing of an office with another often means a limit on work, because extreme concentration and immersion in a task will become an improper handling of oneself in the situation. Some co-workers apparently resolve the issue by gradually according each other the status of nonperson, this allowing a relaxation of situational properties and an increase in situated concentration. This may even be carried to the point where one individual allows himself half-audible “progress grunts” such as, “What do you know!” “Hm hm,” “Let us see,” without excusing himself to his co-worker. If an individual feels obliged to affect deep immersion in some focus of attention, he may of course affect these expressions. Other dissociated side involvements such as hair twisting may also be indulged in and tolerated in such circumstances. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
Many professors have been killing science in the same way as priests are killing religion. None of the established sciences go far enough in exploring the other dimensions which surely exist; they stop at a blank wall. There is great importance of working upon one’s own development with, and through, a school or structured group environment. Man is a machine, moving through is existence in a dream-like, mechanistic state, and in order to tap his full potential he has to awake through a disciplined attempt to self-remember—to be able to become fully aware of oneself at anytime. Self-remembering is difficult, requiring a series of steps in definite order together with the help of a school; the eventual reward, through self-study, control, and the transformation of negative emotions, was the attainment of objective consciousness. This is an awakened state in which a human, released from one’s state of “waking sleep,” is capable of seeing the higher reality (“esoteric knowledge”) invisible to one in one’s ordinary, undeveloped level of being. They key in all of this, of course, is school work based on the principle that development of knowledge and growth of being must proceed together for right understanding. Unlike many other systems, this cannot be learned solely through a book. Words well put together on a page cannot convey a thought as ordinary speech can; on the other hand, a less-than-perfect written sentence could, by its very ambiguity, obscure more than it revealed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Humans have occasional moments of self-consciousness, but they have no command over them. They come and go by themselves, being controlled by external circumstances and occasional associations or emotions. The question arises: is it possible to acquire command over these fleeting moments of consciousness, to evoke them more often and to keep them longer, or even make them permanent? Consciousness, not as it is defined by the medical sciences but as something else—is an awareness and perception of the World above and beyond our ordinary experience. In addition, throughout the so-called “legitimate science” there has been a renewed and serious study in those areas once labelled part of the Occult: extrasensory perception, psychic phenomena, additional dimensions, bio-feedback, telepathy, and other subjects once considered the province of witches and warlocks. It could be said that the entire everyday World is coming around to observation made over four hundred years ago in Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” There is a knowledge which surpasses all ordinary human knowledge and is inaccessible to ordinary people but which exists somewhere and belongs to somebody. Do not accept any ideas that cannot be prove in practice. What is necessary is the willingness to accept one’s own mechanicalness and lack of unifying consciousness, and to summon the will to self-remember in order to overcome the one and acquire the other. The aim of this system is to bring man to conscience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
In reality, we remember very little of our lives, and that is because we remember only conscious moments. Consciousness is not merely the opposite of sleep, or unconsciousness; it is an awareness of self, a self-remembering. The chief feature of our being is that we are many, not one. Because man is not fully aware of himself, he is also not aware of many contradictory desires, beliefs, emotions, and prejudices which sway him from one moment to the next; her has no center of gravity, and, lacking that, is incapable of sustaining a fixed goal for any length of time. Although he may believe he is determining his own life’s direction, a man is actually buffered from one desire to another by an assortment of outside influences. Man can overcome this state only be becoming aware of his multiple selves and by seeking to develop his true self by stopping the expression of negative emotions, identification, lying, and other elements of “false personality.” Man has no will, only self-will (“wanting to have our own way”) and willfulness (“wanting to do something simply because we should not”). Both grow out of the momentary passing desires of the man “I’s,” or selves, of which man consists. True will is present only in conscious man and is a goal to be obtained through the system; we gain will by exercising in work through the system, in a school situation. Self-will and willfulness are particularly difficult to obliterate because they are part of our illusion that we are already conscious and able to “do”—that is, accomplish something by original intent rather thanas a mechanistic, reflex response to outside influences. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Negative emotions are all emotions of violence or depression. Such emotions are useless and destructive, and despite our protests to the contrary they arise not from outside provocations but from within ourselves. However, negative emotions are artificial—arising out of identification (our incapability of separating ourselves from the objects, people, or emotions around us)—and hence can be destroyed once we become aware of them and attempt to suppress them through self-remembering. The first step in eliminating negative emotions is to limit their expression; when this happens, it will then become possible to get at the root of negative emotions themselves. Think very seriously before you decide to work on yourself with the idea of changing yourself…this work admits of no compromise and it requires a great amount of self-discipline and readiness to obey all rules. Very few people actually realize just how much emphasis people place on appearance. One does not have to be flashy to get visual attention either. Despite the sound of your voice, your scent or the texture of your skin, your appearance must command attention. If you are unusual looking and act like you do not really think so, trying to look as much like the others as possible, they will still talk behind your back, but a little more cruelly. When you are in their presence their guilt at having done so, combined with the fear of weakening your apparent self-confidence, will cause them to be extremely patronizing. Neither of these patterns really gains you respect but only sympathy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Respect based on accomplishment can only be given by those who are humble, wise, and themselves worthy of respect. From those who have achieved little or nothing and are ego-starved and insecure, respect can only be gained through fear. Through accomplishment, you will gain respect from those who are just. With your awesomeness, you will gain respect from those who are unenlightened. If you are truly beyond the help of glamorizing techniques, take the Devil’s name and play the Devil’s game and let people know it. Learn a skill. Paint, play, sculpt, write, draw, read—so that those who matter will respect you because you are unusual, wise and capable. Let your status be known. Do everything in accordance with your type. You will then be perfect. You will be outrageous, because everything about you will fit, despite your homeliness; and with your hint of secret powers, the small-minded will fear you, and well they should, for you follow this advice, you will have those powers. The kind of people you attract will depend on the kind of theatre you are working! Remember that attractiveness is a universal appeal and is not limited to a certain economic or cultural level. If you utilize certain tricks that will create compulsion in enough people, you will soon be able to see the right face in the crowd, and the old adage, “Them that has, gets,” will take on new meaning. A most devastating stigma that can confront any person is the fear of being “phoney.” If you are afraid of being considered phoney, you will surely fail. No matter what you do appear otherwise, if you succeed in anything, there will always be the charge of phoneyness leveled against you by those who either cannot stand your success, do not have the guts to do what you are doing or wish they had thought of it first! #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
If you remain in the bounds of public propriety (and most outrageous tactics are!), perform your tasks or responsibilities in an efficient manner and are civil and courteous, you would be surprised at the things you can get away with in your appearance. Everyone who was ever a guest of William Randolph Hearst was astonished at the range and diversity of his knowledge. Whether his visitor was a cowboy or a Rough Rider, a New York politician or a diplomat, William Randolph Hearst knew what to say. And how was it done? Whenever Hearst expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested. For Hearst knew, all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things one treasures most. If you want to get to know a person, find out what interests them—what catches their enthusiasm. You can ask around about a person, or get to know things they said in the past, you can even interview a person, but you will not get to know them until you interact with them. And the best way to do that is to find out what they are interested in and let that be catalyst that builds the friendship. For instance, you may find discover someone belongs to a society of hotel executives called the Hotel Greeters of America. And perhaps their bubbling enthusiasm has made that individual president of the organization, and president of the International Greeters. No matter where its conventions are here, is there. If you talk to him about his interests, he will be willing to open up and express his hobby with vibrant enthusiasm. You may discover that one’s hobby is the passion of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
So, instead of getting to know a person by asking them what kind of music they like or whatever, find out what their hobby is before you meet them and then talk to them about it. Talking in terms of the other person’s interests pays off for both parties. The reward you get from this will be an enlargement of your life each time you speak to someone. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. One of the simplest mechanisms that can modify interaction patterns arises from one agent’s staying near another. The most basic examples of this mechanism involve staying nearby in a physical space. The general character of the mechanism persists even when the proximity is conceptual rather than physical. The biological prototype of this mechanism is adhesion, in which one organism stick to another or stays close to it. It is seen all over the biological World, from a virus that sticks to cell surfaces, to a flea that visits the Human World in the company of a rodent, to a baby kangaroo that travels with its mother by staying in her pouch. The effect is that the “following” agent experiences a patten of interactions similar to that of the “leading” agent. In addition, there is also more interaction between the follower and the leader. In daily life we spend time with out relatives, co-workers, and friends, and by “sticking with them,” we also meet the people they know. There are many follow-the-leader mechanisms beyond these simplest ones. For example, there is apprenticeship, in which the apprentice stays close to, and shares many experiences of, the master of some trade. Beyond formal apprenticeship, there are still other forms of what has been called “legitimate peripheral participation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
These arrangements not only let the trainee see how an expert individual works but also allow access to social interactions that are essential to the effectiveness of the leading agent. Other instances of modifying interaction by staying close to another agent include: hospital rounds; “big brother” relationships—either with real siblings or deliberately arranged mentors; following a guide around a tourist site or other new place; research training; going to work with a parent; or attending the school of a widely known teacher who has attracted other students with the same interests. All of these familiar procedures of the social World, and many more, share an element of acquiring the interaction patterns as well as the strategies of a leading agent, who serves a kind of template. In the World of computer networks, this kind of mechanisms has been generalized. “Recommender” systems allow users to “adhere” to the tastes of others, in order to interact with the persons and objects they have encountered. In such systems, the user provides some profile of interest, say by rating a sample of films. Then the system tells the user about films that were liked by other raters whose patten of evaluation is similar to the user’s own. Comparable methods have been constructed for finding other “taste goods,” such as books and music, for finding professional assistance (dentists, stockbrokers), and for finding online discussion groups or World Wide web pages of interest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
In fact, most people on social media are marketing or advertising and only a small few respond to messages. It has become like an unorganized confusion of information. America Online (AOL) used to have chat rooms were people actually communicated and could send private message, in addition to public messages in a chat room. That for of social media might be conducive to make social media more about socializing. It gets kind of boring just look at people’s pictures and videos and not actually having discussions with people who have an interest similar to yours. These electronic versions imitate the wisdom of the now faded time when library books had signed checkout cards and it was possible to see who had previously read a book. In the contemporary on-line versions, however, you may not need to recognize the names of the others. Indeed, the Information Revolution makes possible recommendations based on statistical synthesis of others that might be closer to predicting your tastes than any other single users, or even a professional critic. Such systems are often able to help users find other agents or objects they will enjoy. These mechanisms for following an agent present an intricate mix of advantages and disadvantages. Among the sources of benefits and problems, we focus on two. The first is the ability to acquire interaction patterns implicitly without having a good theory of how things work. The second is living in the kind of clustered social network that results from wide use of the mechanism, a network where many of the other agents have strongly overlapping knowledge and social contacts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Using mechanisms for following, an agent can tacitly pick up the contact patterns of a leading agent without necessarily understanding the causes or the effects of that pattern. Although there are problems that we return to below, not having to understand the situation can be an important advantage. Indeed, most of the accomplishments of biological evolution, and much human social change, have occurred without the benefit of such explicit knowledge, let alone theoretical understanding. Nature can make a quite efficient food web without the science of ecology. Of course, theories are powerful when we can achieve them. (With scientific understanding, we could have foreseen the consequences of actions like introducing rabbits to Australia, where natural predators were absent.) However, good theories are extraordinarily costly to create and share with others. For many complex domains, they may long remain beyond our capabilities. In addition to three basic strategic moves, there are more complicated options. Instead of establishing a response rule directly, you can purposefully allow someone else to take advantage of one of these strategies. Three options are: You may allow someone to make an unconditional move before you respond. You may wait for a threat before taking any action. You may wait for a promise before taking any action. We have already seen examples in which someone who could move first does even better by relinquishing this option, allowing the other side to make an unconditional move. This is trye whenever t is better to follow than to lead, as in the tales of the America’s Cup race and gambling at the Cambridge May Ball. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
While it can be advantageous to give up the initiative, this is not a general rule. Sometimes your goal will be to prevent your opponent from making an unconditional commitment. When you surround an enemy, leave an outlet free. One leaves an outlet free so that the enemy may believe there is a road to safety. If the enemy does not see an escape outlet, he or she will fight with the courage of desperation. Deny the enemy an opportunity to make his or her own very credible commitment of fighting to the death. It is never advantageous to allow others to threaten you. You could always do what they wanted you to do without the threat. The fact that they can make you worse off if you do not cooperate cannot help, because it limits your available options. However, this maxim applies only to allowing threats alone. If the other side can make both promises and threats, then you can both be better off. When the body’s working, building, and battling go awry, we turn to medicine for diagnosis and treatment. Today’s methods, though, have obvious shortcomings. Diagnostic procedures vary widely, from asking a patient questions, through looking at X-ray shadows, through exploratory surgery and the microscopic and chemical analysis of materials from the body. Doctors can diagnose many ills, but others remain mysteries. Even a diagnosis does not imply understanding: doctors could diagnose many syndromes with unknown cases. After years of experimentation and untold loss of life, they can even treat what they do not understand—a drug may help, though no one knows why. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Leaving aside such therapies as heating, massaging, irradiating, and so forth, the two main forms of treatment are surgery and drugs. From a molecular perspective neither is sophisticated. Surgery is a direct, manual approach to fixing the body, now practiced by highly trained specialists. Surgeons sew together torn tissues and skin to enable healing, cut out cancer, clear out clogged arteries, and even install pacemakers and replacement organs. It is direct, but it can be dangerous: anesthetics, infections, organ rejection, and missed cancer cells can all cause failure. Surgeons lack fine-scale control. The body works by means of molecular machines, most working inside cells. Surgeons can see neither molecules nor cells, and can repair neither. Drug therapies affect the body at the molecular level. Some therapies—like insulin for diabetics—provide materials the body lacks. Most—like antibiotics for infections—introduce materials no human body produces. A drug consists of small molecules; in our simulated molecular World, many would fit in the palm of your hand. These molecules are dumped into the body (sometimes directed to a particular region by a needle or the like), where they mix and wander through blood and tissue. They typically bump into other molecules of all sorts in all places, but only stick to and affect molecules of certain kinds. Antibiotics like penicillin are selective poisons. They stick to molecular machines in bacteria and jam them, thus fighting infection. Viruses are a harder case because they are simpler and have fewer vulnerable molecular machines. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
Worms, fungi, and protozoa are also difficult, because their molecular machines are more like those found in the human body, and hence harder to jam selectively. Cancer is the most difficult of all. Cancerous growths consist of human cells, and attempts to poison the cancer cells typically poison the rest of the patient as well. Other drug molecules bind to molecules in the human body and modify their behavior. Some decrease the secretion of stomach acid, other stimulate the kidneys, many affect the molecular dynamics of the brain. Designing drug molecules to bind to specific targets is a growth industry today, and provides one of the many short-term payoffs that is spurring development in molecular engineering. Current medicine is limited both by its understanding and by its tools. In many ways, it is till more an art than a science. In some areas, medicine has become much more scientific, and in others not much at all. We are still short of what I would consider a reasonable scientific level. Many people do not realize that we just do not know fundamentally how things work. It is like having a BMW, and hoping that by taking things apart, we will understand something of how they operate. We know that there is an engine in the front and we know it is under the hood, we have an idea that it is big and heavy, but we do not really see the rings that allow the pistons to slide in the block. We do not even understand that controlled explosions are responsible for providing the energy that drives the machine. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
Better tools could provide both better knowledge and better ways to apply that knowledge for healing. Today’s surgery can rearrange blood vessels, but is far too coarse to rearrange or repair cells. Today’s drug therapies can target some specific molecules, but only some, and only on the basis of type. Doctors today cannot affect molecules in one cell while leaving identical molecules in a neighbouring cell untouched because medicine today cannot apply surgical control to the molecular level. Now for even better news. We have not run out of energy sources. Energy can be harvested from innumerable sources, including some that at first glance seem outlandish—as the steam engine did in its early days. Clunky and no doubt expensive by the standards of time, it was designed to increase energy supply by helping to pump water out of coal mines Craig Venter, the man who led the successful private effort to decode the human genome, is working toward the creation of artificial organisms that can clean up pollution—and create energy. “Biology,” he says, “can change our dependency on fossil fuels.” He is not alone. Stanford professors and graduate students are also pursuing the biological production of hydrogen from genetically engineered bacteria. Entrepreneur Howard Berke’s team is working to develop a material as thin as plastic wrap to directly convert sunlight into electricity capable of recharging cell phones, GPS, and other devices. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
Others are taking advantage of waves and tides to pull energy out of the oceans. The La Rance tidal-power station in France turns out 240 megawatts of power. Other tidal systems are used in Norway, Canada, Russian, and China. In addition, every day the sun transfers the thermal-energy equivalent of 250 billion barrels of oil to the oceans, and we already have technologies that can convert it to electricity. Farther out in both time and space is another potentially huge source of energy—the moon. It turns out that the moon is rich in helium 3—and helium-3, if combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium, can tun out awesome amounts of energy. Indeed, just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the U.S.A. for one full year. The moon contains ten times more energy in the form of helium-3 than all the fossil fuels on the Earth. Add to these a long list of other potential sources, and it becomes clear that there is no absolute shortage of energy available to the human race. What we need are new, creative ways to access that supply. And today there are more scientists, engineers, inventors and sources of finance and venture capital than any time in history. We are also likely to see the de-massification process at work as the World energy system assumes a new structure more compatible with the needs of advanced knowledge-based economies. This suggests a multiplication of energy sources so that the system is no longer overwhelmingly dependent on coal, oil, and gas. It means more different sources and more different technologies matched by more different players and producers—including prosumers who, with their fuel cells or wind towers or other personal technologies, will increasing meet their own power needs. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
The central question, then is not whether we will overcome the energy disaster heading towards us but how soon. And that will depend in good measure on the outcome of wave conflict between vested interests still benefitting from our industrial-era energy systems and the pioneers researching, designing, and fighting for breakthrough alternatives. Faced with this battle, we should not let the pessimists’ warnings narrow our views of the possible. It helps to remember an earlier crisis that also involved energy—in this case nuclear. In August 1945, the entire World shook when two atomic bombs—the worst weapons ever seen—were dropped on Japan, bringing World War II to a fiery end. These weapons of mass destruction perfectly paralleled the mass production of the industrial age. Yet, miraculously, for the next half century no atomic weapon has been exploded in combat anywhere. Today we worry about nuclear proliferation and fear that terrorists may acquire one or more of these bombs. These are realistic worries. However, the danger does not even approach that which existed when the United States of America and the Soviet Union aimed literally thousands of missiles with atomic warheads at each other with triggers set to go off instantly. Still, I bet the state of the World in 2023 makes a lot of people want to start building basements and stock piling food and water. Speaking of food, not long ago Wendy’s International, whose 3,700 fast-food restaurants stretch from the United States of America to Japan to Greece and Guam, introduced an “Express Pak” order for drive-in customers. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
The Express Pak consisted of a hamburger, French fries, and a Coke. However, the customer had to order only the words Express Pak instead of specifying each item separately. The idea was to accelerate the service. In the words of one Wendy’s spokesperson, “We may be taking three seconds. But the cumulative effect can be significant.” This seemingly trivial business innovation tells us a lot about the future of power. For the speed with which we exchange information—even seemingly insignificant information—is related to the rise of a complex new system for wealth creation. And that lies behind the most important power shifts in our time. In itself, course, how quickly Wendy’s sells hamburgers is not exactly a matter of earth-shaking significance. However, one of the most important things to know about any system, and particularly any economic system, is its “clock-time,” the speed with which it operates. Every system—from the human body’s circulatory system to the society’s wealth creation system—can operate only at certain speeds. Too slow and it breaks down; too fast and it flies apart. All systems consist of subsystems, which likewise function only within a certain speed range. The “pace” of the whole system can be thought of as the average of the rates of change in its various parts. Each national economy and each system of wealth creation operates at its own characteristic pace. Each has, as it were, a unique metabolic rate. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
We can measure the speed of a wealth-making system in many ways: in terms of machine processes, business transactions, communication flows, the speed with which laboratory knowledge is translated into commercial products, or the length of time needed to make certain decisions, lead times for delivery, and so on. When we compare the overall pace of First Wave or agrarian systems of wealth creation with that of Second Wave or industrial systems, it becomes clear that smokestack economics run faster than traditional agricultural economies. Wherever the industrial revolution passed, it shifted economic processes into a higher gear. By the same token, the new system of wealth creation described in these pages operates at speeds unimaginable even a generation or two ago. Today’s economic metabolism would have broken the system in an earlier day. A new “heteojunction” microchip that switches on and off in two trillions of a second symbolized the new pace. The acceleration of change will transform society, and cause it to exceed their adaptive capabilities. Acceleration itself has effects independent of nature of the change involved. Hidden within this finding is an economic insight that goes beyond the old “time is money” cliché. The acceleration effect, indeed, implies a powerful new law of economics. This law can be stated simply: When the pace of economic activity speeds up, each unit of time comes to be worth more money. This powerful law, as we shall see, hold profound implications not just for individual businesses, but for whole economies and for global relations among economies. It has a special meaning for the relations between the World’s rich and poor. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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Is the Soul’s Health More Important than All the Powers of this World?
I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. Whoever is without guile, let one lie down with the lion and the lamb and be not ashamed of one’s nakedness; for they shall put a ring upon one’s hand and shoes upon one’s feet; and all that was one’s father’s shall be one’s and also all that one’s mother and one’s sister hath, and likewise the mote that is in one’s brother’s eye. For it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a camel than for another man to break the Sabbath day and keep it holy. If this astonishing conquest itch were limited to intellectual postures, it would be one thing. However, of course the contemporary mining and polluting of the industrial lands bring forward far more concrete realities. Our Faustian pact with Mephistophelian “sci-tech” goes back a long way. It is an insufficiently realized fact that the contemporary scientific attitude was first nurtured in the bosoms of mystical societies of seventeenth-century England, as the contemporary British scholar Frances Yates has pointed out in a number of valuable studies. Long before this, the pioneering philosopher of the specifically modern cast of organized inquiry, Francis Bacon, had called in his “Fable of Proteus” for a virtually sadistic approach to the natural World: If any skillfull minister of nature shall apply force to nature, and by design torture and vex it in order to its annihilation, it on the contrary, being brought to this necessity, changes and transforms itself into a strange variety of shapes and appearances; for nothing but the power of the Creator can annihilate it or truly destroy it…And that methods of torturing or detaining will prove the most effective and expeditious which makes use of manacles and fetters; id est lays hold and works upon matter in the extremist degree. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
That is an amazing attitude, and one quickly discernible in every aspect of modern life. However, suppose that nature, or at least the Earth as a whole, may not be entirely inert. Can we assume that it would be completely in accord with many of the things we are doing in it? Supposed that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul’s health more important than all the powers of this World; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of Rationalism today, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger to Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux)—then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries. It is a good thing that in some cases stupidity is not painful because more of us would be in pain and have to admit we need help. As the 1960s faded into the more staid 1970, lurid media accounts of Satanic activity and ritualistic murders became sporadic. However, in 1975, the wire services began to pick up stories that cattle ranchers in Colorado and other western sates were increasingly concerned about the safety of their herds, large numbers of animals having been bizarrely slaughtered. And these are very similar crimes, it would be similar to owning a car dealership and someone stealing all of your cars and no insure to reimburse the loss. So, the cattle were apparently not being killed for food, as little of the meat had been touched, but, in many cases, the blood had apparently been drained and the “private” organs and lips had been surgically removed. To add to the mystery, no footprints, animal or human, were found around the carcasses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Speculation about the identity of the culprits ranged from UFOs to secret government experiments. A movie Endangered Species, was even produced, postulating the latter theory. Then in Arkansas, several head of cattle were found dead near sites that exhibited evidence of ritualistic activity—and Satanic cultists, who from the beginning were suspected villains, supplanted extraterrestrials and Uncle Sam as the most popular explanation for the rash of killings. As reports of the number of mutilations increased and alarm among ranchers spread, animal pathologists were called in to investigate. Not only did they find the cattle mortality rate no higher than normal, but autopsies on the animals determined that in almost all cases the cattle had died from natural causes, or by predatory attack, and that the mutilation had been the postmortem work of scavengers, not cultists. Teeth, not knives, had been used to remove “private” organs and lips, those parts being attacked because they were the softest and most accessible. Then, amid hundreds of similarly discredited reports, several mutilations in Idaho and Montana were determined to have indeed been the work of a knife-wielder. There, evidence gathered by law enforcement officials implicated several Satanic cults operating in those states. The cults, which up to that time had allegedly preferred dogs and cats as sacrificial victims, had read about the mutilations in the papers and decided to add cattle to their ritual list. The work of the copycat cultists turned out to be truly a case of life imitating art. An astrologer named Dan Fry, host of Minneapolis radio program called Cosmic Age, admitted on a Texas talk show that he had made up the cattle mutilation rumor as a joke, but things had snowballed when the story was repeated as fact by the Huston Post and picked up from there by the wire services. Thus had Fry created an “urban legend.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
An “urban legend” is a term coined by contemporary folklorists to describe a popular story that spreads swiftly by word of mouth and is soon accepted as truth. These folk tales are always reported as having actually happened, often to the friend of a friend, which is what keeps them “immediate.” When the media picks up such stories and prints them as fact, as it did with the cattle mutilation stories, they acquire a further stamp of truth, which is why people point out that the news is not always true and is someone’s perspective and viewers should be advised to use critical thinking and ask question and do their own research. However, once again, cattle mutilations are baffling law enforcement and ranchers. FOX News published a story August 11, 2022 about the serial crime spree leaving a dozen cattle mutilated. “Mutilations differ from typical livestock deaths because the carcasses are found with body parts removed in an unusual fashion,” states Charles Couger of FOX News. In San Luis more than 10,000 mutilations have betwixt ranchers and investigators across the United States of America for decades. Nonetheless, a recent study by Psychology Today of reported “trick or treat poisonings on Halloween failed to turn up one serious injury and found that, in almost every case, the tamperings were the work of the child victim himself, in an attempt to get attention from parents and friends. Yet every Halloween, newspapers print warnings about tampered treats. And, in the mid-1980s, tales of Satanic animal mutilations have began to resurface from California to Alabama, despite the protests of investing game and animal control officials who have said that, in almost all the cases, the animal deaths were the work of predators or poachers. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The Devil, after all, has been an old favorite subject of urban legends. In 1977, for instance, the rumor was widely circulated in fundamentalist circles that the secret of McDonald’s success was that the chain donated portion of its profits each year to the Church of Satan. Corroboration of the Satanic tithing allegedly came from no less a personage than McDonald’s owner, Ray Kroc, who was reputed to have admitted to the diabolic connection while appearing on the Phil Donahue shows. In Fact, Kroc had been a guest on the Donahue show in May of 1977, but his most startling admission had been his intention to introduce the McDonald’s “Filet o’ Fish” in Cincinnati. The idea of a Satanic “pact”—trading one’s soul for Earthly wealth—is an ancient one, and it cropped up again in 1980 when rumors surfaced that the Proctor & Gamble moon-and-starts trademark was in reality a Satanic symbol, and that the company was run by Satanists. The story went that the owners of Proctor & Gamble long ago made a pact with the Devil that ensured the company’s success in exchange for putting Satan’s logo on all its products. “Proof” cited for this ludicrous claim was that a company executive had revealed the demonic truth on Donahue or 60 Minutes, depending on the version. It mattered little that Donahue and spokesmen for 60 Minutes denied any such interview ever took place. Neighbors told neighbors that they had talked to someone who saw the show, or heard it from someone who heard it from someone, etcetera. By mid-1982, Proctor’s consumer services department was getting 15,000 calls a month from people wanting to know about the company’s Satanic connections. Eventually, a counter-publicity campaign was launched, but in the end, the company wound up changing its logo. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A serious argument about what is most profoundly modern leads inevitably to the conclusion that the study of the problem of Socrates is one thing most needful. It was Socrates who made Nietzsche and Heidegger looks to the pre-Socratics. For the first time in four hundred years, it seems possible and imperative to begin all over again, to try to figure out what Plato was talking about, because it might be the best thing available. The history of classics since the Renaissance has consisted in momentary glimpses of the importance of Greece for man as man, everywhere and always, followed by long periods of merely scholarly study without any sufficient reason for it, living off the gradually dying energy provided by the original philosophic dynamos. Up to Nietzsche, the neglect of and contempt for Plato and Aristotle was the result of a belief that what they tried to do could be done much better. That is why Socrates was always in good repute. He was the skeptical seeker after the way to knowledge by means of unaided reason. He was not tired to any solution or system and thus could be seen s the originator and the inspirer who did not constrain the freedom of posterity. The current contempt for Plato and Aristotle is of an entirely different kind, for it is allied to contempt for Socrates. He corrupted them; they did not pervert him. We did not progress from Socrates, but he marked the beginning of the decline. Reason itself is rejected by philosophy itself. Thus the common thread of the whole tradition has been broke, and with it the raison d’etre od the university as we know it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Thus is was no accident that Heidegger came forward just after Hitler’s accession to power to address the university community in Freiburg as the new rector, and urged commitment to National Socialism. His argument was not without subtlety and its own special kind of irony, but in sum the decision to devote wholeheartedly the life of the mind to an emerging revelation of being, incarnated in a mass movement, was what Heidegger encouraged. That he did was not a result of his political innocence but a corollary of his critique of rationalism. That is why I have entitled this section “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede.” The university began in spirit from Socrates’ contemptuous and insolent distancing of himself from the Athenian people, his refusal to accept any command from the Athenian people, his refusal to accept any command from them cease asking, “What is justice? What is knowledge? What is a god?” and hence doubting the common opinions about such questions, and in his serious game (in the Republic) of trying to impose the rule of philosophers on an unwilling people without respect for their “culture.” The university may have come near to its death when Heidegger joined the German people—especially the youngest part of that people, which he said had already made an irreversible commitment to the future—and put philosophy at the service of German culture. If I am right in believing that Heidegger’s teachings are the most powerful intellectual force in our times, then the crisis of the German university, which everyone saw, is the crisis of the university everywhere. It may be thought that I have devoted too much space to this idiosyncratic history of the university. However, the university, of all institutions, is most dependent on the deepest beliefs of those who participate in its peculiar life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Our present educational problems cannot seriously be attributed to bad administrators, weakness of will, lack of discipline, lack of money, insufficient attention to the three R’s, or any of the common explanations that indicate things will be set aright if we professors would just pull up our socks. All these things are the result of a deeper lack of belief in the university’s vocation. One cannot say that we must defend academic freedom when there are grave doubts about the principles underlying academic freedom. To march out to battle on behalf of the university may be noble, but it is only a patriotic gesture. Such gestures are necessary and useful for nations, but they do little for universities. Thought is all in all for universities. Today there is precious little thought about universities, and what there is does not unequivocally support the university’s traditional role. In order to find out why we have fallen on such hard times, we must recognize that the foundations of the university have become extremely doubtful to the highest intelligences. Our petty tribulations have great causes. What happened to the universities in Germany in the thirties is what has happened and is happening everywhere. The essence of it all is not social, political, psychological or economic, but philosophic. And, for those who wish to see, contemplation of Socrates is our most urgent task. This is properly an academic task. Some technologies come in disguise. Rudyard Kipling called them “technologies in repose.” They do not look like technologies, and because of that they do their work, for good or ill, without much criticism or even awareness. This applies not only to IQ tests and to polls and to all systems of ranking and grading but to credit cards, accounting procedures, and achievement tests. It applies in the educational World to what are called “academic courses,” as well. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
A course is a technology for learning. I have “taught” about two hundred of them and do not know why each one lasts exactly fifteen weeks, or why each meeting lasts exactly one lasts exactly one hour and fifty minutes. If the answer is that this is done for administrative convenience, then a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time. The point is that the origin of a raison d’etre for a course are concerned from us. We come to believe it exists for one reason when it exists for quite another. One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies. Perhaps the most interesting example of such lack of awareness is the widespread belief that modern business invented the technology of management. Management is a system of power and control designed to make maximum use of relevant knowledge, the hierarchical organization of human abilities, and the flow of information from bottom to top and back again. It is generally assumed that management was created by business enterprises as a rational response to the economic and technological demands of the Industrial Revolution. However, research by Alfred Chandler, Sidney Pollard, and especially Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve reveals a quite different picture and leads to a startling conclusion: modern business did not invent management; management invented modern business. The most likely place for management to have originated is, of course, in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, there is no evidence that British industry knew anything about management as late as 1830, nor did there exist anything approximating a “managerial class.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Management was created in the United States of America “out of the blue,” as Hoskin and Macve say. It was not a creation of any obvious needs of American industry, which was only a marginal force in the World economy in the mid-nineteenth century. The roots of management may be traced to a new educational system, introduced in 1817 to the United States Military Academy by the academy’s fourth superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer. Thayer made two innovations. The first, borrowed from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, was to grade examinations by giving numerical marks. As I have previously noted, the grading of student papers originated in Cambridge University towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the practice was taken up by several schools on the Continent. Thayer’s use of this technology is probably the first instance of it in America. As every teacher knows, the numerical mark changes the entire experience and meaning of learning. It introduces a fierce competition among students by providing sharply differentiated symbols of success and failure. Grading provides an “objective” measure of human performance and creates the unshakable illusion that accurate calculations can be made of worthiness. The human being becomes, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, “a calculable person.” Thayer’s second innovation, apparently his own invention, was a line-and-staff system. He divided the academy into two divisions, each organized hierarchically. As Hoskin and Macave describe it: “Daily, weekly and monthly reports were required, all in writing. There were continual relays of written communication and command, going from the bottom to the top of each line, before being consolidated and passed to the central ‘Staff Office.’” #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Thayer rejected the traditional leader’s role of direct, visible command. He ruled indirectly through the medium of written reports, charts, memos, personnel files, etcetera, not unlike the way a modern CEO functions. We do not know how most of the two hundred cadets at the academy reacted to Thayer’s new system (which Hoskin and Macve term the “grammatocentric principle,” meaning that everything was organized around the use of writing). However, we do know that two of them, Daniel Tyler and George Whistler, were impressed. Both were in the graduating class of 1819, and took with them their lieutenant’s rank and Thayer’s general approach to organizations. Desert Rose Industries and other manufacturers can make almost anything quickly and at low cost. That includes the tunneling machines and other equipment that made the subway system they use for shipping. Digging a tunnel from coast to coast now costs less than digging a single block under New York City used to. It was not expensive to get a deep-transit terminal installed in their basement. Just as the tents are not mere bundles of canvas, these subways are not slow things full of screeching, jolting metal boxes. They are magnetically levitated to reach aircraft speeds—as experimental Japanese trains were in the late 1980s—making it easy for Carl and Maria to give their customers quick service. There is still a road leading to the plant, but nobody’s driven a truck over it for years. They only take in materials that they will eventually ship out in products, so there is nothing left over, and no wastes to dump. One corner of the plant is full of recycling equipment. There are always some obsolete parts to get rid of, or things that have been damaged and need to be reworked. These get broken down into simpler molecules and out back together again to make new parts. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The gunk in the manufacturing ponds is water mixed with particles much finer than silt. The particles—fasteners, computers, and the rest—stay in suspension because they are wrapped in molecular jackets that keep them there. This uses the same principle as detergent molecules, which coat particles of oily dirt to float them away. Though it would not be nutritious or appetizing, one could drink the tent mix and be no worse for it. To one’s body, the parts and their jackets, and even the nanomachines, would be like so many bits of grit and sawdust. (Grandma would have called it roughage.) Carl and Maria get their power from solar cells in the road, which is the only reason they bothered having it paved. In back of their plant stands what looks like a fat smokestack. All it produces, though, is an updraft of clean, warm air. The darkly paved road, baking in the New Mexico sun, is cooler than one might expect: it soaks up solar energy and makes electricity, instead of just heat. Once the power is used, it turns back into heart, which has to go somewhere. So the heat rises from their cooling tower instead of the road, and the energy does useful work on the way. Some products, like rocket engines, are made more slowly and in a single piece. This makes them stronger and more permanent. The tents, though, do not need to be superstrong and are just for temporary use. A few days after the tents go up, the earthquake victims start to move out into new housing (permanent, better-looking, and very earthquake-resistant). The tents get folded and shipped off for recycling. Recycling things built this way is simple and efficient: nanomachines just unscrew and unsnap the connectors and sort the parts into bins again. The shipments Desert Rose gets are mostly recycled to begin with. There is no special labeling for recycled materials, because the molecular parts are the same either way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
For convenience (and to keep the plant small), Carl and Maria get most of their parts prefabricated, even those they can make almost anything. They can even make more production equipment. In one of their manufacturing ponds, they can put together a new cabinet full of special-purpose assemblers. They do this when they want to make a new type of part in-house. Like parts, the part-assemblers are made by social-purpose assemblers. Carl even can make big vats in medium-size vats, unfolding them like tents. If Desert Rose Industries needed to double capacity, Carl and Maria could do it in just a few days. They did this once for a special order of stadium sections. Maria got Carl to recycle the new building before its shadow hurt their cactus garden. Now, let us focus on mining knowledge. Even these changes, however, are dwarfed by China’s ravenous pursuit of wealth-relevant know-how. China has become a World leader in the creation, purchase—and theft—of data, information and knowledge. As far back as the winter of 1983, soon after Deng Xiaoping shut the door on the Maoist past, we personally witnessed Chinese scientists in Beijing reverse-engineering computers and carrying out the country’s earliest experiments with fiber optics in Shanghai. The available facilities were primitive, dirty, and freezing. China was still wretchedly not very well-off financially. However, its leaders, even then, understood the importance of technology—and piracy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Today the picture is dramatically different. Up-to-date research labs are proliferating, the country’s total expenditure on research and development (R&D) amounted to about 2.79 trillion yuan (about $441.13 billion) in 2021, which is 14.2 percent year-on-years. After deducting price factors, China’s R&D spending in 2021 rose 9.4 percent year-on-year. And as we have noted in the past, thousands of United States of America—trained Chinese scientists are heading back to China. In five years, America will still be the World center of corporate research. However, China will outrank Britain, Germany, and Japan. Add China’s sharklike appetite for data, information and ideas from the outside World. To do business in China, foreign companies usually have had to transfer technology—and many agreed to do so in return for even limited access to the huge Chinese market. Nor is this hunger for know-how narrowly restricted to technology. As formerly Communist China entered into broader economic relationships with the West, it also sought practical knowledge about capitalist management, finance and business in general. As of 2022, there are 46 MBA programs offered in China—many in partnership with leading American schools such as MIT, UC/Berkeley and Northwestern. Less formally, knowledge is transferred by the more than 600,000 international students who now live and work in China—in sharp contrast to the days when foreigners were likely to be labeled spies or allowed to enter only as part of closely monitored tourist groups. Behind China’s amazing drive, therefore, we find radically changed attitudes toward all three of the deep fundamental central to economies of the future—further evidence of its intention to create the World’s leading knowledge-based economy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Taken together, facts like these suggest an unstoppable China on a short, double-quick march to superpowerdom. Beijing, however, knows better. Recently, China watchers have begun to spin dark scenarios. Those include the possibility that China could suffer a financial crisis like the one that hit the rest of Asia in 1997-98, for example. Or that it will go through a series of ups and downs that it will attempt to mitigate with Keynesian measures. Alternatively, worriers point to a possible convergence of other troubles—an energy breakdown, and environmental crisis or something else. Or, worse, yet, a war with Taiwan in which both sides hurl missiles at each other, destabilizing the new Asia. Any or all of these could hammer the global economy in the years immediately head. One of the most pessimistic assessments of China’s future is that the nation will collapse, the revolution has grown old, the discontent of the people is explosive, state-owned enterprises are dying, Chinese banks will fail, and that ideology and politics restrain progress—and that is only part of the list. However, experts are saying the same about America. If this is true, the global financial system might have to be wheeled into the intensive-care ward. Investors, corporations and central banks around the World could all be traumatized. The price of T-shirts and toys might drop still further in the corner Wal-Mart. However, hundreds of millions of workers around the World—from iron-ore miners in Brazil to bankers in Manhattan or Tokyo—would be looking for jobs. These scenarios are dire enough. However, they overlook more startling possibilities. “They will throw their money in the streets, tossing it out like worthless trash. Their silver and gold will not save the on that day of the LORD’s anger,” reports Ezekiel 7.19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The info-wars cast the corporation—and the work that does on in it—into a new light. Forget, for a moment, all conventional job descriptions; forget ranks; forget departmental functions. Think of the firm, instead, as a beehive of knowledge processing. In the day of the smokestack it was assumed that workers knew little of importance and that relevant information or intelligence could be gathered by top management or a tiny staff. The proportion of the work force engaged in knowledge processing was tiny. Today, by contrast, we are finding that much of what happens inside a firm is aimed at replenishing its continually decaying knowledge inventory, generating new knowledge to add to it, and upgrading simple data into information and knowledge. To accomplish this, employees constantly “import,” “export,” and “transfer” data and information. Some employees are essentially importers. These “OUT-IN” people gather information from outside the company and deliver it to their co-workers inside. Market researchers, for example,” are OUT-INers. Studying consumer preferences in the external World, they add value by interpreting what they learn, and then deliver new, higher-order information to the firm. Public relations people do the reverse. They market the firm to the World by collecting information internally and disseminating or exporting it to the outside World. They are IN-OUTers. House accounts are basically IN-IN people, gathering most of their information from inside the firm and transferring it internally as well. Good salespeople are two-way RELAYS. They disseminate information, but also collect it from outside and then report it back to the firm. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
These functions relate to flows of data, information, or knowledge. Cutting across them is a set of functions that have to do with upgrading the stock of data, information, and knowledge that the firm and its people already possess. Some mind-workers are creators, capable of finding new, surprising juxtapositions of ideas, or putting a fresh spin on an old idea; other “edit” new ideas by matching them against strategic requirements and practical considerations, then deleting those that are irrelevant. In reality, we all do all these things at various times. However, while different functions emphasize one or another, no conventional job descriptions or management texts deal with such distinctions—or their implications for power. At almost every step in this knowledge processing, some people or organizations gain, and others lose, an edge. Thus, conflicts—tiny, sometimes highly personal info-wars—are fought over things like who will or will not be invited to a meeting, whose names appear on the routing slip, who reports information to a superior directly and who, by contrast, is asked to leave it with a secretary, and so forth. These organizational battles—“micro info-wars,” so to speak—are hardly novel. They are a feature of all organizational life. They take on new significance, however, as the super-symbolic economy spreads. Since the value added through smart knowledge-processing is critical in the new system of wealth creation, 21st-century accountants will find ways to assess the new economic value added by various informational activities. The performance ratings of individuals and units may well take into account their own contribution to knowledge enhancement. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today, a geologist who funds a huge oil strike is likely to be well rewarded by the company for adding to its reserves. Tomorrow, when knowledge resources are recognized as the most important of all, employee remuneration may well come to hinge, at least in part, on the success of each individual in adding value to the corporate knowledge reserve. In turn, we can expect even more sophisticated power struggles for the control of knowledge assets and the processes that generate them. We are already witnessing the beginnings of a change in management assumptions about the functions of the work force. Thus, all employees are increasingly expected to add not merely to the firm’s knowledge of assets in general, but to its competitive intelligence arsenal as well. A company tht does CI work for both U.S. and Japanese firms, the Japanese take a far more wholistic view of intelligence than do the Americans. While Japanese executives regard information collection as a routine part of their jobs, if you ask a typical Harvard M.B.A., it is the company librarian’s job. That narrow assumption, however, is fading. At General Mills every employee is expected to engage in competitive intelligence gathering. Even janitors when buying supplies are supposed to ask vendors what competing firms are buying and what they are doing. Telephone companies in the United States of American runs seminars and distribute literature explaining the methods and benefits to CI to their executives. Bayer even rotates executives through its CI staff to teach them the importance of this kind of information collection. GE links CI directly into its strategi planning. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Pushed to extremes, such measures inch us toward the nation of the corporation as a total info-war fighting machine. Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel it ways into disturbing contacts. To a believer, the effect of the contemplation of science is of being in the presence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. However, what he is awed by is mutilation. To our crippled intellects, only the maimed is what we call understandable, because the unclipped ramifies into all other things. According to my aesthetics, what is mean by beautiful is symmetrical deformation. In very various strata of Iranian literature from the most ancient texts of the Avesta to the poetry of Firduis, we find elements of the saga of the primeval king Yima or Yama, a figure transmuted from primeval Indo-Aryan tradition into Indian and Iranian mythology. He “whose gain is like the sun,” the “great shepherd”—he has rightly been explained as the ancient shepherd-god of the Persians seen through the eyes of the peasant—is born immortal, but become mortal through his offence. The highest god, Ahura Mazdah, invited him to tend and protect religion, his, Ahura Mazdah’s religion, and then, when Yima has declared himself unfit for this, he bids him foster, multiply and guard the World, his, Ahura Mazdah’s World. This Yima is prepared to do; he assumes dominion over the World and it shall be a World in which none of the destructive powers will have a part, neither cold nor hot wind, nor sickness, nor death. Already previously he had besought the gods with sacrifices to grant him that in his real man and cattle should be released from death, and water and trees from drought. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
He besought them to let him become the ruler of all countries, them shall take all evil from off Ahura Mazdah’s creatures. This is now granted him. Three hundred year elapse, and since none of the creatures dies the Earth overflows “with small cattle and great cattle and dogs and birds and red flaming fires.” Called by Ahura Mazdah, Yima advances “to light, at midday, towards the path of the sun” and, with the gold-embellished goad and friendly incantation received from the god, urges on the Earth to stretch apart until it has become greater by a third of its size. This is repeated twice more: the Earth has now doubled its size, and all creatures live upon it at their pleasure. However, now Ahura Mazdah gathers together the gods and the best men, Yima at their peak. To him he announces that upon the World given over to materiality (here it sounds as though, in consequence of Yima’s refusal, it was devoid of spirituality) there will descend the greater winter, which will first cover it in snow and then flood it in the thaw, so that no creature will be able any more to put its feet upon the ground. Then Yima is instructed to erect a mighty pen, like a citadel, and to secure therein the seed of the best and most beautiful of all living and growing things. It is done. Then, however, Yima vouchsafes the access of demonry, which he had hitherto held in coercion, and takes the lie into his mind by lauding and blessing himself. Immediately the regal glory, the lustre of good-fortune, which has till then irradiated his brow, leaves him in the shape of a raven and he becomes mortal. “And I would not that ye think that I know of myself—not of the temporal but of the spiritual, not of the carnal mind but of God,” reports Alma 36.4. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Fixed is Better than the Evolutionary
They appeared as though out of nowhere, or so it must have seemed to the countless pedestrians who came across the black-clad missionaries hawking their books and pamphlets on the streets of major U.S. cities. They were members of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. Their message was one of Apocalyptic prophecy infused with an odd theology of Christian/Satanic reconciliation. Of their origins, intentions and activities, there has been much dispute and allegation. One thing, however, remains certain: The Process has left an indelible watermark upon the post-psychedelic era, and have become a part of that era’s urban folklore. The Process is characterized as a cult that never quite got off the ground and which experienced a major theological and organizational schism from the mid-1970s. Some allude that their existence is a sort of modern Thuggee or Satanic underground, in which the Process is a central organizing factor. There used to be and still may be a family residence for The Process house in the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco, California. There was rumored to be a lot of dark goings-on within. The Process was allegedly part of a vast cryptocracy of serial murders who supposedly had links with the police and judicial establishment, thereby evading responsibility for their cultic crimes. However, The Process nor its founders were every personally accused of these crimes—but there is an overall impression that they are guilty nonetheless. The Process is known for having “chant sessions,” “midnight meditations,” and other activities. They at one time and still may have The Process coffee house in Chicago. The Process discusses how soulless technology and bureaucracy has imposed on our lives. Ecology had not yet become the catch slogan yuppie materialists, yahoo politicians and quarterly stockholder reports. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Much like now, people felt constricted under the thumb of a debased age in which advertising slogans supplanted poetry, contractual agreements replaced love, and televangelism masqueraded as spirituality. Unlike the alien and decadent garb of the Guru cults from the East, The Process had a distinctly Westerly, neo-Gothic exterior: Neatly-trimmed shoulder-length hair and equally neat beards, all set-off by tailored magician’s capes with matching black uniforms. My earliest memories of The Process are associated with bitter subzero nights, accompanied by a group of friends as we hurried down deserted back streets on Chicago’s North side, a section of the city where some of the last remaining cobblestones had not yet been covered with asphalt. The glitter of stars could still be seen in the night sky as the mercury vapor lamps had not yet been installed there. Process headquarters was a four-story Victorian house that also doubled as living quarters for the majordomos of the Chicago chapter. We entered that bitter chill Winter night past the yellow exterior porch lights and encountered several young men in black uniforms with black caps who stood talking to a small group of people in conventional clothes. A tall thin man with a neat fringe of beard greeted us cheerfully with the salutation, “As It Is.” I rejoindered, “So Be It.” I asked him about the coffee house some other Processians told me about, and he directed us toward a back room, where we would find a staircase leading to the coffee house in the basement. Were descended the narrow, curving stairs to a room in the basement where some music emanated from. “As It Is,” hailed an attractive, petite woman with an upper-class British accent. “So Be It,” we replied. She seated us at a table and gave us menus. We ordered tea and listened to the recorded folk music of John Renbourn and Pentangle. It seemed the perfect accompaniment to the setting. The coffee house was low ceilinged, with curtains hanging on the ground-level windows. Second-hand tables, chairs and benches comprised the sparse décor. A candle burned in the center of each table. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Several days earlier I had run into a pretty young woman with an English accent dressed in Process garb on Wabash Avenue Downtown Chicago. She handed me a leaflet listing the group’s activities and invited us to the group’s coffee house. Later that day I stopped by at a psychedelic head shop where I was hawking my poster art. One of the workers was familiar with the Process and showed me the Fear issue. The colors and graphics were very eye-catching and impressively put-together, and I pored over its contents. At the coffee house we experienced no hard-sell proselytizing, in fact we were all a bit disappointed until it was announced that the “Sabbath assembly” was to begin in several minutes on the top floor of the house. Anticipating the adventure of it, we climbed the narrow stairs to the unfinished attic of the building, the roof-beams and wooden rafters rising sharply to the roof’s steep peak. A could dozen people were already seated in a semi-circle on floor cushions. At the center of the circle was a low round table upon which a black and red altar cloth hung down to the floor in neat folds. In front of the windows hung a back curtain with a red Goat of Mendes in its center. To its left was a large gong. To one side of the altar was a steel container of water, to the other side a steel container with a burning pyre. Standing in front of the goat’s head symbol was a man wearing a tabard, a ceremonial device such as a Catholic or Anglican priest might wear. In the center of the tabard was a symbol of a sort of omega confirmation. We were to learn later that this man was called the Sacrifist. At the entrance of the room stood another man dressed in an ankle-length black robe underneath a tabard. On the center of it was the Process Symbol of Four P’s, which formed a swastika-like device. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
This celebrant was known as the Evangelist. The Sacrifist carried a red-leather bound book at his side and the Evangelist a similar one of black. By the early 1970s, the decline of the counterculture and the use of hallucinogens led to a waning popular interest in the occult. Spiritual realization and wicca groups lost membership as people once more became fixated on material goals. The “me” generation, forerunners of the yuppies, came into prominence. For a while, groups like the Church of Satan, which exhorted egotism and a pragmatic, selfish brand of ritual magic, thrived, but by 1975, interest in all magical groups dropped as the economy took an upturn and people got what they wanted through more practical means. Around the Zarathustrian doctrine, which it resists it, the question grows and grows, till the West Iranian religion develops the myth of Zurvan, Time Unbonded in reply. We only know it from a later version, but its original content is unmistakable. Zurvan arises out of the primal sleep, as it seems, and sacrifices murmuring (the song of the generation of the gods, of which we know through Herodotus, is presumably meant), for a thousand years, to obtain the son, Ahura Mazdah, who would create Heaven and Earth. It would be beside the point to ask to whom he is sacrificing: similarly without recipient, the primeval Indian gods also sacrifice (or sacrifice themselves) that out of them may arise the World. After all the vain sacrifice, Zurvan is overcome by doubt: “What avails sacrifice? Perhaps being is not?” Then arose two in the womb: the Wise Lord from the sacrifice, from the doubt the Wicked Spirit. But Zurvan is obviously “fluid” deity. Evil arises in him through his Fall. He does not choose, he doubts. Doubt is unchoice, indecision. Out of it arises evil. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
We must note that the Wicked Spirit, Angra Mainyu, the well-known Ahriman, is here not the son of Ahura Mazdah, but his brother; Ahura Mazdah, Ormuzd, is, however, no longer a primal god, he enters at the beginning into being, and now precisely as the Only-good One. Thus here too the twins stand in radical antithesis to one another, but here, in contradistinction to the twin-myth of the Avesta, the antithesis of the one to the other is not explicitly stated, nor is the coming World-process between the two of them announced; we hear nothing of good and evil and their mutual relationship; we merely watch the appearance of the protagonists in the nascent cosmic conflict. Yet by what is recounted of the primal god himself we are led not less deep than there, and perhaps deeper, into the sphere of the question what good and evil are. There is was deception and truth, deception in sense of being deceptive, truth in the sense of being true, which confronted one another; here doubt of being is the evil, the good is “knowledge,” belief in being, against which Zurvan transgresses. Here it is ultimately a question of fidelity and infidelity to being. However, some within the Zurvan community could not tolerate the notion of a divine Fall. Of these, some supposed that the time-god had gone astray as to being at a particular moment, but that from the beginning something bad, either bad thinking or a corruption of the essence, had been admixed into him, and from this evil made its start; these are evidently reverting to the Avestic doctrine, though a modified form. However, others said Zurvan brought forth both, in order to mingle good with evil, from which it is clearly inferred that only through the gradated abundance of such inter-mixtures can the full manifoldness of things arise; here the fundament of the Iranian tradition is abandoned: good and evil are no longer irreconcilable principia, but utilizable qualities, before whose utilisability the question of an absolute worth and worthlessness vanishes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The fundament of another tradition is adopted, when in the opinion of a third of these sects Ahriman is an outcast angel who was cursed for his disobedience. About that, so end the report in this connection, much can be said. However, there is a fragment of the Avesta which runs: “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deed, I do consciously. All evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds, I do unconsciously.” From here a path leads to the psychological problem of evil, as it first evolved in early Christendom. The character of the experience Socrates represents is important because it is the soul of the university. The rich drama of Socrates, the early philosopher, who came to the attention of the city because he was a philosopher, presents all the questions of freedom of thought from all the angles, without any kind of doctrinairism, and hence provides us with a fresh view of the importance and also of the difficulties of such freedom. From the Republic, which really takes seriously only the demands of knowledge, to the Laws, which gives full attention to the competing demands of political life, Socrates as perfecter and as dissolver of the community reveals all the facets of his activity. The difficulty he and the other philosophers contend with from the law is not to be confounded with society’s prejudice against outsiders, dissenters or nonconformists but is, at least apparently, a result of an essential opposition between the two highest claims of a man’s loyalty—his community and his reason. That opposition can only be overcome if the state is rational, as in Hegel, of if reason is abandoned, as in Nietzsche. However that may be, we have a record, unparalleled in its detail and depth, of this first appearance of philosophy, and we can apprehend the natural, or at least primitive, responses to it, prior to philosophy’s effect on the World. This provides a view of the beginning at a time when we may be witnessing the end, partly because we no longer know that beginning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The poetry written about Socrates by Plato and Xenophon is already in the defensive mode, a rehabilitation of the condemned man. The first statement of the city’s reaction to Socrates is made by Aristophanes. What luck Socrates had! Not only did he command the pens of Plato and Xenophon; he also was the central figure of the greatest work of the consummate genius of the comedy. The Clouds often arouses indignation in those who care little for Socrates but think serious matters are not laughing matters. Socrates’ fate and Aristophanes’ possible contribution to it trouble them. However, Socrates was probably not of their persuasion. He laughed and joked on the day of his death. He and Aristophanes share a certain levity. Aristophanes does present a ridiculous Socrates and takes the point of view of the vulgar, to whom Socrates does look ridiculous. However, Aristophanes also ridicules the vulgar. Reading him we, indeed, laugh at the wise as do the unwise, but we also laugh at the unwise as to the wise. Above all we laugh at the anger of the unwise against the wise. The Socrates of The Clouds is a man who despises what other people care about and cares about what they despise. He spends his life investigating nature, worrying about gnats and stars, denying the existence of the gods because they are not to be found in nature. His maps have only a tiny dot where Athens looms large to its citizens. Law and convention (nomos) mean nothing to him, because they are not natural but manmade. His companions are pale-faced young men totally devoid of common sense. In this academy, which has established itself in the free atmosphere of Athens, these eccentrics carry on their activities without appearing to be other than harmless cranks. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
They are poor, without any fixed means of support. Socrates receives gifts and apparently countenances minor thefts, literally to keep body and soul together. There is no morality, but they are not vicious people, because their only concern is their studies. Socrates is utterly indifferent to honor or luxury. Aristophanes recaptures for us the absurdity of a grown man who spends his time thinking about gnats’ anuses. We have been too persuaded of the utility of science to perceive how far the scientist’s perspective is from that of a gentleman, how shocking and petty the scientist’s interests appear to a man who is concerned with war and peace, justice, freedom and glory. Aside from the occasional surfacing of an adolescent outlaw group, such as the Black Magic Cult in Northglenn, or a similar cult of high schoolers in Lake County, Illinois, in 1972, and a flurry of rumors of Satanic cattle sacrifices in the Midwest, all was quiet on the Satanic front. As we stood in front of the goat’s head altar at The Process house, slowly our eyes adjusted to the light of white and red candles. After a moment of hushed silence, the two began to chant: “Contact reaching to the stars through the spirit of Christ; knowledge of the Universe, He is the way of life.” Sacrifist: “The Final Reckoning.” Evangelist: “An End a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “Christ and Satan joined!” Evangelist: “The Lamb and the Goat.” Together: “Pure Love, descended from the Pinnacle of Heaven, united with Pure Hatred raised from the Depths of Hell.” Sacrifist: “Repayment of the Debt.” Evangelist: “Fulfillment of the Promise.” Sacrifist: “All Conflicts are Resolved.” Evangelists: “An End and a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “The End of Hell and the Beginning of Heaven.” Evangelists: “The End of Darkness and the Beginning of Light.” Sacrifist: “The End of War and the Beginning of Peace.” Evangelist: “The Hatred and the Beginning of Love.” Sacrifist: “The End is Now. The Beginning is yet to come.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
After the pronouncements, we read a series of positive and up-tempo hymns from books that had been passed around. Another Processian got up and read Process material concerning the Gods Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan and Christ, and their respective roles in the Universe. Another Processian strummed a guitar in accompaniment. At the conclusion, the Sacrifist rung the gong. The Evangelist began reciting and was followed by more singing. The gong sounded again and the Sacrifist spoke: “All those Initiates who wish to rededicate their lives on the service of Christ and the three great Gods of the Universe, come forward and kneel before me.” A woman got up from the circle and knelt before the Sacrifist, and the Sacrifist continued: “In the name of the Lord Christ, and in the name of the Lord Satan, I accept you as an initiate of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. As It Is.” The kneeling initiate countered: “So Be It.” My friends and I discussed our experience at Process headquarters could only agree that it was pleasant, but we had not yet drawn any hard conclusions. In the following months I noticed the presence of biker-types at the coffee hose, who seem to be employed as bodyguards for the headquarters. Little of a theological nature was discussed at the coffee house, and occasionally a Processian would play guitar and sing Process-inspired songs, much of it beautifully melodic. In the Spring the Victorian headquarters on Demming Place was set aside as living quarters for full-time members and was thereafter closed to the general public. Public activities were moved to a newly acquired lost above a store in Chicago’s Old Town District on North Wall Street. Old Town, like Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, was the countercultural headquarters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Focusing on the nation, problems arise when a politician appears to have little chance of reflection. The problem becomes even more acute with a lame duck. From the point of view of the public, a Politian facing an end of career can be dangerous because of the increased temptation to seek private goals rather than maintain a pattern of cooperation with the electorate for the attainment of mutually rewarding goals. Since the turnover of political leaders is a necessary part of democratic control, the problem must be solved another way. Here, political parties are useful because they can be held accountable by the public for the acts of their elected members. The voters and the parties are in a long-term relationship, and this gives the parties an incentive to select candidates who will not abuse their responsibilities. And if a leader is discovered giving in to temptation, the voters can take this into account in evaluating the other candidates of the same party in the next election. The punishment of the Republican party by the electorate after Watergate shows that parties are indeed held responsible for the defections of their leaders, which is something many politicians should keep in mind. In general, the institutional solutions to turnover need to involve accountability beyond the individual’s term in a particular position. In an organizational or business setting, the best way to secure this accountability would be to keep track not only of the person’s success in that position, but also the state in which the position was left to the next occupant. For example, if an executive sought a quick gain by double-crossing a colleague just before transferring to a new plant, this fact should be taken into account in evaluating that executive’s performance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Cooperation Theory has implications for individual choice as well as for the design of institutions. Speaking personally, one of my biggest surprises in working on this project has been the value of provocability. I came to this project believing one should be slow to anger. The results of the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicates that it is actually better to respond quickly to a provocation. It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay. And the more strongly this patterned is established, the harder it will be to break it. The implication is that it is better to be provocable sooner, rather than later. The success of TIT FOR TAT certainly illustrates this point. By responding right away, it gives the quickest possible feedback that a defection will not pay. The response to potential violations of arms control agreements illustrates this point. Russian has occasionally taken step which appear to be designed to probe the limits of its agreement with the United States of America. The sooner the United States of America detects and responds to these Russian probes, the better. Waiting for them to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble. The speed of response depends upon the time required to detect a given choice by the other players. The shorter this time is, the more stable cooperation can be. A rapid detection means that the next move in the interaction comes quickly, thereby increasing the shadow of the future as represented by the parameter. For this reason, the only arms control agreement which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate to such an extent that the victim’s provocability is no longer enough to prevent the challenger from having an incentive to defect. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The results concerning the value of provocability are complemented by the theoretical analysis of what it takes for a nice rule to be collectively stable. In order for a nice rule to be able to resist invasion, the rule must be provocable by the very first direction of the other individual. Theoretically, the response need not come immediately, and it need not occur with certainty, but it must have a real probability of coming eventually. The important thing is that the other individual does not wind up having an incentive to defect. Of course, provocability has a danger. The danger is that is the other individual does try a defection, retaliation will lead to further retaliation, and the conflict will degenerate into an unending strong of mutual defections. This can certainly be a serious problem. For example, in many cultures blood feuds between clans can continue to undimished for years and even generations (Black-Michaud 1975). This continuation of the conflict is due to the echo effect: each side responds to the other’s last defection with a new defection of its own. One solution is to find a central authority to police both sides, imposing a rule of law. Unfortunately this solution is often not available. And even when there is a rule of law, the costs of using the courts for routine affairs such as enforcement of business contracts can be prohibitive. When the use of a central authority is impossible or too expensive, the best method is to rely on a strategy which will be self-policing. Such a self-policing strategy must be provocable, but the response must not be too great lest it lead to an unending echo of defections. For example, suppose that Russia (then the Soviet Union) in conjunction with the other Warsaw Pact countries undertakes a partial mobilization of its armed forces throughout Eastern Europe. This mobilization would give the Soviets an added advantage if conventional war were to break out. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
A useful response from NATO would be to increase its own state of alter. If additional troops moved from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, NATO should respond with additional troops moved from the United States of America. It is also recommended that this type of response be automatic so that it can be made clear t the Soviets that such increases in NATO readiness are standard procedure and take place only after Soviet mobilizations. It is also recommended that the response be limited, say one American division moved for every three Soviet divisions mobilized. In effect, this would help limit the echo effects. Limited provocability is a useful feature of a strategy designed to achieve stable cooperation. While TIT FOR TAT responds with an amount of defection exactly equal to the other’s defection, in many circumstances the stability of cooperation would be enhanced if the response were slightly less than the provocation. Otherwise, it would be all too easy to get into a rut of unending responses to each other’s last defection. There are several ways for an echo effect to be controlled. One way is for the individual who first defected to realize that the other’s response need not call for yet another defection. For example, the Soviets might realize that NATO’s mobilization was merely a response to their own, and hence need not be regarded as threatening. Of course the Soviets might not see it that way, even if the NATO response was automatic and predictable. Therefore, it is also useful if the NATO response is somewhat less than proportional to the Soviet mobilization. Then if the Soviet response is also somewhat less than the NATO mobilization, the escalation of preparations can become stabilized, and then possibly reversed for a return to normal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Fortunately, friendship is not necessary for cooperation to evolve. As the trench warfare example demonstrates, even antagonists can learn to develop cooperation based upon reciprocity. The requirement for the relationship is not friendship, but durability. The good thing about international relations is that the major powers can be quite certain they will be interacting with each other year after year. Their relationship may not always be mutually rewarding, but it is durable. Therefore, next year’s interactions should cast a large shadow on this year’s choices, and cooperation has a good chance to evolve eventually. Foresight is not necessary either, as the biological examples demonstrate. However, without foresight, the evolutionary process can take a very long time. Fortunately, humans do have foresight and use it to speed up what would otherwise be a blind process of evolution. The individuals who were able to use the result of the first round in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, including the value of reciprocity, to anticipate what would work well on the second round end up gaining foresight. Foresight pays off with substantially more rewarding results. The result for the second round of negotiations is typically more sophisticated than the first. Cooperation based upon reciprocity was firmly established. The various attempts at exploitation of the unsophisticated entries of the first round all failed in the environment of the second round, demonstrating that the reciprocity of strategies like TIT FOR TAT is extraordinarily robust. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that people can use the surrogate experience of these rules to learn the value of reciprocity for their own Prisoner’s Dilemma interactions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Once the word gets out that reciprocity works, it becomes the thing to do. If you expect others to reciprocate your defections as well as your cooperations, you will be wise to avoid trying to start any trouble. Moreover, you will be wise to defect after someone else defects, showing that you will not be exploited. Thus you too will be wise to use a strategy based upon reciprocity. So will everyone else. In this manner the appreciation of the value of reciprocity becomes self-reinforcing. Once it gets going, it gets stronger and stronger. This is the essence of the ratchet effect which was established in a past reports: once cooperation based upon reciprocity gets established in a population, it cannot be overcome even by a cluster of individuals who try to exploit the others. The establishment of stable cooperation can take a long time if it is based upon blind forces of evolution, or it can happen rather quickly if its operations can be appreciated by intelligent individuals. The empirical and theoretical results of these reports might help people see more clearly the opportunities for reciprocity latent in their World. Knowing the concepts that accounted for the results of the two rounds of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and knowing the reasons and conditions for the success of reciprocity, might provide some additional foresight. We might come to see more clearly that there is a lesson in the fact that TIT FOR TAT succeeds without doing better than anyone with whom it interacts. It succeeds by eliciting cooperation from others, not by defeating them. We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. However, the World is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Today, the most important problems facing humanity are in the arena of international relations, where independent, egoistic nations face each other in a state of near anarchy. Many of these problems take the form of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Examples can include arms races, nuclear proliferation, crisis bargaining, and military escalation. Of course, a realistic understanding of these problems would have to take into account many factors not incorporated into the simple Prisoner’s Dilemma formulation, such as ideology, bureaucratic policies, commitments, coalitions, mediation, and leadership. Nevertheless, we can use all the insights we can get. From the ancient Greeks to contemporary scholarship all political theory addresses one fundamental question: How can the human race, whether for selfish or more cosmopolitan ends, understand and control the seemingly blind forces of history? In the contemporary World this question has become especially acute because of the development of nuclear weapons. The advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: do not be envious, do not be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and do not be too clever. Likewise, techniques we have discussed for promoting cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma might also be useful in promoting cooperation in international politics. The core of the problem of how to achieve rewards from cooperation is that trial and error in learning is slow and painful. The conditions may all be favorable for long-run developments, but we may not have the time to wait for blind processes to move us slowly toward mutually rewarding strategies based upon reciprocity. Perhaps if we understand the process better, we can use our foresight to speed up the evolution of cooperation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Though HAGOTH, with program that could detect if someone over the phone was being dishonest, has virtually disappeared, its idea survives—for example, in the machines called “lie detectors.” In American these are taken very seriously by police officers, lawyers, and corporate executive who ever more frequently insist that their employees be subjected to lie-detector tests. As for intelligence tests, they not only survive but flourish, and have been supplemented by vocational aptitude tests, creativity test, mental-health tests, tests that base attractions on pleasures of the flesh, and even material compatibility tests. One would think that two people who have lived together for a number of years would have noticed for themselves whether they get along or not. However, in Technopoly, these subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” However, in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and the provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with. They tell us that when eight green lights go on someone is speaking the truth. That is all there is to it. They tell us that a score of 136 means more brains than a score of 104. This is Technopoly’s version of magic. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than understanding. In Technopoly, we are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies. In considering here the ideological biases of medical technology, let us begin with a few relevant facts. Although the U.S.A. and England have equivalent life-expectancy rates, American doctors perform six times ad many cardiac bypass operations per capita as English doctors do. American doctors perform more diagnostic tests than doctors do in France, Germany, or England. An American woman has two to three times the chance of having a hysterectomy as her counterpart in Europe; 60 percent of the hysterectomies performed in America are done on women under the age of forty-four. American doctors do more prostate surgery per capita than do doctors anywhere in Europe, and the United States of America leads the industrialized World in the rate of cesarean-section operations—50 to 200 percent higher than in most other countries. When American doctors decide to forgo surgery in favor of treatment by drugs, they give higher dosages than doctors elsewhere. They prescribe about twice as many antibiotics as do doctors in the United Kingdom and commonly prescribe antibiotics when bacteria are likely to be present, whereas European doctors tend to prescribe antibiotics only if they know that the infection is caused by bacteria and is also serious. American doctors use far more X-rays per patient than doctors in other countries. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
In one review of the extent of X-ray use, a radiologist discovered cases in which fifty t one hundred X-rays had been taken of a single patient when five would have been sufficient. Other surveys have shown that, for almost one-third of the patients, the X-ray could have been omitted or deferred on the basis of available clinical data. We have been able to use basic principles to design and build a simple molecule that folds up the way we want it to. This is really the first real example of a design protein structure, designed from scratch, not by taking an already existing structure and tinkering with it. Although scientists do the work, the work itself is really a form of engineering. The process makes this clear: After you have made it, the next step is to find out whether our protein did what you expected it to do. Did it fold? Did it pass ions across bilayers [such as cell membranes]? Does it have a catalytic function [speeding specific chemical reactions]? And that is tested using the appropriate experiment. More than likely, it will not have done what you wanted it to do, so you have to find out why. Now, a good design has in it a contingency plan for failure and helps you learn from mistakes. Rather than designing a structure that would take a year or more to analyze, you design it so that it can be assayed for given function or structure in a matter of days. Many groups are pursuing design today, including academic researchers like Jane and Dave Richardson at the Duke University, Bruce Erickson at the University of North Carolina, and Tom Blundell, Robin Leatherbarrow, and Alan Fersht in Britain. The successes have stated to roll in. Japan, however, is unique in having an organization devoted exclusively to such projects: the Protein Engineering Research Institute (PERI) in Osaka. In 1990, PERI announced the successful designs and construction of de novo protein several times larger than any built before. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Extra-intelligence can squeeze untold billions of fat and waste out of the economy. It potentially represents an enormous leap forward—the substitution of brainpower and imagination not merely for capital, energy, and resources, but for brutalizing labor as well. However, whether extra-intelligence produces a “better” way of life will depend partly on the social and political intelligence that guides its overall development. The more automated and extra-intelligent our networks become, the more human decision-making is hidden from view, and the more dependent we all become on preprogrammed events based on concepts and assumptions that few understand and that are sometimes not even willingly disclosed. Before long the power of computers will leap forward because f parallel processing, artificial intelligence, and other studding innovations. Speech recognition and automatic translation will, no doubt, come into wide use, along with high-definition visual displays ad concert-class sounds. The same networks now routinely carry voice, data, imagines, cable, Internet, and other information in other forms. All this raises profound philosophical questions. Some see in all this the coming monopolization of knowledge. The moment of truth comes when the matter of the ownership and control of the new information banks…[strikes] with a vengeance. This is the specter of a global private monopoly of information. That fear is now far too simple. The issue is not whether one giant global private monopoly will control all information—which seems highly unlikely—but who will control the endless conversations and reconversions of it made possible by extra-intelligence, as data, information, and knowledge flow through the nervous system of the super-symbolic economy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Baffling new issues about the uses and misuses of knowledge will arise to confront business and society as a whole. They will no longer simply reflect Bacon’s truth that knowledge is power, but the higher level of truth that, in the super-symbolic economy, it is knowledge about knowledge that counts most. I.T. and telecommunications, however, are not the only advanced technologies that can contribute to a real war on poverty. India has one of the most successful operational space programs running in the developing World, with capabilities to design, develop, fabricate and launch its own communications and remote sensing satellite. It is also planning to send a scientific payload to go around the moon using its own rocket. Once more, this may seem irrelevant to the less affluent—your land is subject to sudden flooding or you are among the thousands saved from drowning with the help of satellite-based disaster-warning systems and remote sensing technologies. Or if you are among the 100,000 patients of the Regional Cancer Center in Thiruvananthapuram who once had to travel extremely long distance, often more than one, and at high cost, for treatment or follow-up care. The RCC has now set up six peripheral centers. All six are teleclinics linked to the main facility by the Internet—and the number of necessary follow-up visits has fallen by more than 30 percent. The Indian Space Research Organization has also created satellite links between big, multi-specialty hospitals and eight remote healthy centers to allow the exchange of patients’ records, imagines and data from medical instruments, along with live video and audio contact. All this means that doctors in central locations can help guide medics in the remote rural villages. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
In biotechnology, India could generate $5 billion and up to a million new jobs in the coming five years. India’s Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority has agreed to allow insurance firms to put money into biotech, and the government has made it easier for foreign venture capitalist to invest. It is in this sector, as we will see shortly, that some of the most important tools for the reduction of poverty may well be found. And not just in India. Many of the advances we see in India are still either experimental or limited. They are patchy and not yet systemically integrated. However, as more pieces of the knowledge-based wealth system are laid in place and begin to interact and reinforce one another, their payoffs will increase combinatorially, if not exponentially, as happened in the past when different components of the industrial wealth system—social, institutional, political and culture—came together. India faces many of the same social, political and cultural challenges we find in China—corruption, infirmary, massive environmental problems, the need for institutional reinvention and generational conflict, to name a few. Externally, while China worries about Taiwan, India worries about a shaky, nuclear-armed Pakistan and the ever-bloody struggle against Muslim secessionists in Kashmir. What is more, and unlike China ate present, India faces caste conflict and intermittent murderous battles between Hindu and Muslim fanatics. Despite all this, India knows it cannot delay a fresh assault on poverty—and it cannot win that attack with smokestacks alone. It also cannot win so long as most of its population remains doomed to a low-productivity peasant existence, no matter how much small-scale “appropriate technology” is introduced. Neither a Second Wave strategy nor a First Wave strategy is enough. “Believest thou that there is no God? I say unto you, Nay, thou knowest that there is a God, but thou lovest that lucre more than Him,” reports Alma 11.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Find a Way to Have Your Own Mind
Everyone is God and the Devil, for together Satan and Christ inhabit everyone. Like Christ and Satan, many people are both metaphorically crucified and sent to hell. Anything that is not created out of the depths of loneliness is not a creation, only a production, and has no soul to sustain it. Many people who claim to be waiting for the second coming are not genuine, often they are just waiting for a chance to get on the second crucifixion. A few of them are already bargaining for the television rights lest they get caught with their pants down by an unknown contender making a surprise bid for the number one spot. What they fail to realize is that the twenty first-century savior is going to outfox them all by, yes, he is going t crucify himself, thus getting a jump on his competitors. Not only that, but his loyal followers will be standing there beside him, not just gawking or taking notes, but yes, sports lovers, actually crucifying themselves right along with their leader. And they stand, eyes wild. It is hard to see because the light is getting so bright, but it seems that each one of these men and women is armed with a golden hammer and a handful of plutonium spikes. They are standing in a circle around a tower, on the breast of a hill in the midst of a slum, and they are actually nailing themselves to the ground, fellow Americans, and some of them are nailing each other to the ground—let us have a slow motion replay of that last bit of actions—wonderful—and now it appears that these people are actually driving these spikes in rhythm and singing some sort of spiritual or worksong!—word just in from our computers indicates that the language they are singing in has never been spoke on Earth before—perhaps that is why they are singing it instead—and ladies and gentlemen, the modern messiah has just announced that as soon as he is sure these spikes have been driven deeply enough, he and his disciples will rise, that is right, folks, they are going to rise into the Heavens, and since they are so, well, attached to the Earth, they are going to drag it along behind them! #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Wow! Sounds like they have got their work cut out for them, eh? Lucky you can just sit in your armchair and wait for it to come on tv! They seem to be nearly ready for the Big Drag now…hard to tell what is actually happening from down here, though, what with all the blood and thunder and fire and screaming—maybe I will just step up the hill here a bit, and get a closer look…might be a little risky, but it is my job to get the truth, before it gets me. The Enlightenment thinkers understood themselves to be making a most daring innovation: according to Machiavelli, modern philosophy was to be politically effective, while Plato and Aristotle, and all the ancients who followed them since Socrates founded political philosophy were politically ineffective. Machiavelli follows Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, who ridicules Socrates for being unable to defend himself, to avert insults or slaps in the face. The vulnerability of the philosopher would seem to be the starting place for the new reflection and the renewal of philosophy. This may seem trivial to many today, but the entire philosophic tradition, ancient and modern, took the relation of mind to society as the most fruitful beginning point for understanding the human situation. Certainly the first philosophy of which we have a full account begins with the trial and execution of the philosopher. And Machiavelli, the inspirer of the great philosophical systems of modernity, starts from this vulnerability of reason within the political order and makes it his business to correct it. Some might say it was not concern with the fate of philosophers but the wish, In Bacon’s phrase, to ease man’s estate that motivated the modern thinkers. This, however, comes down to the same thing—a criticism of the ancient philosophers for their impotence, and a reflection on the relation of knowledge to civil society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The ancients were always praising virtue, but men were not made more virtuous as a result. Everywhere there were rotten regimes, tyrants persecuting peoples, rich exploiting the less affluent, computer hackers robbing people of their hard earn money through various means, nobles keeping down citizens men insufficiently protected by laws or arms, et cetera. Wise men saw clearly what was wrong in all this, but their wisdom did not generate power to do anything about it. The new philosophy claimed to have discovered the means to reform society and to secure the theoretical life. If the two purposes were not identical, they were intended to be complementary. It must be remembered that this was a dispute within philosophy and that there was an agreement among the parties to it about what philosophy is. The moderns looked to and disagreed with the Greek philosophers and their heirs, the Roman philosophers. However, they shared the view that philosophy, and with it what we call science, came to be in Greece and had never, so far as is known, come to be elsewhere. Philosophy is the rational account of the whole, or of nature. Nature is a notion that itself is of Greek origin and requisite to science. The principle of contradiction guided the discourse of all, and the moderns presented reasoned arguments against those of their predecessors with who they disagree. The moderns simply took over a large part of ancient astronomy and mathematics. And they, above all, agreed that the philosophic life is the highest life. Their quarrel is not like the difference between Moses and Socrates, or Jesus and Lucretius, where there is no common universe of discourse, but more like the differences between Newton and Einstein. It is a struggle for the struggle for the possession of rationalism by rationalists. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
This fact is lost sight of, partly because scholasticism, the use of Aristotle by the Roman Catholic Church, was the phantom of philosophy within the older order that was violently attacked by the modern philosophy. Another reason why the essential agreement between ancients and moderns is no longer clear is the modern science of intellectual history, which tends to see all differences of opinion as differences of “Worldview,” which blurs the distinction between disagreements founded on reason and those founded on faith. They very term Enlightenment is connected with Plato’s most powerful image about the relation between thinker and society, the cave. In the Republic, Socrates presents men as prisoners in a dark cave, bound and forced to look at a wall against which are projected images that they take to be the beings and that are for them the only reality. Freedom for man means escaping the bonds, civil society’s conventions, leaving the cave and going up to where the run illuminates the beings and seeing them as they really are. Contemplating them is at once freedom, truth and the greatest pleasure. Socrates’ presentation is meant to show that we begin from deceptions, or myths, but that it is possible to aspire to a nonconventional World, to nature, by the use of reason. The false opinions can be corrected, and their inner contradictions impel thoughtful men to seek the truth. Education is the movement from darkness to light. Rason projected on the beings about which at first we only darkly opine produces enlightenment. The moderns accepted that reason can comprehend the beings, that there is a light to which science aspires. The entire difference between ancients and moderns concerns the cave, or non-metaphorically, the relation between knowledge and civil society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Socrates never suggests that, even in the unlikely event that philosophers should be kings and possess absolute wisdom, the nature of the cave could be altered or that a civil society, a people, a demos, could not make any but the happy few able to see the beings as they really are. They would guide the city reasonable, but in their absence the city would revert to unreason. Or to put it in another way, the unwise could not recognize the wise. Men like Bacon and Descartes, by contrast, thought that it was possible to make all men reasonable, to change what had always and everywhere been the case. Enlightenment meant to shine the light of being in the cave and forever to dim the images on the wall. Then there would be unity between the people and the philosopher. The whole issue turns on whether the cave is intractable, as Plato thought, or can be changed by a new kind of education, as the greatest philosophic figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth century taught. As Plato tells us, Socrates was charged with impiety, of not holding the same gods the city held, and he was found guilty. Plato always presents Socrates as the archetypical philosopher. The events of Socrates’ life, the problems he faced, represent what the philosopher as such must face. The Apology tells us that the political problem for the philosopher is the gods. It makes clear that the images on the wall of the cave about which me will not brook contradiction represent the gods. Socrates’ reaction to the accusation is not to assert the right of academic freedom to pursue investigations into the things in the Heavens and under the Earth. He accepts they city’s right to demand his belief. His defense, not very convincing, is that he is not a subversive. He asserts the great dignity of philosophy and tries as much as possible to reduce the gap between it and good citizenship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In other words, he temporizes or is insincere. His defense cannot be characterized as “intellectual honest” and is not quite to contemporary taste. He only wants to be left alone as much as possible, but is fully aware that a man who doubts what every good citizen is supposed to know and spends his life sitting around talking about virtue, rather than doing virtuous deeds, comes into conflict with the city. Characteristically, Socrates lives with the essential conflicts and illustrated them, rather than trying to abolish them. In the Republic he attempts to unite citizenship with philosophy. The only possible solution is for philosophers to rule, so there would be no opposition between the city’s commands and what philosophy requires, or between power and wisdom. However, this outline of a solution is ironic and impossible. It only serves to show what one must live with. The regime of philosopher-kings is usually ridiculed and regarded as totalitarian, but it contains much of what we really want. Practically everyone wants reason to rule, and no one thinks man like Socrates should be ruled by inferiors or have to adjust what he thinks to them. What the Republic actually traches is that none of this is possible and that our situation requires both much compromise and much intransigence, great risks and few hopes. The important thing is not speaking one’s own mind, but finding a way to have one’s own mind. Contrary to common opinion, it is Enlightenment that was intent on philosophers’ ruling, taking Socrates’ ironies seriously. If they did not have the title of king, their political schemes were, all the same, designed to be put into practice. And they were put into practice, not by begging princes to listen to them but by philosophy’s generating sufficient power to force princes to give way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The rule of philosophy is recognized in the insistence that regimes be constructed to protect the rights of man. The anger we experience on reading Socrates’ censorship of the poets is unselfconscious, if we agree, as we willy-nilly do, that children must be taught the scientific method prior to any claims of the imagination on their belief or conduct. Enlightenment education really does what Socrates only tentatively proposes. Socrates, at least, tries to preserver poetry, whereas Enlightenment is almost indifferent to its fate. The fact that we think there should be poetry classes as well as education in reasoning helps us to miss the point: What happens to poetic imagination when the soul has been subjected to a rigorous discipline that resists poetry’s greatest charms? The Enlightenment thinkers were very clear on this point. There is no discontinuity in the tradition about it. They were simply solving the problem to the advantage of reason, as Socrates wished it could be solved but thought it could not. Enlightenment is Socrates respected and free to study what he wants, and thereby it is civil society reconstituted. In the Apology, Socrates, who lives in thousands fold poverty because he neither works nor has inherited, purposes with ultimate insolence that he be fed at public expense at city hall. However, what is the modern university, with its pay and tenure, other than a free lunch for philosophy and scientists? Moreover, the Enlightenment’s explicit effort to remove the religious passion from politics, resulting in distinctions like that between church and state, is motivated by the wish to prevent the highest principle in political life from being hostile to reason. This is the intention in the Republic of Socrates’ reform of the stories about the gods told by the poets. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Nothing that denies the principle of contradiction is allowed to be authoritative, for that is the reef against which Socrates foundered. However, Socrates did not think that church and state could be separated. He would have treated both terms as artificial. The gods are believed to be the founders of every city and are its most important beings. He would not have dared to banish them in defense of himself. The Enlightenment thinkers took on his case and carried on a way against the continuing threat to science posed by first causes that are irrational or beyond reason. The gradual but never perfect success of that war turns the desire to be reasonable into the right to be reasonable, into academic freedom. In the process, political life was rebuilt in ways that have proved intolerable to many statesmen and thinkers, and have gradually led to the reintroduction of religion and the irrational in new and often terrifying guises. This is what Socrates would have feared. However, here I am only indicating the unity of the tradition, that Enlightenment is an attempt to give political status to what Socrates represents. The academy and the university are the institutions that incorporate the Socratic spirit more or less well. Yet the existence of these institutions underlines at the same time how they differ from Socrates, who founded no institutions and had only friends. And these attacks on these institutions made first by Rousseau and then by Nietzsche are attacks on Socratic rationalism made in a Socratic spirit. The history of Western thought and learning can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates, beginning with Plato defending him, passing through the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and ending with Nietzsche accusing on him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The cherishing, for two and a half millennia, of the memory of this man, who was put to death by the city for philosophizing, ends with his spiritual execution in the name of culture at the hands of the latest of great philosophers. Both city and culture are authorized by the sacred. The meditation on Socrates is the inspiring theme of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle, through Farabi and Maimonides, Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Socrates is the complementary man whose enigmatic being leads to reflection of the nature of the knowers. Sometimes the problem of slowing down rather than promoting cooperation. An example is the prevention of collusive business practices by avoiding the very conditions which would promote cooperation. Unfortunately, the very ease with which cooperation can evolve even among egoists suggests that the prevention of collusion is not an easy task. Cooperation certainly does not require formal agreements or even face-to-face negotiations. The fact that cooperation based upon reciprocity can emerge and prove stable suggests that antitrust activities should pay more attention to preventing the conditions that foster collusion than to search for secret meetings among executives of competing firms. Consider, for example, the practice of the government selecting two companies for competitive development contracts for a new military airplane. Since aerospace companies specialize to some degree in planes for either Air Force or the Nav, there is a tendency for firms with the same specialty to face each other in the final competition. This frequency of interaction between two given companies makes tacit collusion relatively easy to achieve. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
To make tacit collusion more difficult, the government should seek methods of reducing specialization or compensating for its effects. Paris of companies which shared a specialization would then expect to interact less often in the final competitions. This would cause later interactions between them to be worth relatively less, reducing the shadow of the future. If the nest expected interaction is sufficiently far off, reciprocal cooperation in the form of tacit collusion cases to be a stable policy. The potential for attaining cooperation without formal agreements has its bright side in other contexts. For example, it means that cooperation on the control of the arms race does not have to be sought entirely through the formal mechanism of negotiated treaties. Arms control could also evolve tacitly. Certainly, the fact that the United States of America and Russia know that they will both be dealing with each other for a very long time should help establish the necessary conditions. The leaders may not like each other, but neither did the soldiers in World War I who learned to live and let live. Occasionally a political leader gets the idea that cooperation with another major power should not be sought because a better plan would be to drive them into bankruptcy. This is an extraordinarily risky enterprise because the target need not limit its response to the withholding of normal cooperation, but would also have a strong incentive to escalate the conflict before it was irreversibly weakened. Japan’s despairing gamble at Pearl Harbor, for example, was a response to power American economic sanctions aimed at stopping Japanese intervention in China. Rather than give up what it regarded as a vital sphere, Japan decided to attack America before becoming even further weakened. Japan understood that American was much more powerful, but decided that the cumulative effects of the sanctions made it better to attack rather than to wait for the situation to get even more desperate. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Trying to drive someone bankrupt changes the time perspective of the participants by placing the future of the interaction very much in doubt. And without the shadow of the future, cooperation becomes impossible to sustain. Thus, the role of time perspectives is critical in the maintenance of cooperation. When the interaction is likely to continue for a long time, and the players care enough about their future together, the conditions are ripe for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship. When the conditions are right, the players can come to cooperate with each other through trial-and-error learning about possibilities for mutual rewards, through imitation of other successful players, or even through a blind process of selection of the more successful strategies with a weeding out of the less successful ones. Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other. Just as the future is important for the establishment of the conditions for cooperation, the past is important for the monitoring of actual behavior. It is essential that they players are able to observe and respond to each other’s prior choices. Without this ability to use the past, defections could not be punished, and the incentive to cooperate would disappear. Fortunately, the ability to monitor the prior behavior of the other player does not have to be perfect. When dealing with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people sometimes assume perfect knowledge of the other individual. In many settings, however, an individual may occasionally misperceive the choice made by the other. A defection may go undetected, or a cooperation may be misinterpreted as a defection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The role of time perspective has important implications for the design of institutions. In large organizations, such as business corporations and governmental bureaucracies, executives are often transferred from one position to another approximately every two years. This gives executive a strong incentive to do well in the short run, regardless of the consequences for the organization in the long run. They know that soon they will be in some other position, and the consequences of their choices in the previous post are not likely to be attributed to them after they have left their position. This gives two executives a mutual incentive to defect when either of their terms is drawing to an end. The result of rapid turnover could therefore be a lessening of cooperation within the organization. Economics of the past, whether agricultural or industrial, were built around long-lasting structures. In place of these, we are laying the electronic basis for an accelerative kaleidoscopic economy capable of instantly reshuffling itself into new patterns without blowing itself apart. The new extra-intelligence is part of the necessary adaptive equipment. In the confusing new flux, businesses can use extra-intelligence to launch surprise attacks on entirely fresh territory, which means that companies can no longer be sure where the next competitive push will come from. The classic blitzkrieg—much analyzed in the network literature—was Merrill Lynch’s launch of its Cash Management Account in 1977, an early use of information technology for a strategic, as distinct from merely administrative, purpose. The Cash Management Account, or CMA, was a new financial product that combined four previously separate services for the customer: a checking account, a deposit account, a credit card, and a securities account. The customer could move money back and forth among these at will. There was no float and the checking account paid interest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The integration of these previously disparate products into a single offering was made possible only by Merrill Lynch’s sophisticate computer technology electronic networks. In twelve months, Merrill sucked in $5 billion of customer fund and by 1984, according to consultant Peter Keen, $70 billion had flooded into Merrill Lynch’s hands. Keen calls it a “preemptive strike” against the banks, which saw vast sums withdrawn by customers who preferred the CMA to an ordinary bank checking account. A securities house, not subject to ban regulations and not regarded as a bank, devastated the bank. Since then, many banks and other financial institutions have offered similar packages, but Merrill has a several-year head start on them. The strange new hybrid patterns of competition—which reflect a restructuring of markets as a result of extra-intelligence—are seen in the move of retailers like Japan’s Seibu Saison group into the financial services business. A Seibu subsidiary is planning to install electronic cash dispensers in railroad stations. British Petroleum, having set up its own internal bank, sells banking services to outsiders. Extra-intelligent networks help explain the widespread push for deregulation of industry, and they suggest that existing government regulations will prove less and less effective. For existing regulations are based on categories and divisions among industries that no longer exist in the age of extra-intelligence. Should banking regulations apply to nonbanks? What, after all, is a bank these days? By linking actual operations across company lines, by making it possible for companies to compete in fields once regarded as alien, extra-intelligent networks break up the old specialization, the old institutional division of labor. In their place come new constellations and cluster of companies, densely interrelated not merely by money but by shared information. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Ironically, it is the disruption cased by this drastic restructuring of the economy around knowledge that explains many of today’s breakdowns and inefficiencies—the misplaced bills, the computer errors, the inadequate service, the sense that nothing works properly. The old smokestack economy is disintegrating; the new super-symbolic economy is still being built, and the electronic infrastructure on which it depends is still in a primitive stage of development. Information is the most fluid of resources, and fluidity is the hallmark of an economy in which the production and distribution of food, energy, goods, and services increasingly depend on symbolic exchange. What emerges is an economy that itself looks more like a nervous system than anything else, and which runs according to rules no one has as yet formulated coherently. Indeed, the unprecedented rise of extra-intelligence raises profound, sometimes chilling questions for society as a whole, quite different from those raised by earlier communications revolutions. The World media today focus on the striking changes wrought by the outsourcing of jobs to India from the United States of America and elsewhere. Indeed, the story of I.T. jobs flowing to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, and Jaipur has made front-page headlines around the World. By 2021, India was earning $157 billion a year by manning call centers, writing software, performing back-office work, accounting and even financial analysis for American and other foreign firms. And India’s projected revenue from firms being outsourced to that nation is $245 billion by 2022. But the charge that outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans overlooks a reserves effect. For instance, Bangalore Central, a new shopping mall offering such imported brands as Levi’s, Polo, Lacoste and Jockey. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The outsourcing boom—insourcing from India’s point of view—is unlikely to continue at its present pace of growth, but it has helped create a segment of nouveaux riches who are young, middle-class, focused on “now” and very witty, too much so for their elders. The 2004 election in India resurrected the Congress Party, whose roots in quasi-socialism led it to view development conventionally as a matter of factories and smokestacks rather than the transition to a knowledge-based wealth system. However, even longtime holdouts are coming around, including Communists, who are theoretically farther to the let than the Congress Party. A reporter not long ago chided the Communist chief minister of the state of West Bengal, where Calcutta is located, pointing out that “your party helped protect the advent of computers.” The chief minister’s response: “That was in the 1970s—that was foolish, foolish. It stated when they were going to introduce computers in bans and [insurance companies]. Their employees protested and we supported it. Nowadays they have understood…We have entered a century where industries will be talent-based.” Now even Calcutta, once the World symbol of urban misery, has reached out and attracted IMB. Article after article has pictured India’s talented young I.T. workers as a greedy, socially irresponsible, yuppiesque middle class. Less attention has been paid to the fact that, because of computers over 8 million people in the state of Karnataka can now, for the equivalent of thirty cents, get a printout of land records securing their property from takeover by corrupt, farm-grabbing landlords. On a wider scale, a consortium of Indian and U.S. corporations, along with the World Bank, and the Indian government set up Internet kiosks in five thousand Karnataka villages that allow rural residents access to banking, education and government services. Karnataka is held up as a model for the rest of the nation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
An enterprising company made available a machine called HAGOTH, of which it might be said, this was Technopoly’s most ambitions hour. The machine cost $1,5000, the baragen of the century, for it was able to reveal to its owner whether someone talking on the telephone was telling the truth. It did this by measuring the “stress content” of a human voice as indicated by its oscillations. You connected HAGOTH to your telephone and, in the course of conversation, asked your caller some key questions, such as “Where did you go last Saturday night?” HAGOTH had sixteen lights—eight green and eight red—and when the caller replied, HAGOTH went to work. Red lights went on when there was much stress in the voice, green lights when there was little. As an advertisement for HAGOTH said, “Green indicates no stress, hence truthfulness.” In other words, according to HAGOTH, it is not possible to speak the truth in a quivering voice or to lie in a steady one—an idea that would doubtless amuse Richard Nixon. At the very least, we must say that HAGOTH’s definition of truthfulness was peculiar, but so precise and exquisitely technical as to command any bureaucrat’s admiration. The same may be said of the definition of intelligence as expressed in a standard-brand intelligence test. In fact, an intelligence test works exactly like HAGOTH. You connect a pencil to the fingers of a young person and address some key questions to one; from the replies a computer can calculate exactly how much intelligence exists in the young person’s brain. HAGOTH has mercifully disappeared from the market, for what reason I do not know. Perhaps it was sexist or culturally biased or, worse, could not measure oscillations accurately enough. When it comes to machinery, what Technopoly insists upon most is accuracy. The idea embedded in the machine is largely ignored, no matter how peculiar. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Some may wonder, how can protein engineering build molecular machines? Proteins can self-assemble into working molecular machines, objects that do something, such as cutting and splicing other molecules or making muscles contract. They also join with other molecules to form huge assemblies like the ribosome (about the size of a washing machine, in our simulation view). Ribosomes—programmable machines for manufacturing proteins—are nature’s closet approach to a molecular assembler. The genetic-engineering industry is chiefly in the business of reprogramming natural nanomachines, the ribosomes, to make new proteins is termed protein engineering. Since biomolecules already form such complex devices, it is easy to see that advanced protein engineering could be used to build first-generation nanomachines. Making proteins is easier than designing them. Protein chemists began by studying proteins found in nature, but have only recently moved on to the problem of engineering new ones. These are called de novo proteins, meaning completely new, made from scratch. Designing proteins is difficult because of the way they are constructed. A characteristic of proteins is that their activities depend on their three-dimensional structures. These activities may range from hormonal action to a function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function, it is always essential to have a definite three-dimensional shape or structure. This three-dimensional structure forms when a chain folds to form a compact molecular object. To get a feel for how tough it is to predict the natural folding of a protein chain, picture a straight piece of cord with hundreds of magnets and sticky knots along its length. In this state, it is easy to make and easy to understand. Now pick it up, put it in a glass jar, and shake it for a long time. Could you predict its final shape? Certainly not: it is a tangled mess. One might call this effort at predation “the sticky-cord-folding problem”; protein chemists call theirs “the protein-folding problem.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Given the correct conditions, a protein chain always folds into one special shape, but that shape is hard to predict from just the straightened structure. Protein designers, though, face the different job of first determining a desired final shape, and then figuring out what linear sequence of amino acids to use to make that shape. Without solving the classic protein-folding problem, they have begun to solve the protein-design problem. Now many people wonder why so much pleasures of the flesh and so much skin is shown on television? Well, it is because lust is better television than satisfaction. Ebullience and anxiety are better than tranquility. On the other hand, anger is better than anxiety. Jealousy is better television than acceptance. All of these work more easily than love. Passionate love is more communicable than brotherly and sisterly love. Competition is inherently more televisable than cooperation as it involves drama, winning, wanting and loss. Cooperation offers no conflict and becomes boring. Materialism, acquisitiveness and ambition, all highly focused attitudes, work better than spirituality, nonseeking, openness and yielding. The medium cannot deal with ambiguity, subtlety and diversity. Doing is also easier to convey than being. Activity will always be chosen over inactivity. When dealing with tribal peoples, objective events such as hunting, building, fighting or dancing are easier to convey through television than subjective details of qualities of experience, ways of mind, alternative perceptions. The latter qualities, which form the heart of life for tribal people, are dropped out in favor of the former. Lound is easier to televise than soft. Close is easer than distant. Large is easier than small. Too large is harder than medium. The narrow is easier than the wide. Therefore, television is not an accurately display of live, culture, people, or civilization, and it does not really teach a lot of values one wants their kids to follow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Therefore, do not let the news teach you how to profile situations or people, nor let them teach you how to predict future events. Local news tends to be fake. They are just trying to get ratings and they can keep their thoughts and prayers to themselves. Who knows what they are thinking and praying about besides a way to strike fear into people and spread ignorance in the community. Like the God of Heaven, man makes in himself the choice between good and evil, both of which, like Him, he bears within himself. Between God and man, however, stand the primal spirits, they too choosing, but in pure paradox. They neither contain nor confront a duplicity, each possesses only himself in the most extreme differentiation; the other one, the other thing, he only has as his absolute computer; such is the situation in which he chooses himself, his own kind and the work commensurate wit it. Choosing, each acknowledges himself. The evil chooses and acknowledges himself, not however merely as created thus and not otherwise, but precisely as the evil, and for his followers he does not merely posit that after death they shall abide with him, but that it is just the worst existence which shall fall to their lot (in this doctrines there is no distinction of category between bad and evil: the bad is precisely that which cases evil, and in the last analysis there is no other evil than that which it causes.) He desires evil as such; and thereby he fulfills the will of the highest god, who brought forth him and his twin: only through mastering unmitigated evil does existence attain to transfiguration. Here the most harassing of questions remains unasked: how can the God of Heavens, the primal being, have contained and encompassed evil? “And they hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord, because of their wicked combinations; wherefore, there began to be wars and contentions in all the land, and also may famines and pestilences, insomuch that there was a great destruction such and one as never had been known upon the face of the Earth; and all this came to pass in the days of Shiblom. And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them, reports Ether 10.7-8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 