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What the F–Business Must be Conducted with Glass Pockets!
Although you make think “What the F!” has a negative connotation, it is not a curse word. It means “What the Ferry!” It is what Ferry calls his live resonation radio show. Ferry Coresten is one of the most talented disc jockeys in the World. Mr. Coresten is Dutch disc jockey, record producer and remixer. Defining, understanding, and discovering the conditions that lead to peace is an intellectual challenge with a long and rich traditional with the social sciences. Nevertheless, it remains central today, not simply for academics but to the broader populations as well. The notion that peace is at hand as soon as there is no ongoing, large-scale organized violence is not only the most common idea today but also a way of viewing peace that goes back at least to antiquity. We sometimes achieve peace through military preparations and deterrence, or the military defeat of adversaries. The quantitative research on conflict, violence, and peace is an already large subject area within the social sciences, and it is undergoing yet another growth spurt in the aftermath of 9/11, with increasing discussion of terrorism, restriction of civil liberties, torture, invasion, insurgency, counterinsurgency, revolution, counterrevolution, mass protest, and protest policing. Many people think we already live in a police state, but they have not seen anything yet. In 2007, alarm companies did not want to install security cameras on homes because they warned home owners that footage could be obtained by anyone and put on the Internet without their consent, but now people are going as far as having cameras places in their home that security companies monitor. Before long, the streets and highways in the United States of American will be full of license plate readers, which automatically issues tickets for speeding, which will make the road less safe as less officers will be out to stop illegal vehicles and vehicle violating law. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
We will also have police drones patrolling neighbourhoods, roads, and highways recording information and acting as law enforcement agents, so there will be virtually no privacy and anything that is done can be pulled up and reviewed for later enforcement of the law. Therefore, it is critical to study peace as something more than merely the absence of overt violence. Peace is defined only as the absence of some violent actions. This form of peace, as “no violence,” can range from brutal dictatorships to democracies that fully respect human rights, from states that remain at peace only for brief periods of time between recurring bought of violence to societies that have not experienced overt hostilities for hundreds of years, and from states that consistently remain prepared for “hot” conflict to those that do not consider preparing for it. If peace is an inherent dichotomy, then war and genocide are the opposite. Personal relationship, closeness and warmth, Christian community—these are just what I have experienced in East Germany when I have visited. Over the years the society has always come through with insightful and perceptive judgments. The new paradigm of just peacemaking is grounded in the historical experience of people who have lived in the face of oppression, violation of their basic rights, and the nuclear threat, and who, together with political scientist, Christian ethicists, and activists, fashioned realistic steps of peacemaking that enabled them to begin living in the time after the Cold War even before the Wall came down. Though oppressed and constricted, they began to live our future. Because the paradigm is grounded in realistic but persistent hope-creating experience, attention must be paid to critical perspectives external to Christian faith; and since the heart of the story is consent to all God’s creating and the practice of forgiveness and love, an ethic is to be tested by its ability to be inclusive rather than to repress important standards of human life, or other members of the human community. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
We have all known we needed to develop new methods for achieving change without violence. Now we have seen nonviolent revolutions in Iran (where the revolution was nonviolent but not the subsequent regime) in Philippines, in Argentina, throughout Eastern Europe, and in the peoples’ defeat of the coup in the Soviet Union, and there is hope for them in South Africa and perhaps Palestine (where parts of the movement are nonviolent, and other parts are not). Human rights movements must refrain from violence. They must take the beneficial action of clearly articulating the human rights that need to be established. The breakdown of the medieval system of feudal society had one main significance for all classes of society: the individual was left alone and isolated. He was free. This freedom had a twofold result. Man was deprived of the security he had enjoyed, of the unquestionable feeling of belonging, and he was torn loose from the World which had satisfied his quest for security both economically and spiritually. He felt alone and anxious. However, he was also free to act and to think independently, to become his own master and do with his life as he could—not as he was told to do. However, according to the real life situation of the members of different social classes, these two kind of freedom were of unequal weight. Only the most successful class of society profited from rising capitalism to an extent which gave them real wealth and power. They could expand, conquer, rule and amass fortunes as a result of their own activity and rational calculations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
This new aristocracy of money, combined with that of birth, was in a position where they could enjoy the fruits of the new freedom and acquire a new feeling of mastery and individual initiative. On the other hand, they had to dominate the masses and to fight against each other, and thus their position, too, was not free from a fundamental insecurity and anxiety. But, on the whole, the positive meaning of freedom was dominant for the new capitalist. It was expressed in the culture which grew on the social of the new aristocracy, the culture of the Renaissance. In its art and in its philosophy it expressed the new spirit of human dignity, will, and mastery, although often enough despair and skepticism also. The same emphasis on the strength of individual activity and will is to be found in the theological teachings of the Catholic Church in the late Middle Ages. The Schoolmen of that period did not rebel against authority, they accepted its guidance; but they stressed the positive meaning of freedom, man’s share in the determination of his fate, his strength, his dignity, and the freedom of his will. On the other hand, the lower classes, the poor population of the cities, and especially the peasants, were impelled by a new quest for freedom and an ardent hope to end the growing economic and personal oppression. They had little to lose and much to gain. They were not interested in dogmatic subtleties, but rather in the fundamental principles of the Christian Bible: brotherliness and justice. Their hopes took active form in a number of political revolts and in religious movements which were characterized by the uncompromising spirit typical of the very beginning of Christianity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Rising capitalism, although it made also for their increased independence and initiative, was greatly a threat. In the beginning of the sixteenth century the individual of the middle class could not yet grain much power and security from the new freedom. Freedom brought isolation and personal insignificance more than strength and confidence. Besides that, he was filled with burning resentment against the luxury and power of the wealthy classes, including the hierarchy of the Roman Church. Protestantism gave expression to the feelings of insignificance and resentment; it destroyed the confidence of man in God’s unconditional love; it taught man to despise and distrust himself and others; it made him a tool instead of an end; it capitulated before secular power and relinquished the principle that secular power is not justified because of its mere existence if it contradicts moral principles; ad in doing all this it relinquished elements that had been the foundations of Judaeo-Christian tradition. Its doctrines presented a picture of the individual, God, and the World, in which these feelings were justified by the belief that the insignificance and powerlessness which an individual felt came from the qualities of man as such and that he ought to feel as he felt. Thereby the new religious doctrines not only gave expression to what the average member of the middle class felt, but, by rationalizing and systematizing this attitude, they also increased and strengthened it. However, they did more than that; they also showed the individual a way to cope with his anxiety. They taught him that by fully accepting his powerlessness and the evilness of his nature, by considering his whole life an atonement for his sins, by the utmost self-humiliation, and also by unceasing effort, he could overcome his doubt and his anxiety; that by complete submission he could be loved by God and could at least hope to belong to those whom God has decided to save. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Protestantism was the answer to the human needs of the frightened, uprooted, and isolated individual who had to orient and to relate himself to a new World. The new character structure, resulting from economic and social changes and intensified by religious doctrines, became in its turn an important factor in shaping the further social and economic development. Those very qualities which were rooted in this character structure—compulsion to work, passion for thrift, the readiness to make one’s life a tool for the purposes of an extra personal power, asceticism, and a compulsive sense of duty—were character trait which became productive forces in capitalistic society and without which modern economic and social development are unthinkable; they were the specific forms into which human energy was shaped and in which it became one of the productive forces within the social process. To act in accord with the newly formed character traits was advantageous from the standpoint of economic necessities; it was also satisfying psychologically, since such action answered the needs and anxieties of this new kind of personality. To put the same principle in more general terms: the social process, by determining the mode of life of the individual, that is, his relation to others and to work, molds his character structure; new ideologies—religious, philosophical, or political—result from and appeal to this changed character structure and thus intensify, satisfy, and stabilize it; the newly formed character traits in their turn become important factors in further economic development and influence the social process; while originally they have developed as a reaction to the threat of new economic forces, they slowly become productive force, furthering and intensifying the new economic development. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The system of rules and their enforcement itself must first establish a reputation for integrity and efficacy. This takes a long time and strict supervision even given much good will. In many countries, the great difficulties experienced by the governments of most transition economies in their attempts at such reputation-building require attempts of the top levels of the government at making and enforcing reliable governance systems. However, they can be ruined by some middle-level officials who attempt to make quick profit from their newfound power. There are evident problems of this in most transition economies. Also, in the phase when the system of rules in imperfect but improving, it can offer better outside payoffs to the participants in the prevailing relation-based system. By thus increasing their incentives to cheat their current partners, it can worsen the outcomes of the relation-based system. The policies required to initiate a transition from low-income equilibrium to a state of rapid growth may be qualitatively different from those required to reignite growth for a middle-income country. At low levels of income, with reasonable institutions and reasonable policies, it may be easy to achieve high growth up to semi-industrialization. However, the institutional requirements of reigniting growth in a middle-income country can be significantly more demanding. Growth starting from a low level can be achieved using relation-based governance in small communities of traders with good relationships and information networks, so long as the state does not actually inhibit such developments with its policies. However, to go beyond the middle-income level requires greater integration into a large economy, where relation-based governance is inadequate. The necessary shift toward rule-based governance is more demanding because it must overcome the additional problems of collective action, vested interest and so on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
How might such investment in the framework of rules get made? In 1898, when Elbert Gary and J. Pierpont Morgan started Federal Steel, they took the then unusual step of issuing quarterly reports because both men believed that corporations issuing publicly traded securities had to account for their financial performance. At first there was no public process such as external audits to guarantee the truthfulness of these accounts; presumably Mr. Morgan’s own reputation and integrity, acquired in the prevailing relation-based system of finance, gave them credibility. However, the public gradually found that inadequate, perhaps because others entering the arena of raising finance from the general public did not have the same reputation. A few years later, then president Theodore Roosevelt said that he would not “accept the publication of what some particular company chooses to publish as a favor, instead of demanding what we think ought to be published from all companies as a right” (Strouse 2000, p. 439). And still later, Mr. Morgan said that “business in the twentieth century would have to be conducted with glass pockets” (Strouse 2000, p. 600). This episode serves to emphasize the endogeneity of verifiability, and the value of making more information publicly verifiable. Forces operate on the other side to undermine a relation-based system when it comes into contact with other rule-based systems. If capital-owners in the relation-based system become able to invest abroad under a rule-based system and earn the going return there, that will raise the outside opportunities of the participants in each ongoing repeated game of relation-based finance, and thereby unravel its tacit cooperation equilibrium. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Similarly, as improvements in transportation technology or lowering of trade barrier with other countries, or liberalization of regulation within or across countries, bring a relation-based production system into contact with other economies and other markets, its firms will discover better opportunities outside their previous relationships; this can undermine the previous repeated game equilibrium. If or when a relation-based economy needs to import capital, whether financial or direct investment, it will find it difficult to do so. Unless foreigners are misinformed or gradually develop relationships with host-country businesses, they will be reluctant to lend. Conversely, firms in a relation-based system may be reluctant to borrow from lenders who are not part of their relation network, for fear that the strangers may withdraw their capital suddenly. So, if it needs foreign capital, a relation-based economy may fail to grow unless it changes over successfully to a rule-based system where anyone can invest with the confidence that the only uncertainties will be those arising from natural economic shocks, not those of borrowers’ strategic default or fraud or lenders’ capital flight. Of course the difficulties of brining together two such different systems of financial transactions are not insurmountable. Intermediaries can develop relations on both sides, and profit by providing these services for a fee. The Rothschilds did this in Europe with great success for over a century, literally be having relations on both or all sides. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the United States of America was a major capital importer. This was facilitated by the Morgans—Junius S. operating in London and J. Pierpont in New York—who established a relation-based chain of trust between borrowers in the United States of America and lenders in the United Kingdom and Europe. In modern times, Hong Kong served a similar role, dealing with lenders—Western ones on a basis of rules and overseas Chinese ones on the basis of relations—and with borrowers—investing firms in mainland China on a basis of relations. In countries shaken by the Third Wave, the truly poor no longer necessarily have numbers on their side. In a good many countries they—like everyone ese—have become a minority. Not only is majority rule therefore no longer adequate as a legitimating principle, it is no longer necessarily humanizing or democratic in societies moving into the Third Wave. Second Wave ideologues routinely lament the breakup of mass society. Rather than seeing in this enriched diversity an opportunity for human development, they attack it as “fragmentation” and “Balkanization” and attribute it to the aroused “selfishness” of minorities. This trivial explanation substitutes effect for cause. For the rising activism of minorities is not the result of a sudden onset of selfishness; it is, among other things, a reflection of the needs of a new system of production which requires for its very existence a far more varied, colourful, open and diverse society than any we have ever known. We can either resist the thrust toward diversity, in a futile last-ditch effort to save our Second Wave political institutions, or we can acknowledge diversity and change those institutions accordingly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The former strategy can only be implemented by totalitarian means and must result in economic and cultural stagnation; the latter leads toward social evolution and a minority-based twenty-first-century democracy. To reconstitute democracy in Third Wave terms, we need to jettison the frightening but false assumption that increased diversity automatically brings increased tension and conflict in society. Indeed, the exact reverse can be true. Conflict in society is not only necessary, it is, within limits, desirable. If one hundred men all desperately want the same brass ring, they may be forced to fight for it. On the other hand, if each of the hundred has a different objective, it is far more rewarding for them to trade, cooperate and form symbiotic relationships. Given appropriate social arrangements, diversity can make for a secure and stable civilization. It is the lack of appropriate political institutions today that unnecessarily sharpens conflict between minorities to the knife-edge violence. It is the lack of such institutions that makes the majority harder and harder to find. The answer to these problems is not to stifle dissent or to charge minorities with selfishness (as though the elites and their experts are not similarly self-interested). The answer lies in imaginative new arrangements for accommodating the legitimating diversity—new institutions that are sensitive to the rapidly shifting needs of changing and multiplying minorities. Someday future historians may look back on voting and the search for majorities as an archaic ritual engaged in by communicational primitives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Today however, in a dangerous World, we cannot afford to delegate total power to anyone, we cannot surrender even the weak popular influence that exists under majoritarian systems, and we cannot allow tiny minorities to make vast decisions that tyrannize all other minorities. This is why we must drastically revise the crude Second Wave methods by which we pursue the elusive majority. We need new approaches designed for a democracy of minorities—methods whose purpose is to reveal differences rather than to paper them over with forced or fake majorities based on exclusionary voting, sophistic framing of the issues or rigged electoral procedures. We need, in short, to modernize the entire system so as to strengthen the role of diverse minorities, yet permit them to form majorities. In Second Wave societies, voting to determine the popular will provide an important source of intermittent feedback for the ruling elites. When conditions for one reason or another became intolerable for the majority, and fifty-one percent of the voters registered their pain, the elites could, at a minimum, shift parities, alter policies, or make some other accommodations. Even in yesterday’s mass society, however, the fifty-one percent principle was a decidedly blunt, purely quantitative instrument. Voting to determine the majority tells us nothing about the quality of people’s views. It can tell us how many people at a given moment want X, but not how badly they want it. Above all, it tells us nothing about what they would be willing to trade off for X—crucial information in a society made up of many minorities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
When a minority feels so threatened or attaches such life-and-death significance to a single issue that its views should perhaps receive more than ordinary weight, nor does it signal us then. In a mass society these well-known weaknesses of majority rule were tolerated because, among other things, most minorities lacked strategic power to disrupt the system. In today’s finely wired society, in which all of us are members of minority groups, that is no longer true. For a de-massified Third Wave society, the feedback systems of the industrial past may be considered too crude. Thus we will have no use voting and the polls in a radically new way. Also, because the de-massification and redistribution of media outlets, we are no longer creating stars as famous Worldwide as Aaliyah, Britney Spears, Beyonce, Paris Hilton, Brad Pitt, Tyson Beckford, Tyra Banks, Jennifer Lopez, or Lucy Lui. Fortunately, Third Wave technologies provide pathways toward Third Wave democracy. They reopen, in a startling new context, fundamental issues that our founders considered two hundred years ago. These technologies make possible new, hitherto impractical forms of democracy. Although the transition from the problem phase to the proposal phase of planning is usually gradual, the formulation of proposals is qualitatively distinct from the definition of public and problem. Proposals are creative responses; they call for imagination, invention, even genius. The making of proposals has to be properly timed, not coming too early in the planning process. For any given problem there may be a number of solutions, and thus new potentialities of divergence are introduced into the public’s discussion. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
If those who make proposals are anxious that they be accepted or at least taken seriously and attended to, they should ideally wait until a public has become quite clear and coherent s to the nature of its problem and its desire to act. This is especially true when a proposal is likely to threaten this or that section of the public’s interest; a premature proposal is more easily exiled from discussion by an alter minority, or even without opposition may lose force, when its relevance is not yet apparent. Perhaps the proposal phase could be said to begin where “to act or not to act” ceases to be the question and consideration turns to serious alternatives. It ends when the proposal or proposals go before a policy-making body for decision. If the outcome is to be a full-fledged proposal of the planning type, during the interim a considerable number of developments ideally must occur. During this phase, proposals may be legion, running from the most casual sort of suggestion to massive reports prepared by many experts and taking years of work. If it is to deserve serious considerations, despite such variation in their elaborateness, the proposal must contain some basic elements. There must be a statement of an effective and feasible way of solving the problem as it has been defined. An estimate of the resources, human and material, required for carrying out the proposal. A schedule of the rate at which these recourses will be applied. A statement of certain quantitative goals for achievement within the schedule set. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Any proposal containing these elements is a planning proposal, and is often called a plan, sometimes with the name of its author prefixed, exempli gratia, the Marshall Plan (although technically it does not become a plan until it has been subject to a policy commitment, and then of course it becomes a program). The injection of proposals into the public’s discussion of the problem is frequently, at first, on what might be called an amateur basis. While each serious proposal may contain the four essential elements, their development is neither elaborate nor exact. The multiplicity of proposals and their rudimentary nature, given a strong feeling of concern, then quite readily lead to a conscious demand for more careful study of the situation and comparative examination of the proposals. Then, and not before then in most cases, is the appropriate time for commencing the formal organization of the public. At this point, another custom is often to constitute some expert committee, commission, or board and to charge it with making a study and some definite recommendations for action. The composition of the more successful committees tends to be drawn, with certain exceptions, from all the significant elements in the public to which the situation is a problem. To give them their charge may call for further definition of the appropriate scope of the planning area. This calls for judgment and may itself be a matter of disagreement. If action is truly desired, the planning area ought to be confined to those to whom the situation is definitely a problem in which they are actively involved, and it ought not to include everyone who might potentially experience some consequence from the action taken. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
After admitting the possibility of deception in supernatural things, and a doubt has come into mind whether certain “experiences,” either personal or otherwise, were of God after all, the next stages are: The discovery of the deception. Light and truth alone can make free, and when once a doubt comes in and the man opens his mind to the truth that he is as liable to be deceived as anyone else, then to the mind and attitude light is given (John 3.21). Sometimes the specific deception is seen at once, but more often the discovery is gradual, and patience is needed while the light slowly dawns. Certain fact in connection with various experiences of the past, which the believer has failed to note, may now emerge into the light, and the half-truths which the Adversary had used to deceive are clearly seen: the twisting of words, the wrenching of sentences out of their context in the Scriptures—all come into a view as the light is given. Then comes: the acknowledgement of the deception. This is now imperative. The truth must not only be faced but owned up to, so that things are called by their right names, and the father of lies defeated by the weapon of truth. The Book of Mormon and the Christian Holy Bible keeps one from sin, and draws one near to virtue. You shall teach diligently the word of God to your children. The moral World is maintained by the instruction of our young; their education shall not be interrupted even to rebuild the Temple. When parents encourage their children to study The Book of Mormon and the Christian Holy Bible, their influence lives beyond the grave. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
One who has studied in one’s youth may be compared to writing set down on new parchment; but one who begins to study when one is old, is like writing set down on re-used parchment. If one studies The Book of Mormon and the Holy Christian Bible in one’s youth, its words are woven into the texture of one’s life. Train a child in the way one should go, and when one is older, one will not depart from it. As long as the voices of children resound with the study of The Book of Mormon and the Holy Chistian Bible, no enemy can triumph over America. The Book of Mormon and the Holy Christian Bible are each a Tree of Life; happy are they who understand its teachings, and fulfill God’s commandments. The significance of the Cross and the Resurrection of Jesus as the Christ can be summed up in one word: salvation. One can be saved from many things, but salvation is salvation from the ultimate negativity. Salvation is healing for healing means reuniting that which is estranged, giving a center to what is split, overcoming the split between God and man, man and his Worl, man and himself. It is the revelation of the New Being in Jesus as the Christ which brings salvation. Consequently, where there is revelation, there is salvation, for the revelation of the ground of being transforms and heals. Revelation and salvation are identified. The revelational history of mankind—preparatory revelation before the appearance of the New Being, and receiving revelation afterwards—testifies that men have shared in the healing power of the New Bring, or else they would have succumbed to the destructive tendencies of existential estrangement and have ceased to exist. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Traditional theology has presented the rigid alternatives of total condemnation and total salvation. However, we reject them both, for, although the healing power of the New Being is never absent, even those who experience it are healed but fragmentarily. The divine act overcomes estrangement by removing guilt, and man reacts by accepting reconciliation. The effects of atonement are threefold, and together they constitute the meaning of salvation: Regeneration, Justification, and Sanctification, or, in Tillichian terminology, participation, acceptance, and transformation. Regeneration stresses the objective power of the New Being to grasp estranged mankind and draw it into itself. Man participates in the new reality revealed in Christ only by being seized by it. Thus, Regeneration is the new state of things, the new eon, which the Christ brought; the individual enters it, and in so doing he himself participates in it and is reborn through participation. Since Regeneration is participation in the objective power of the New Being, it precedes Justification, for faith as the state of being grasped by the divine presence is not a human act, but the work of the Spirit. Justification is acceptance. It is the act of God by which He accepts sinful man in spite of his guilt. It is also the act of man by which man accepts God’s saving mercy. Indeed, there is nothing in man which enables God to accept him. However, man must accept just this. He must accept that he is accepted; he must accept acceptance. This in spite of his anxiety, man accepts God’s justifying act. In spite of is the paradox of simual peccator, simul Justus. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
As a divine act, Regeneration and Justification are one, for Regeneration is the actual reunion of the estranged, and Justification is its paradoxical character. Sanctification is distinct from both of them in the sense that a process is distinguished from the event in which it is initiated. Sanctification is the process in which the New Being transforms both individuals and communities. Sanctification, as transformation, takes place both within religion and outside it in the secular realm. Up to now emphasis has been laid upon the individual man as the one who is saved. However, our vision is broader than that. At the crucifixion of Jesus the sun was darkened, the temple veil split, rocks cracked, and the dead rose. Nature was in an uproar, and the event at Golgotha is one which concerns the Universe, including all nature and history. The Christ cannot be restricted to one area; Christology must be cosmic. Salvation extends to the whole World, and World means nature as well as man. It is through man, the microcosm, that the saving power of the New Being reaches out to the Universe. The tragedy of nature is bound to the tragedy of man, as the salvation of nature and nature is in man. Consequently, the impact of the Spiritual Presence upon beings inferior to man is indirect and, in a quantitative sense, severely limited. However, in a qualitative sense it is enormous. Salvation is found within the Kingdom of God which embraces the Universe. It is the place where there is complete transparency of everything for the divine to shine through it. In His fulfilled kingdom, God is everything for everything. Salvation, the healing of the disrupted, is brought about by love, for love is the drive towards the unity of the separated. The New Being is the love of Jesus who is the Christ, reuniting estranged mankind with its ground. The Spiritual Presence manifests itself as love. After distinguishing divine love from human love, we come to an understanding that man’s love for God is the drive toward the reunion of the separated. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
However, since salvation is an act of God, God’s love must first extend to man and grasp him. The distinction between faith and love disappears, for being grasped by God in faith and adhering to Him in love is one and the same state of creaturely life. We belong to the Old Creation, and the demand made upon us by Christianity is that we also participate in the New Creation. What is this New Being? The only thing that counts, regardless of faith, is the union with Him in whom the New Reality is present. No religion matters—only a new state of things. The New Creation—this is our ultimate concern; this should be our infinite passion—the infinite passion of every human being. This matters; this alone matters ultimately. In comparison with it everything else, even religion or non-religion, even Christianity or non-Christianity, matters very little—and ultimately nothing. And now again we ask: What is this New Being? It is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split, and almost destroyed. Therefore, we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold “re,” namely, re-conciliation, re-union, re-surrection. The word “resurrection” has for many people the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images. However, resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of death of the Old. Resurrection is not an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow…Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in soul and history, in nature and Universe. The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality. A New state of things had appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you. And like God saves all, the Fire Department will rescue you no matter how rich or poor you are, no matter or age, or what you look like or where you live! Be sure to thank your local heroes, and feel free to make donations to them, they are understaffed and underfunded. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
MAGNOLIA STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH
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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.
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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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What Do You Intend to Do with Me?
There came to me the blessed knowledge that every living soul was the subject of this celebration, of this infinite and ceaseless chorus, that every soul was loved as I was loved, know now as I was known. Not a single word was lost in the great mansion of love that surrounded me, this vast night was as bright as day. The grounds were thrown open, the trees hung with coloured lamps. There was such a display of fireworks as Paris itself had never witnessed. And such music—music, you know, is my weakness—such ravishing music! The finest instrumental band, perhaps in the World, and the finest singers who could be collected from all the great operas in Europe. As you wandered through the fantastically illuminated ground of Llanada Villa, the moon-lighted mansion throwing a rosy light from its long rows of windows, you would suddenly hear these ravishing voices stealing from the silence of the fruit orchard, or rising from upon the farmland. I felt myself, as I looked and listened, carried back into the romance and poetry of my early youth. When the firework were ended, and the ball beginning, we returned to the Grand Ballroom which was thrown open to the dancers. A masked ball, you know, is a beautiful sight; but so brilliant a spectacle of the kind I never saw before. It was a very aristocratic assembly. My dear niece Daisy was looking quite beautiful. She wore no mask. Her excitement and delight added an unspeakable charm to her features, always lovely. #RandolphHarris 1 of 9
An old friend called me by name, opened a conversation with me, which piqued my curiosity a good deal. She referred to many scenes where she had met me—at Court, and at distinguished houses. She alluded to little incidents which I had long ceased to think of, but which, I found, had only lain in abeyance in my memory, for they instantly started into life at her touch. I became more and more curious to ascertain who she was, every moment. She parried my attempts to discover very adroitly and pleasantly. The knowledge she showed of many passages in my life seemed to me all but unaccountable; an she appeared to take a not unnatural pleasure in foiling my curiosity, and seeing me flounder, in my eager perplexity, from one conjecture to another. She was very witty and lively when she pleased, and after a time . In the meantime, availing myself of the license of a masquerade, I put not a few questions to the lady. “You have puzzled me utterly,” I said, laughing. “Is that not enough? will you, now, consent to stand on equal terms, and do me the kindness to remove your mask?” “Can any request be more unreasonable? And how do you know that a sight of my face would help you?” she said. “I should take chance for that,” I answered. “Mrs. Winchester, you have no mask to remove. You can offer me nothing in exchange.” “My petition is to your pity, to remove it,” I replied. “And mind to yours, to let it stay where it is,” she said. “Well, then, at least you will tell me whether you are French or German; you speak both languages so perfectly.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 9
“I don’t think I shall tell you that, Mrs. Winchester; you intend a surprise, and are meditating the particular point of attack.” “At all events, you will not deny this,” I said, “that being honoured by your permission to converse, I ought to know how to address you, Shall I say Mrs. Bertha Haas?” She laughed, and she would no doubt, have met with another evasion—if, indeed, I can treat any occurrence in an interview every circumstance of which was pre-arranged, as I now believe, with the profoundest cunning, as liable to be modified by accident. “As to that,” she began; but she was interrupted, almost as the opened her lips, by a gentleman, dressed in black, who looked particularly elegant and distinguished, with this drawback, that his face was the most deadly pale I ever saw, except in death. He was in no masquerade—in the plain evening dress of a gentleman; and he said, without a smile, but with a courtly and unusually low bow:–“Will Mrs. Haas permit me to say a very few words which may interest her?” The lady turned quickly to him, and touched her lip in token of silence; she then said to me, “Keep my place for me, Mrs. Winchester; I shall return when I have said a few words.” And with this injunction, playfully given, she walked a little aside with the gentleman in black, and walked for some minutes, apparently very earnestly. They then walked away slowly together in the crowd, and I lost them for some minutes. A few moments she returned, accompanied by the pale man in black, who said: “Mrs. Winchester, please forgive me, but Mrs. Haas’s carriage is at the door.” They left in a hurry. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9
Darkness had fallen—I did not know what time it was. I was now on the first floor, about halfway down a passage which twists and turns so often that you cannot tell where you are. I had to go back and count three times to establish that there were twenty-two rooms on this corridor. The servants’ stairs are at the back of the house, with a door leading to the main part of the Hall at the front. The panelling had been scrubbed, and new carpets laid. The floor creaks wherever I move, no matter how softly I tread. There was folklore, while cloudy, evasive at best, which hinted at a hidden race of monstrous being which lurked someone among this passage way. These beings were seldomly glimpsed, but were said to wander in from deep in the fruit orchards, and the dark valleys where streams trickled from unknown sources. However, evidences of their presence was reported by those who had ventured father than usual into certain areas of the mansion that even I shunned. There were queer footprints or claw-prints on the floor and scratched on the walls. The rumors had several points in common; averring that the creatures were huge, black, and with two great batlike wings in the middle of their back. Once a specimen was seen flying—launching itself from the top of the observational tower, at night and vanishing in the sky after its great flapping wings had been silhouetted an instant against the full moon. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9
These things seemed content, on the whole, to let the staff alone; though they were at times held responsible for the disappearance of servants—especially those venturesome individuals who went too far in the fruit orchards or who went lurking in the observational tower at night. People would look up at Llanada Villa with a shudder, even when not recalling how many servants had been lost. However, while according to the earliest legends the creatures would appear to have harmed only those trespassing on their privacy. They attempted to establish secret outpost in my home. There were tales of queer claw-prints seen around the mansion’s windows in the morning, and of occasional disappearances in regions obviously haunted. Tales, besides, of buzzing voices in imitation of human speech which made surprising offers to the servants, and of housemaids frightened out of their wits by things seen or heard in parts of the mansion we rarely used. There are other tales of servant who had undergone a repellent mental change shortly after being hired, and who were shunned and whispered about as people who had sold themselves to strange beings. As to what these beings were—I had not a clue. Many just called the “demons.” However, there was unanimous agreement that these creatures were not natural. I had asked myself endlessly whether, if someone had succeeded in mesmerizing the servants, or shrouded their perception. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9
The next morning, I must have come down to breakfast first, though I did not recall dressing, or pinning up my hair, only—just as if I had been sleepwalking, and found myself suddenly wide awake at the breakfast table—seeing the housemaid at the sideboard. And I looked up fearfully. All evening I kept up the pretence that nothing had occurred; and when it came time to retire, I lay awake half the night, dreading the sound of something treading upon the stair, but the next morning it was the same. The housemaid gave her notice soon afterward, but if she had been forced to do so, she did not admit it to me. She had often spoke of lines and curves which pointed out directions leading through the walls of space to other spaces beyond, and had often implied that certain midnight meetings took places in these areas. She had also spoke of a large Black figure, then vanished. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and I somethings shook with fear least the noises I heard should subside and allow me to hear certain other noises which I suspected were lurking in the walls. Life had become an insistent and almost unendurable cacophony, and there was that constant, terrifying impression of other sounds—perhaps from regions beyond life—trembling on the very brink of audibility. There were rumours, too, with a baffling and disconcerting amount of agreement. Witnesses said the Black shadowy figure had long hair, was sharp-toothed, was evilly human and had claws like a bear. Of all the bizarre monstrosities in the Word, nothing filled me with greater panic and nausea than this blasphemous beast haunting the hall of my mansion, and to think that there were several of them behooved me. A sense of impending crisis was as palpable as the ticking clock. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9
The library and the old gallery from which one of the servants vanished from had been locked, for reasons of safety. And all of the rooms above this floor were closed, the stairs roped off and all the landing doors locked. In my tortured ears there sounds unceasingly a nightmare whirring and flapping, and a faint distant baying as of some gigantic hound. It is not a dream—it is not I fear, even madness—for too much has already happened to give me these merciful doubts. There was thunder in the air one night, the pitiful throngs of the win shrieked and whined, as the unnamable horror descended upon Llanada Villa. This house swarmed with ghosts. However, people enough, first and last, had been in terror or apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and become oneself, in the apparitional World, an incalculable terror? What habit and repetition had I gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness of corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evil-looking forms taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective; putting down my dim luminary I could still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only known it was there behind me in case of need, see my way about, visually project for my purpose a comparative clearness. It made me feel, this acquired faculty, like some stealthy cat; I wondered if I would ever glare at these moments with large shining yellow eyes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9
The moments I liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, I found myself hoping most. Then I could most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel my fine attention, never in my life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place: I preferred the lampless hour and only wished I might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. In the depths of the house, the mystical other World flourished. This night—I stood in the hall and looked up the staircase with certainty more intimate than any I had known. Then I realized there was a red-clad figure moving up there. The longer I watched, the clearer the figure became. The man was pacing back and forth at a rapidly increasing speed. His face carried a worried frown and suddenly he was running back and forth so fast that he levitated and bounced into the walls. I was shocked as the man continued back and forth, bouncing from wall to wall, until he actually touched the ceiling. I followed his progress upward and then he was gone. As I cast my eyes around my home, I saw that it was no longer empty. There were spectral people everywhere and they were watching me quietly. I had taken a number of steps to possess myself. The door between the rooms was open, and as I remembered, have all three upon a common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond me, without issue save through the preceding. The house, withal, was immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms, to no one of which my eye deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high skylight that formed the crown in the deep well created for me a medium in which I could advance, but which might have been, for queerness of colour, some watery underworld. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9
I tried to think of something noble, as Llanada Villa was really grand, a splendid possession; but this nobleness took the for of the clear delight with which I was finally to sacrifice it. They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers—they might come as soon as they would. At the end of two flights, I had dropped to another zone, and from the middle of the third, with only one more left, and I seemed to lose myself in the vague darkness. I let myself go on with the sense that here was at least something to meet, to touch, to take, to know—something all unnatural and dreadful. The penumbra, dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored sentinel guarding a treasure. I was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out, the particular thing I had believed during the rest of my descent. I saw, in its great gray glimmering margin, the central vagueness diminish, and I had felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of my curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence. Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of substance and stature. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into my throat, gasping there in a sound I could not utter; for the bared identity was too hideous. My glare was the passion of the protest. The face, that face! It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility. The presence before me was a presence, the horror of nights of grotesqueness. A thousand times as it came upon me nearer now—the face was the face of a stranger. The stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and I knew myself to give ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of my shock, and falling back as my whole vision turned to darkness and my feet gave way. My head went round; I was going; I had gone. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9
Many of the ghosts of The Winchester Mystery House are associated with tragedy. For years, there have been stories that the security guards see a man walking along the fourth floor of the mansion. The man does not set off the motion sensors, but he is often seen hurrying along. He disappears when guards approach too near him. The guards consistently describe him as a man in work clothes from the 19th century. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/
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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
Today, we’re saying “hey” 👋 to our Residence 1 at our brand new Magnolia Station community!
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Take Shelter on My Front Porch, Dandelion Sun Scorch, Would You Like a Cold Glass of Lemonade?
That a highly organized monarchy of evil spirit-beings was in existence is not made known in the story of the garden. Only a “serpent” is there; but in the serpent is spoken to by God as an intelligent being, carrying out a deliberate purpose in the deception of the woman. The serpent-disguised of Satan is swept aside by God as He makes known the decision of the Triune God in view of catastrophe which had taken place: a “Seed” of the deceived woman would eventually bruise the head of the supernatural being who had used the form of the serpent to carry out his plan. Yet from that point on the name of “serpent” is attached to him throughout the ages, for it describes the climax action of his revolt against his Creator in beguiling and deceiving the women in Eden and blasting the human race. Satan triumphed, but God overruled. The victim is made the vehicle for the advent of a Victor, who would ultimately destroy the work of the devil and cleanse the Heavens and the Earth from every trace of his handiwork. The serpent is cursed, but, in effect, the beguiled victim is blessed, for through her will come the ”Seed” which will triumph over the devil and his seed; and through her will arise a new race through the promised Seed (Gen. 3.15), a race which will be antagonistic to the serpent to the end of time, through the enmity implanted by God. Henceforth the story of the ages consists of the record of a war between these two seeds: the Seed of the woman—Christ and His redeemed—and the seed of the devil (See John 8.44; 1 John 3.10), right on to the furthermost point of the final committal of Satan to the lake of fire. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Henceforth it is also war by Satan upon the womanhood of the World, in malignant revenge for the verdict of the garden. Yes, war by the trampling down of women in all lands where the deceiver reigns. And war upon all women in Christian lands too, by the continuance of his Eden method of misinterpreting the Word of God: insinuating into men’s minds throughout all succeeding ages that God pronounced a “curse” upon the woman, when in truth she was pardoned and blessed; and instigating fallen men to personally carry out this supposed curse, though in truth it was a CURSE UPON THE DECEIVER and not upon the deceived one (Gen. 3.14). “I will put enmity between thee and the woman,” said God, a well as between “thy seed and her seed,” and this vindictive enmity of the hierarchy of evil toward women, and especially believers, had not lessened in its intensity from that day. Normative and behavioral aspects of a street gang collectively serve to shape and routinize the violent ways of its members. A gang is defined as an, “aggregated peer group that exhibits permanence, engages in criminal activity, and has symbolic representations of memberships.” For gangs, violence generally services critical, symbolic purpose withing the gang subculture. In many cases, violent themes permeate all aspect of gang life. Most gang members seek to develop and maintain a threatening physical presence. Violence tends to be incorporated into the entry rituals, social gatherings, and story-telling of the group. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
An overdeveloped sense of urgency and “threat” produces a contagion of violence, a hallmark of which is a never-ending cycle of preemptive and retaliatory violence among and between rival gangs. Gangs share many of the properties of mobs, crowds, and other collectives, and engage in many forms of collective behavior. Gangs have turf, symbols, organizational structure, permanence, criminality, and a sketchy sense of loyalty. One will notice a gang is always brought down when they trust an outsider. They fail to notice tale tale sighs that someone is working undercover. Many times, they also get too greed, to sloppy, think they are too big to fail, and talk too much, which leads to their down fall. Many gangs do not know when to give up and leave. It is like they are begging to be arrested and sent to prison. Their group membership, behavior, and values, however, make them interesting to criminologist who study gangs. Collective behavior explanations provide insights into gang processes, particularly the escalation of violence, the spread of gangs from one community to another, and increases in gang membership in specific communities. Violence, as we have mentioned, tends to be integral to the life in the gang, and gang members engage in more violence than other youths and senior citizens. Our analysis of gang violence focuses on the role of threat, actual or perceived, in explaining the functions and consequences of gang violence. We define threat as the potential for transgression against or physical harm to the gang, represented by the acts or presence of a rival group. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Threats of violence are important because they have consequences for future violence. Threat plays a role in the origin and growth of gangs, their daily activities, and their belief systems. In a sense, it help to define them to rival gangs, to the community, and to social institutions. Gangs are set apart from other groups by their ability to create “dread,” a direct consequence of involvement in and willingness to use violence. Dread elevates these individuals to street elites through the community members’ perceptions of gang members as violent. In many neighborhoods, groups form for protection against the threat of outside groups. Sometimes these groups are established along ethnic lines, though territorial concerns often guide their formation. There is a natural progression from a neighborhood group to a gang, particularly in the face of “adversarial relations” with outside groups. The emergence of many splinter gangs can be traced to the escalation of violence within larger gangs, and to the corresponding threat that the larger gang comes to represent to certain territorial or age-graded subgroups. Threat also may contribute to the growth of gangs. This mechanism works in two ways: through building cohesiveness and through contagion. Threats of physical violence increase the solidarity or cohesiveness of gangs within neighborhoods as well as across neighborhoods. The source of gang cohesion is primarily external—the results of intergang conflict. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Cohesion within the gang grows in proportion to the perceived threat represented by rival gangs. Threat maintains gang boundaries by strengthening the ties among gang members and increasing their commitment to each other, thus enabling them to overcome an initial reluctance about staying in the gang and ultimately engaging in violence. Thus the threat of a gang in a geographically proximate neighborhood increases the solidarity of the gang, motivates more young men to join their neighborhood gang, and enables them to engage in acts of violence that they might not have committed otherwise. The growth of gangs and gang violence contains elements of what is called “contagion.” In this context, contagion refers to subsequent acts of violence caused by an initial act; such act typically takes the form of retaliation. Violence—or its threat—is the mechanism that spreads gang from one neighborhood to another, as well as contributing to their growth. As the population of people of color grows in a community, many European Americas are prone to[RH1] move when the neighborhood diversifies. This is due to their fears of gang violence, and negative stereotypical beliefs about other racial and ethnic group. Some say White flight is due to increases in crimes, and conflicting political agendas. Many people wonder why there are so few European Americans in low income and middle-class neighborhoods. Well, it is because they tend to become victims of crime and are pushed out of their communities, which creates segregation. Many people do not realize it, but some African Americans are extremely racist. And speaking of segregation, by blockbusting, it is fascinating because many low income races of people do not like living around each other, due to the violence and crime and pests, but then they move to another community, threaten and harass the Europeans Americas until they move and create a ghetto. However, you will then find that these people do not like each other, they do not like living in the ghetto, and want to move out. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
Yet, the housing authority in many communities are not actually redeveloping. They are creating ghettos by violating fair housing laws and only renting to low income ethic groups, often from the same family, under the rouse of a lottery system. However, the exclude European America applicants, especially if they are young. The ability to manage the property because impossible because the management is in fear of the residence and neighbors in the surrounding houses live in fear and choose to move. As the community becomes undesirable, the property rates decrease because the area is what the insurance company deems high risk neighborhood (HRN), which makes the rates of any time of insurance in the neighborhood increase because more losses are sustained in that area. It also reduces the likelihood of investments in the neighborhood because it is unsafe. The threat of attack by a group of organized youth or senior citizens from another neighborhood is part of the gang “myth” or belief system, and helps to create the need for protection as well as to generate unity in a previously unorganized group of neighborhood youths and senior citizens. The origin and spread of such beliefs explain, among other things, the viability of the gang. Threat performs an additional function: it enhances the mythic nature of violence in the gang by increasing the talk about violence and preparedness for violent engagements. The threat of violence also “enables” gang member to engage in violent acts (especially retaliatory violence) that they might not have chosen under other circumstances. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The need to respond effectively to rival gang violence escalates weaponry and increases the “tension” that often precedes violent encounters between gangs. Threat has an additional function, however. As gangs and gang members engage in acts of violence and create “dread,” they are viewed as threatening by other (gang and non-gang) groups and individuals. Also, over time, the threats that gang members face and pose isolate them from legitimate social institutions such as schools, families, and the labor market. This isolation, in turn, prevents them from engaging in the very activities and relationships that might reintegrate them into legitimate roles and reduce their criminal involvement. It weakens their ties to the socialization power and the controlling norms of such mainstream institutions, and frees them to commit acts of violence. When once we clearly recognize the existence of an unseen host of evil spirit-being, all actively engaged in deceiving and misleading humans, Old Testament of the Christian Holy Bible history will convey to us an open vision of their doings otherwise hidden from our knowledge. We can trace their operations in relation to the servants of God throughout all history and discern the work of Satan as deceiver penetrating everywhere. We shall see that David was deceived by Satan into numbering Israel because he failed to recognize that the suggestion to his mind was from a satanic source (1 Chron. 21.1). #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
That is why it is not only important for people to remain active members of the church, but to also take a class on Home Economics and also learn how to remain in compliance with the law and be good neighbors by keeping your home clean, inside and out, and not to make too much noise, nor to have too many people hanging out in front of your property. Since senior citizens and the youth have special license as regards involvement rulings, we might ask whether, in American society at least, the genders are differently defined in this regard. Some evidence suggests that women, in general, are more tightly defined than men. There is at least a popular belief that the female toilet takes longer than the male, and that therefore more is entailed in making a female presentable thana in making a male presentable. So, too, a man who appears on a public street with his hair tousled, his tie loosened, a cigarette dangling from his lips seems to be less of an affront to public decorum than is a woman similarly disarrayed. Drunkenness in a woman has a much higher visibility than that in a man, which can be traced to the symbolic qualities of drinking and drunkenness in women in the past, when drinking customarily symbolized the bawd and the harlot. The lack of a long experience with drinking on the part of women in America may explain the greater loss of control they show in their tippling. Another possibility to be counted is that women are more likely to be badly maladjusted when they first turn to excessive drinking, and as a result their overt behavior becomes more flagrantly disorganized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
The high-pitched and overt behavior becomes more flagrantly disorganized. The high-pitched and shrill laughter of the drunken women often brands her behavior more quickly for what it is than in a man. Women are supposed to be neater, cleaner, fresher, and more fastidious about their dress than the opposite gender, so that disarray brought drunkenness also demarcates their condition more sharply. And yet, of course, women are sometimes defined as creatures who are not expected to be full-fledged participants in public meetings, and so can sometimes engage in somewhat taxing side involvements such as knitting, in recognition that they have not been deeply drawn into the occasioned main involvement. Similarly, there are coming to be more semipublic situations where a young woman may half-daringly slip her shoes off, while a man in the same setting cannot; but perhaps this is merely a sign that the female’s tightness of orientation is more than shoe-deep, and that a foot sheathed only in nylon is already almost presentable enough for safe public display. To speak of the general level of tightness or looseness built into a role is to imply a social rigidity: that is, the individual may be unable from the start to fit into certain social gatherings, finding that some are defined too loosely and others too tightly. Correspondingly, the individual will tend to exhibit alienation from those gatherings from which his role causes him to be unsuitably involved, and even be led to exhibit this kind of alienation at times when he does not want to. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
In this context it is worth considering the relation of work and clothing to the problem of fitting into gatherings. Some clothing, like that worn by deep-sea divers or firemen, is inextricably geared to the task at hand. These personal fronts can hardly serve in nonoccupational situations, nor can hardly serve in nonoccupational situations, nor can the possessor, unless he changes clothes. Even during the coffee-break he will be showing a certain kind of devotion to the job. In the case of white-collar task, however, work clothes transcend the work place and enable the worker to merge into gatherings occurring off the job. Correspondingly, when he is on the job, there will be parts of himself that he need not submerge into work, and this in fact provides him with one basis for self-possession and dignity. Those who must wear a uniform at work, and who cannot leave it in the locker room when they leave the premises, are likely to feel that they are under special constraint to give much of themselves to work and to carry this contribution to any nonwork situation in which they happen to find themselves. In the army, of course, this may be quite explicitly stressed by admonitions to respect one’s uniform. We find, then, that persons often feel unfairly restricted in uniform; they carp about not being able to melt easily into loose gatherings that happen to occur, and they feel their autonomy is threatened. Some individual may, of course, desire to maintain a pervasive alienation from their society at large, and seek membership in informed quasi-military groups partly in order to ensure that they will always be a little out of place. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
When you come into contact with the second and third lines of work, you necessarily come into contact with the will of others. “Is not stopping the expression of negative emotions more or less the same thing as giving up willfulness?” Why do you want to translate one thing into another? Willfulness may have many forms without a definite connection with negative emotions. “It seems to me that if you give up self-will you will get what you desire; that by giving up the desire, you get the desired results.” That is not self-will. Self-will does not include everything you want. If you are hungry and want to eat, that is not self-will. Self-will means preferring to act by yourself and, in our cause, not taking into consideration the work and the principles of the work. We speak of principles of the work and self-will. We can do things in our own way or not. If my self-will is to swear, for instance, and I give it up because it is against the principles of the work, where are the desired results you speak of? As I said earlier, self-will is always connected with self-opinions, a human always thinks one knows something. Then one comes to a school and realizes that one knows nothing. That is why preparation is necessary for school. One is usually full of self-opinions and self-will. Self-will is like a child saying, “I know it myself; I will do it myself.” Self-will has many features. One is told not to do something and at once one wants to do it; one is told that something is wrong, and at once one says, “No, I know better.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
A man who comes to teach school must be ready to accept the teaching and the discipline of the school; he must be free to accept it, or else he will get nothing. He cannot acquire will unless he gives up self-will; just as he cannot acquire knowledge unless he gives up self-opinions. “Must one break self-will oneself, or have it broken?” One must do it oneself, and one must have broken it sufficiently to be in a school. One must be sufficiently free from it to accept things without a fight. One cannot keep all the old views and opinions and acquire new ones. One must be sufficiently free to give up the old, at least for a time. One must be able to understand the necessity of discipline. Will cannot be created until one accepts a certain discipline. Strengthen your self-discipline and discover how it can help you succeed in all areas of your life. Most of life’s mistakes are easily overcome through simple, sincere repentance, a process common to nearly all religious people. In rare instances, we may commit serious transgressions that jeopardize our progress. Church discipline—restrictions and conditions of repentance that prompt a person to reevaluate their situation and return to full fellowship and activity—is a process designed to help us overcome sin in these instances. For all sins, large and small, it is the sacrifice and suffering, mercy and grace—or Atonement—of Jesus Christ that makes repentance possible. Church discipline is designed to help an individual more fully apply the Atonement of Jesus Christ, be cleansed of their sins and move forward in their eternal progression. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
Repentance brings peace when we place our lives in harmony with the teachings of Jesus Christ. Church discipline is a process that helps the individual feel that change of heart and change of behavior necessary to bring full forgiveness and peace. Someone who has fulfilled the requirements of Church discipline can be completely forgiven and return to full participation in the Church. Protect the innocent. When someone poses a physical threat to others or a spiritual threat to other members, Church discipline is conducted to provide protection to predatory practices, physical harm, abuse, fraud and apostasy. We all possess the God-given gift of moral agency—the right to make choice and the obligation to account for those choices. “That every human may act in doctrine and principle pertaining to futurity, according to the moral agency which I have given unto him or her, that every man or woman may be accountable for his or her own sins in the day of judgement,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 101.78. By “moral discipline,” I mean self-discipline based on moral standards. Moral discipline is the consistent exercise of agency to choose the right because it is right, even when it is hard. It rejects the self-absorbed life in favor of developing character worthy of respect and true greatness through Christlike service (see Mark 10.42-45). Jesus’s own moral discipline was rooted in His discipleship to the Father. To His disciples He explained, “My meat is to do the will of him that sent me, and to finish his work,” reports John 4.34. By this same pattern, our moral discipline is rooted in loyalty and devotion to the Father and the Son. It is the gospel of Jesus Christ that provides the moral certainty upon which moral discipline rests. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
When the fraction using technology is constant over time, we are at an equilibrium of the game. Our preference for gasoline engines over steam and light-water nuclear reactors over gas-cooled is better explained by historical accidents than by the superiority of the adopted technologies. In 1890 there were three ways to power automobiles—steam, gasoline, and electricity—and of these one was patently inferior to the other two: gasoline. [A turning point for gasoline was] an 1895 horseless carriage competition sponsored by the Chicago Times Herald. This was won by a gasoline-powered Duryea—one of only two cars to finish out six starters—and has been cited as the possible inspiration for R.E. Olds to patent in 1896 a gasoline power source, which he subsequently mass-produced in the “Curved-Dash Olds.” Gasoline thus overcame its slow start. Steam continued viable as an automotive power source until 1914, when there was an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease in North America. This led to the withdrawal of horse troughs—which is where steam cars could fill with water. It took the Stanley brothers about three years to develop a condenser and boiler system that did not need to be filled every thirty or forty miles. However, by then it was too late. The steam engine never recovered. While there is little doubt that today’s gasoline technology is better than steam, that is not the right comparison. How would steam have been if it had the benefit of seventy-five years of research and development? While we may never know, some engineers believe that steam was the better bet. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
In the United States of America, almost all nuclear power is generated by light-water reactors. Yet there are reasons to believe that the alternative technologies of heavy-water or gas-cooled reactors would have been superior, especially given the same amount of learning and experience. Canada’s experience with heavy-water reactors allows them to generate power for 25 percent less cost than light-water reactors can operate without the need to reprocess fuel. Perhaps most important is the safety comparison. Both heavy-water and gas-cooled reactors have a significantly lower risk of a meltdown—heavy water because the high pressure is distributed over many tubes rather than a single core vessel, and gas-cooled because of the much slower temperature rise in the event of a coolant loss. The question of how light-water reactors came to dominate has recently been studied by Robin Cowen, in a 1987, Stanford University Ph.D. thesis. The first consumer for nuclear power was the U.S.A. Navy. In 1949, then Captain Rickover made the pragmatic choice in favor of light-water reactors. He had two good reasons. It was then the most compact technology, an important consideration for submarines, and it was the furthest advanced, suggesting that it would have the quickest route to implementation. In 1954, the first nuclear-powered submarine, Nautilus, was launched. The results looked very optimistic. At the same time civilian nuclear power become a high priority. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
The Soviets had explored their first nuclear bomb in 1949. In response, Atomic Energy Commissioner T. Murray warned, “One we become fully conscious of the possibility that [energy-poor] nations will gravitate towards the USSR if it wins the nuclear power race, it will be quite clear that this race is no Everest-climbing, kudos-providing contest. General Electric and Westinghouse, with their experience producing light-water reactors for the nuclear-powered submarines, were the natural choice to develop civilian power stations. Considerations of proven reliability and speed of implementation took precedence over finding the most cost-effective and safest technology. Although light-water was first chosen as an interim technology, this gave it enough of a head start down the learning curve that the other options have never had the chance to catch up. The adoption of gasoline engines, and light-water reactors are but two demonstrations of how history matters in determining today’s technology choices. The important insight from game theory is to recognize early on the potential for future lock-in—once one option has enough of a head start, superior technological alternatives may never get the chance to develop. Thus there is a potentially great payoff in the early stages from spending more time figuring out not only what technology meets today’s constraints, but also what options will be the best for the future. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Although exploratory engineering research can show certain technological possibilities, gaining this knowledge can have a paradoxical effect on our feeling of knowledge, on our sense of how much we know about the future. It gives us more information, but it can reveal a range of possibilities so vast that we feel as if we know less than we did before. The prospect of nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing has this paradoxical effect. It makes certain scenarios—such as a mid-twenty first century World of poverty, or choking on pollution caused by massive accumulations of twentieth-century-style industry—seem very unlikely indeed. This is useful information in trying to understand our real situation and trying to make sensible plans for the future. And yet the range of new possibilities opened up is broader than we could have imagined before. On the negative side, one can imagine building engines of destruction capable of devasting the World as thoroughly as a nuclear war. On the beneficial side, one can imagine futures of stable peace with levels of health, wealth, and environmental quality beyond any historical precedent and beyond present expectations. But recall the energy crisis of the 1980s, when home owners and businesses could be fined $10,000 (2023 inflation adjusted $36,307.04) for turning on the heat, the thermostat, during the winter, was required to stay at 65-degrees Fahrenheit. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
Within this spectrum of possibilities (and off to its sides) is a range of futures we cannot even imagine. Our actions, day by day, are taking us into one of those futures. Not to some future of our present plans or dreams or nightmares, but to a real future, one that will grow from the intended and unintended consequences of our actions, one that we and our descendants will actually have to live in. Scenarios are useful tools for thinking about the future. They do not represent predictions of what will happen, but instead they present pictures of Worlds that one can imagine happening. By looking at these pictures and seeing how they fit together, we can try to get some idea of which events are more likely and which are less likely, and to get some idea of how the choices we make today may affect the shape of the things to come. We are about to see a fusion of government and private business intelligence on a scale never before known in the capitalist economies. Governments and companies have long had truck with one another. Some giant firms have long provided “cover” for government agents. For example, the Bechtel Corporation, the San Francisco-based construction firm that had hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of contracts in the Middle East, gave nominal jobs to CIA operatives. In return, Bechtel received commercially valuable intelligence from the CIA. At one time U.S. businesses provided cover for some two hundred intelligence agents posted abroad who pretended to be executives. The companies were reimbursed for their costs. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
On the other hand, while may countries simply “expect” their business people to cooperate with intelligence and may apply pressure if they refuse, the United State of America does not. America business executives, including those who have had contacts with high-level foreign politicians, are seldom debriefed. The line between public and private espionage will continue to blur. As multinational corporations proliferate, many grown their own private intelligence networks—“para-CIA,” as it were. This is as true for European oil companies or banks and for Japanese trading houses as it is for American construction firms. Contact between some of these para-CIAs and the intelligence units of their own or their host countries must be assumed. Paralleling “para-intelligence” operations abroad is the recent spread of so-called “competitive intelligence” units in domestic industry. While designed to operate within the law, these apply, at least on a rudimentary level, many of the same methods and skills used by government intelligence operations. The possibilities for informal links with government increase as these business firms hire former spies and analysts from the ranks of government. Such incestuous relationships will multiply as a consequence of the restructuring of World business now taking place, which is leading to complex-cross-national business alliances. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
The company entering into a “strategic alliance” with another firm may never know that some of its partner’s operations are actually espionage activities run for the benefit of the government. Or it may want to know—and demand that its own government’s spies find out. Inevitably, such changes will drag many formerly “private” business activities into the public purview, politicizing them, and firing off a succession of charges, countercharges, upheavals, and explosive scandals. Another change that parallels recent developments in business will be a shift of emphasis from mass production to customization of intelligence. Government policy-makers are demanding more and more targeted, particularized, and precise information. This requires either customized collection of information or, at a minimum, customized analysis. To meet this demand—especially in the fields of economics, technology, and environment—requires pinpointed tactical information about so vast a variety of matters that not even the largest intelligence producers, like the CIA, will be able to recruit, maintain, and pay for all the necessary specialists. Intelligence agencies will therefore do what companies are doing: They will contract more work out, breaking up the vertical integration characteristic of mass-production operations. Espionage agencies have always done some contracting out. The CIA and French intelligence have both hired gangster and Mafiosi to carry out unpleasant tasks for them. Intelligence agencies have often set up pseudo-businesses—like the famous “Foreign Excellent Trench Coat Company,” used as a cover by the Red Orchestra spy network during its work against the Nazis in World War II, or the CIA’s “proprietary” airlines used during the Vietnam War. However, spies will soon be forced to rely on independent outside suppliers and consultants to a great extent than ever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The basis for this “out-sourcing” is already being laid by the proliferation of private research boutiques specializing in everything from political risk analysis to technical information searches. Business Environment Risk Information, a Long Beach, California, firm, has made whopping mistakes on occasion, but it is also credited with having told its business subscribers in December of 1980 that Egyptian president Anwar Sadat would be assassinated. He was, ten months later. It also correctly forecast Iraq’s invasion of Iran nine months ahead of time. As long ago as 1985, even before the boom in such shops, there were scores of these info-boutiques. Many employ former senior officials or intelligence agents. The most prominent is Kissinger Associates, which at one time or another has employed Brent Scowcroft, national security adviser to President Bush; Lawrence Eagleburger, the number two man in the American State Department; William Simon, a former Secretary of the Treasury; and, of course, Henry Kissinger himself, a former national security adviser and once Secretary of state. Officials with intelligence connections move in and out of such firms—among them William F. Colby, former director of the CIA, who set up his own shop in Washington after leaving the agency. Said Colby: “The assessment business is a lot like the intelligence business.” Private intelligence enterprises can provide “deniability” to the governments that hire them; they can attract the best professionals at free-market, rather than civil service, wages; they can also perform the niche tasks for which large, bureaucratic sup shops are inherently ill-fitted. What we may well see, therefore, is a far closer fusion or interpenetration of business and government intelligence-seeking. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
I will continue to hold my banner aloft. I find myself born—aye, born—into a people and a religion. The preservation of my people must be for a purpose, for God does nothing without a purpose. His reasons are unfathomable to me, but on my own reason I place little dependence; test it where I will, it fails me. The simple, the ultimate in every direction is sealed to me. It is as difficult to understand matter as mind. The courses of the planets are no harder to explain the growth of a blade of grass. Therefore am I willing to remain a link in the great chain. What has been preserved for four thousand years was not saved that I should overthrow it. My people have survived the prehistoric paganism, the Babylonian polytheism; and it will survive the modern dilettantism and the current materialism, holding aloft the traditional Christian ideals inflexibly until the World shall become capable of recognizing their worth. I am a Christian because the faith of America demands no abdication of my mind. I am a Christian because the faith of America asks every possible sacrifice of my soul. I am a Christian because in all places where there are tears and suffering the Christian weeps. I am a Christian because every age when the cry of despair is heard the Christian hopes. I am a Christian because the message of America is the most ancient and the most modern. I am a Christian because America’s promise is a universal promise. I am a Christian because for American the World is not finished; men will complete it. I am a Christian because for America man is not yet fully created; men are creating him. I am a Christian because America places man and his unity above nations and above America itself. I am a Christian because above man, image of the divine unity, American placed the unity which is divine. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Out for Murder: Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?
The dreams of the Founding Fathers of the United States of America, who united the Thirteen Colonies in the 18th century, may have died or have at least become shaded in the 21st century. Nothing nettles America more than the hordes of diverse people whom she cannot exclude from her land. The new multitudes are jamming into the cities, making these centers the most fearful jungles of “manyness” and are threatening the Anglo-Saxon empire. The cities are becoming the storm center as well as the nerve center because they are where the serious menaces to America is lurking. They have not only become the home of roughs, gamblers, thieves, robbers, lawless and desperate men and women, rioters, skeptics, and the irreligious, but they are also the lair of wealthy and luxurious people who do not care for the Kingdom. This has allowed people to adopt a sense of pride in their deviant work, as they are gradually able to reconceptualize their killings and other crimes as an acceptable and rewarding business profession. Murder, the unlawful killing of a person, is considered a serious criminal offense in the United States of America, and it is punished by extreme penalties. In addition, most Americans do not feel that the penalties are extreme enough. In overcoming the intense stigma associated with murder, the hit man or hit woman lacks the supports available to more ordinary types of killers. #RandolphHarris 1 of 25
Some cultures allow special circumstances or sanction special organizations wherein people who kill are insulated from the taint of murder. Soldiers at war, or police in the line of duty, or citizens protecting their property operate under what are considered justifiable or excusable conditions. Individuals acting on their own, who kill in a spontaneous, “irrational” outburst of violence, can also mitigate the stigma of their behaviour. I mean, people will go ape for one minute and shoot, but there are very few people who are capable of thinking about, palling, and then doing it. Individuals who kill in a hot-blooded burst of passion can retrospectively draw comfort from the law which provides a lighter ban against killings performed without premeditation or malice or intent. At one extreme, the spontaneous killing may seem the result of a mental disease or dissociative reaction, and excused entirely as insanity. However, when an individual who generally shares society’s ban against murder, is fully aware that his or her act of homicide is (1) unlawful, (2) self-serving, and (3) intentional, one does not have the usual defenses to fall back on. How does such an individual manage to overcome his or her inhibitions and avoid serious damage to his or her self-image (assuming that he or she does share society’s ban)? This is the special dilemma of the professional hit man or woman who hires himself or herself out for murder. #RandolphHarris 2 of 25
There are two types of professional murders: the organized and the independent. The killer who belongs to an organized syndicate does not usually get paid on a contact basis, and performs his or her job out of loyalty and obedience to the organization. The independent professional killer is a freelance agent who hires himself or herself out for a fee. It is the career organization of the second type of killer that will be discussed. The organized killer can mitigate his or her behavior through an “appeal to higher loyalties.” He or she can also view his or her victim as an enemy of the group and then choose from a variety of techniques available for neutralizing the offense against the enemy. However, the independent professional murderer lacks most of these defenses. Nevertheless, built into one’s role are certain structural features that help one avoid deviance ascription. These features include: Contract. A contract is an unwritten agreement to provide a sum of money to a second party who agrees, in return, to commit a designated murder. It is most often arranged over the phone, between people who have never had personal contact. And the victim, or “hit,” is usually unknown to the killer. This arrangement is meant to protect both parties from the law. However, it also helps the killer deny the victim, or hit, is usually unknow to the killer by keeping the individual relatively anonymous. #RandolphHarris 3 of 25
In arranging the contract, the hired killer will try to find out the difficulty of the hit and how much the customer wants the killing done. These considerations determine the price. He or she does not ask about motive for the killing, treating it as none of his or her concern. Not knowing the motive may hamper the killer from morally justifying his or her behavior, but it also enables one to further deny the victim by maintaining one’s distance and reserve. Finally, the contract is backed up by a further understanding. If the killer fails to live up to one’s part of the bargain, the penalties could be extreme. This has the ironic effect that after the contract is arranged, the killer can somewhat deny responsibility. Reputation and Money. Reputation is especially important in an area where killers are unknown to their customers, and where the less written, the better. Reputation, in turn, reflects how much money the hit man had commanded in the past. Pete, who could not recall the exact number of people he had killed, did, like other hit men, keep an accounting of his highest fees. To him big money meant not only a way to earn a living, but also a way to maintain his professional reputation. People who accept lower fees can also find work as hired killers. Heroin addicts are the usual example. However, as Pete says, they often receive a bullet for their pains. It is believed that people who would kill for so little would also require littler persuasion to make the talk to the police. This further reinforces the single-minded emphasis on making big money. #RandolphHarris 4 of 25
As a result, killing is conceptualized as a business or as just a job. Framing the hit in a normal busineslike context enables the hit man or woman to deny wrongfulness or deny injury. In addition to the economic motive, Pete, and hit men and women discussed how the job was exciting, fun, game-playing, power, and impressive to their romantic partners as incentives for murder. However, none of these motives are mentioned by all sources. None are as necessary to the career as money. And, after a while, these other motives diminish and killing becomes only “just a job.” The primacy of the economic motive has been aptly expressed in the case of another deviant profession. Women who enjoy pleasures of the flesh with their customers do not make good women of the evening, according to those who are acquainted with this institution first hand. Instead of thinking about the most effective way of making money at the job, they would be doing things for their own pleasure and enjoyment. Skill. Most of the hit man and woman’s training focuses on acquiring skill in the use of weapons. “Then, he met these two guys, these two white guys…them two them two was the best. And but they stayed around over there and they got together, and Pete told [them] that he really wanted to be good. He said, if [I] got to do something, I wanted to be good at it. So, they go together, showed him, show him how to shoot…And gradually, he became good…Like he told me, like when he shoots somebody, he always goes for the head; he said, that’s about the best shot. I mean, if you want him dead then and there…And these two guys showed him, and to him, I mean, hey, I mean, he don’t believe nobody could really outshoot these two guys, you know what I mean. They know everything you want to know about guns, knives, and stuff like that.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 25
The hit man or woman’s reputation, and the amount of money he or she makes depend on his or her skill, his or her effective ability to serve as a means to someone else’s ends. “The result is a focus on technique. Like in anything you do, when you do it, you want to do it just right. On your target and you hit it, how you feel: I hit it! I hit it!” reports Pete. This focus on technique, on means, helps the hit man to “deny responsibility” and intent. In frame-analytic terms, the hit man or woman separates one’s morally responsible, or “principal” self from the rest of himself or herself, and performs the killing mainly as a “strategist.” In other words, one sees oneself as a “hired gun.” The saying, “If I didn’t do it, they’d find someone else who would,” reflects this narrowly technical orientation. Therefore, the contract, based on the hit man or woman with opportunities for denying the victim, denying the injury, and denying responsibility. However, this is not enough. To point out the defenses of the professional hit man or woman is one thing, but it is unlikely that the novice is at a point where he or she both lacks the conventional defense against the stigma of murder, and he or she has not yet fully acquired the exceptional defenses of the professional. How, then, does he or she cope? Negative experience is a feeling of disorientation. Expecting to take up a position in a well-framed realm, one finds that no particular frame is immediately applicable, or the frame that one thought was applicable no longer seems to be, or one cannot bind oneself within the frame that apparently apply. #RandolphHarris 6 of 25
One loses command over the formulation of viable response. One flounders. Experience, the meld of what the current scene brings to one and what one brings to it—meant to settle into a form even while it is beginning, finds no form and is therefore no experience. Reality automatically flutters. One has a “negative experience”—negative in the sense that it takes it character from what it is not, and what it is not is an organized and organizational affirmed response. Negative experience can occur when a person finds oneself lapsing into an old understanding of a situation, only to suddenly awaken to the fact that it no longer applies. In this regard, we should expect negative experience to be a special problem for the novice. For example, the first time he killed a man for money, Pete supposedly became violently ill: “When he [Pete], you know, hit the guy, when he shot the guy, the guy said ‘You killed me.’…something like that, cause he struck him all up here. And what he said, it was just, I mean, the look right in the guy’s eye, you know. I mean he looked like: Why me? Yeah? And then he said that at night-time he’ll start thinking about the guy: like he should not have looked at him like that…I mean actually [Pete] was sick…He couldn’t keep his food down, I mean, or nothing like that….[It lasted] I’d say about two months…” #RandolphHarris 7 of 25
Pete’s account conforms to the definition of negative experience. He had never killed anyone for money before. It started when a member of the Detroit drug World had spotted Pete in a knife fight outside an inner city bar, was apparently impressed with the young man’s style, and offered him fifty dollars to do a “job.” Pete accepted. He wanted the money. However, when the first hit came about, Pete of course know that he was doing it for money, but yet his orientation was: revenge. Thus, he stared his victim in the face, a characteristic gesture of people who kill enemies for revenge. Expecting to see defiance turn into a look of defeat, they attempt to gain “face” at the loser’s expense. However, when Pete stared his victim in the face, he saw not an enemy, but an innocent man. He saw a look of: “Why me?” And this discordant image is what remained in his mind during the weeks and months to follow and made him sick. As Pete says, “He shouldn’t have looked at him like that.” The victim’s look of innocence brought about a “frame break.” Given that the frame applied to an activity is expected to enable us to come to terms with all events in that activity (informing and regulating many of them), it is understandable that the unmanageable might occur, an occurrence which cannot be effectively ignored and to which the frame cannot be applied, with resulting bewilderment and chagrin on the part of the participants. In brief, a break can occur in the applicability of the frame, a break in its governance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 25
When such a frame break occurs, it produces negative experience. Pete’s extremely uncomfortable disorientation may reflect the extreme dissonance between the revenge frame, that he expected to apply, and the unexpected look of innocence that he encountered and continued to recall. The quotes above are from Pete, who is a hit man. Pete speaks of himself in the third person to explore the behavioral side of contract killing, or because his disassociates with himself when it comes time to hit a person. However, it is possible that is become possessed when he has a contract and enforces it. Demon possession is a condition in which one or more evil spirits or demons inhabit the body of a human being and can take complete control of their victim at will. By temporarily blotting out his consciousness, they can speak and act through him as their complete slave and tool. The inhibiting demon (or demons) comes and goes much like the proprietor of a house who may or may not be “at home.” When the demon is “at home,” he may precipitate an attack. In these attacks the victim passes from his normal state, in which he acts like other people, to the abnormal state of possession. Causes of demonic attacks vary. In many case, the targets do not deliberately call on evil spirits so these would latch onto them. Rather, they engage in “spiritual openings” that the spirits consider an invitation, which eventually leads to an attack. #RandolphHarris 9 of 25
There are aspects of life where a particular kind of situational respect is required. In daily speech, the terms “formality” and “informality” are sometimes used to refer to this central axis of situational regulation. And these terms might be tend to stress unduly the kind of clothing that is worn, the degree to which the sequence of acts in a social occasion is codified in advance and heavily enjoined, and the range of activities that is permitted. The terms “tight” and “loose” might be more descriptive and give more equal weight to each of the several ways in which devotion to a social occasion may be exhibited. For example, certain social settings in different communities are differently defined as regards tightness. Thus, public streets in Paris seem to be more loosely defined than those in Britain or America. On many Parisian streets one can eat a loaf of bread while walking to or from work, become heatedly involved in peripatetic conversations, engage in a full-course meal at an open café table, expect not to show surprise at oddly costumed persons, and so forth. In Anglo-American society one would have to look to summer resorts to find a similar degree of looseness. (In any case, Americans tend to find France and summer resorts relaxing for the same reason: many public gatherings seem to demand less attachment and respect, allowing one an easier depth of either private or interpersonal concerns.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 25
Similarly, in many Anglo-American communities a teacher will be expected to remain thoroughly oriented in to the situation during school hours, while in a rural community in Southern Italy we learn that: It is not uncommon for a teacher to come late to class and to spend the morning smoking a cigarette and looking idly out the window. In many geographical regions in America, a continuum can be traced regarding the formality of dree required of men who patronize public eateries. There are still establishments that require dinner jackets. Those next in line insist at least on ties and jackets, and may keep a supply of ties handy to accommodate would-be customers who turn up informally attired. At summer resorts in the same geographical regions, one can find establishments whose posted house-rules demand that T-shirts be worn in addition to swimming trunks, these establishments thereby distinguishing themselves from those final seats of beach informality in our society where eating, drinking, and dancing are allowed even barefoot men in swimming trunks. Incidentally, it might be noted here that societies seem to have their own limits regarding tightness and looseness and that these limits seem to change over time. In spite of some recent efforts to bring pomp back into American life, the most formal of evening clothes are becoming more and more rarely sed, and decorations such as jewelled tiaras can properly be worn these days at almost no occasion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 25
Any social establishment is itself likely to provide instructive variation in tightness or formality requirements, according to place and time. In Central Hospital, for example, attendants claimed that they need wear their ties and “look smart,” that is, situationally oriented, only when on that half of the campus that contained the administration building. On the night-shift, when doctors and nurses were absent, attendants would administer medication without bothering to take their cigarettes from their mouths, and tended to slouch more while sitting or standing. Therefore, one can draw from this example that there are ways one leaves oneself more open to demon possession. Are you doing things that are conducive of the Lord? Are you engaging in slander, gossip, fights, drugs, drinking, terrorism, premarital pleasures of the flesh, and not going to church? Well, these are ways to open yourself up to becoming possessed by demons. God’s regulations for good Christian behavior is very tight. “Why did you say we must remember ourselves when it is most difficult?” Our own exposure to life is both a threat and an opportunity. You know you must not do something. One part of you wants to do it. Then your remember yourself and stop it. Self-remembering has an element of will in it. If it were just dreaming, “I am, I am, I am,” it would not be anything. You must give a certain time simply to studying what remembering means, and what not remembering means, and what effect these have. Then you can invent many different ways to remember yourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 25
However, actually, self-remembering is not an intellectual or abstract thing; it is moments of will. It is not thought; it is action. It means having increased control; otherwise of what use would it be? You can only control yourself in moments of self-remembering. The mechanical control which is acquired by training and education—when one is taught how to behave in certain circumstances—is not real control. “Are we to understand that self-remembering means awareness?” Not only awareness. It means also a certain capacity to act in a certain way, to do what you want. You see, in our logical way of thinking, according to logical knowledge, we divide consciousness from will. However, consciousness means will. In the Russian language, for instance, “will” is the same word as “freedom.” The word “consciousness” means a combination of all knowledge; as if you had all your knowledge before you at the same time. However, consciousness also means will, and will means freedom. “What does giving up will mean?” Giving up childishness, inefficiency and lying. “Does giving up self-will involve giving up your own judgment?” It depends in what. What does giving will mean? How can it be achieved? You have mistaken ideas about this. First you think of it as a final actions: that you give up will and have no more will. This is an illusion because we have no such will to give up. #RandolphHarris 13 of 25
Our will last for about three minutes. Will is measured by time. If once we give up three minutes of will, tomorrow, another three minutes will grow. Giving up will is a continuous process, not one action. A single action means nothing. A second mistake is not remembering certain principles to which you give up will, such as rules. For example, there is a rule that you should not talk about this system. The natural desire is to talk, but if you stop yourself, it means that you give up your will; that you obey this rule. There are many other principles to which you must give up your will in order to follow them. In the 1950s the Ivy League colleges were faced with a problem. Each school wanted to produce a willing football team. The colleges found themselves overemphasizing athletics and compromising their academic standards in order to build a championship team. Yet, no matter how often they practiced or how much money they spent, at the end of the season the standings were much as they had been before. The average win/loss record was still 50/50. The inescapable mathematical fact is tht for every winner there had to be a loser. All the extra work canceled itself out. The excitement of college sports depends as much on the closeness and intensity of the competition as on the level of skill. Many fans prefer college basketball and football to the professional versions; while the level of skill is lower, there is often more excitement and intensity to the competition. #RandolphHarris 14 of 25
With the excitement and intensity in mind, the colleges got smart. They joined together and agreed to limit spring training to one day. Although there were more fumbles, the games were no less exciting. Athletes had more time to concentrate on their studies. Everyone was better off, except some alumni who wanted their alma maters to excel at football and forget about academic work. Many students would like to have a similar agreement with their fellow students before examinations. When grades are based on a traditional “bell curve,” one’s relative standing in the class matters more than the absolute level of one’s knowledge. It matters not how much you know, only that others know less than you. The way to gain an advantage over the other students is to study more. If they all do so, they all have more knowledge, but relative standings and therefore the bottom line—the grades—are largely unchanged. If only everyone in the class could agree to limit spring studying to one (preferably rainy) day, they would get the same grades with less effort. The feature common to these situations is that success is determined by relative rather than absolute performance. When one participant improves his or her own ranking, one necessarily worsens everyone else’s ranking. However, the fact that one’s victory requires someone else’s defeat does not make the game zero-sum. In a zero-sum game it is not possible to make everyone better off. Here it is. The scope for gain comes from reducing inputs. While there might always be the same number of winners and losers, it can be less costly for everyone to play the game. #RandolphHarris 15 of 25
The source of the problem of why (some) students study too much is that they do not have to pay a price or compensation to others. (Of course, the dumb thing to do is believe you are stupid and not study at all!) Each student’s studying is akin to a factory’s polluting: it makes it more difficult for all the other students to breathe. Because there is no market in buying and selling studying time, the result is a “rat race”: each participant strives too hard, with too little to show for one’s efforts. However, no one team or student is willing to be the only one, or the leader, in reducing the effort. This is just like a prisoner’s dilemma with more than two prisoners. Escape from the horns of this dilemma requires an enforceable collective agreement. As we saw with OPEC and the Ivy League, the trick is to form a cartel to limit competition. The problem for high-school students is that the cartel cannot easily detect cheating. For the collectivity of students, a cheater is one who studies more to sneak an advantage over the others. It is very hard to tell if some are secretly studying until after they have “aced” the test. BY then it is too late. In some small towns, high-school students do have a way to enforce “no-studying” cartels. Everyone gets together and cruises Main Street at night. The absence of those home studying is noticed. Punishment can be social ostracism or worse. To arrange a self-enforcing cartel is difficult. #RandolphHarris 16 of 25
It is all the better if an outside enforces the collective agreement limiting competition. This is just what happened for cigarette advertising, although not intentionally. In the old says, cigarette companies used to spend money to convince consumers to “walk a mile” for their product or to “fight rather than switch.” The different campaigns made advertising agencies rich, but their main purpose was defensive—each company advertised because the others did, too. Then, in 1968, cigarette advertisements were banned from TV by law. The companies thought this restriction would hurt them and fought against it. However, when the some cleared, they saw that the ban helped them avoid mutually damaging and costly advertising campaigns and thus improved their profits. As with advertisers, scientists are trying to stop means of losing control. The simplest imaginable approach to “guiding” nanotechnology would be to stop it. The easiest trip to plan is the trip that goes nowhere. This would have a certain appeal, if it were possible. Because of its enormous potential for abuse, nanotechnology has the potential of doing great harm. If we believe that human beings and human institutions are too incompetent to deal with nanotechnology—that they are too likely to turn it to aggressive military use, or too likely to make it freely available to madmen and women—then the option of stopping the development of nanotechnology may seem attractive indeed. However, the ethical question that must guide human actions is not “Would it be better to stop?,” but “Would attempts to stop make things better?” #RandolphHarris 17 of 25
One option is to push forward, emphasizing the need for caution but also the potential for good applications. The promise of medical, economic, and environmental applications, joined with the threat posed by a new arms race, provides a powerful motive for international cooperation. With positive goals and an inclusive stance, international cooperation is a promising strategy; it could provide a basis for guiding the development and application of nanotechnology. Another option would be to emphasize the downside, to focus debate on potential abuses in support of a campaign to halt development. In following this strategy, an activist group would want to downplay the civilization applications of nanotechnology and emphasize its military applications. Horror stories of potential abuse (including abuses that regulation could easily prevent) would help to make the technology seem strange and dangerous. This strategy might succeed in suppressing civilian research in many countries, though probably not all. Unfortunately, it would also guarantee funding for classified military research programs in laboratories around the World, even in the most morally honest countries, because of their then-inevitable fear of consequences if someone else developed nanotechnology first. In a hostile public atmosphere, research would be pushed into secret programs, and in secrecy the prospects for broad international cooperation would disappear. Attempts to stop nanotechnology for fear of a new, unstable arms race become self-fulfilling prophecies. Afterwards, the advocates of this view could then say, “We warned you!” as the World slid toward a war they themselves had helped to prepare. #RandolphHarris 18 of 25
Attempting to stop technological development is a simple but dangerous idea. The greater its success, the greater the polarization it would cause between technology advocates and technology critics. A moderate success would push research out of the public universities and into corporate and military research labs. A greater success would push research out of the corporate laboratories and into heavily classified programs. A truly amazing success would end most of these, leaving the only remaining military programs in the hands of those states with thoroughly repressive governments or alien ideologies. This, presumably, is not how one would prefer nanotechnology to be developed. The only genuine success would be a total success, and this would mean banning research not only in the United States of America, and Germany, and France, and the rest of Western Europe, and Japan, and the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, and Taiwan, but in Korea, South Africa, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Brazil, Argentina, Vietnam, and the part of Colombia controlled by the Medellin Cartel. Later, as computers improve, as chemistry advances, as more and more proximal-probe microscopes are built by high school students, total success would require banning kids from tinkering in suburban garages in Pittsburgh. Competitive pressures are pushing technology toward thorough control of matter, and we have seen that this goal can be reached by many different paths. Preventing one area of research would not prevent the advance, nor would stopping work in one country. #RandolphHarris 19 of 25
When the United States of America delays drug development through regulations by the FDA, drug companies simply switch research overseas, or non-U.S.A. companies pull ahead. Orbital-launch capability and nuclear-weapons capabilities are other examples. Very seldom has one country given these abilities to another, yet at least eight nations are able to launch satellites to orbit independently, at least seven have detonated nuclear devices, and another two are suspected to be within reach of nuclear capabilities. India and Israel have built bombs and launched satellites, though neither is considered a great power or a leading force in World technology. Where nanotechnology is concerned, many countries are capable of doing the required research, and more will be in the future. South Korea has both the needed educational levels and the ambition; visitors from the People’s Republic of China ask about nanotechnology. A decision at the top directing the resources of a nation could get results almost anywhere. The United States of America is only gradually being shaken from its illusion that it rules the World of technology. However, whoever rules the World of technology is generally the World leader. Like military force, economic clout is increasingly based on knowledge. High technology is congealed knowledge. As the super-symbolic economy spreads, the value of leading-edge technology soars. #RandolphHarris 20 of 25
In January of 1985 nearly 200,000 tons of Romanian 96-inch carbon steel arrived in North America and went on sale for 40 percent less than comparable Canadian steel. The story of that shipment began thirteen years earlier, when the Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu placed his country’s nuclear development program under the aegis of the DIE, his foreign intelligence organization. According to Ion Pacepa, the former head of the DIE, who later defected to the West, teams of intelligence-trained engineers were provided with false papers and sent abroad to find jobs in the nuclear industry. According to Pacepa, these techno-spies actually landed positions in General Electric, Combustion Engineering, their Canadian counterparts of affiliates, as well as in Siemens, Kraftwerke Union, and AEG in West Germany and Ansaldo Nucleari Impiante itn Italy. Soon technical intelligence began barreling into Bucharest. Knowing that the Canadians were having difficult selling their CANDU reactor, Ceausescu, through the DIE, hinted that he might buy as many as twenty CANDUS. In fact, on October 27, 1977, the Romanians signed an agreement with the Canadians, the remainder with Romanian help. Canada thereupon laid down the welcome mat for Romanian nuclear engineers, many of them DIE agents. The result, according to Pacepa, was that “the DIE soon obtained intelligence covering approximately 75 percent of CANDU-600 technology, a modern security system for nuclear plants, technology and equipment for producing heavy water, and architectural and construction plans for nuclear plants built in Canada, West Germany, and France.” #RandolphHarris 21 of 25
Better yet, Romania was able to sweet-talk Canada into putting up a $1 billion loan, supposedly to be partly used as payments to Canadian firms involved in the project, the remaining Romanian costs to be paid to Canada in the form of countertrade or barter. By March 1982, the entire commercial deal melted down, as its were. However, Romania had already pocketed an advance tranche amounting to $320 million. Moreover, Romania also already had most of the technology it needed. All it needed to do now was send Canada goods under terms of the barter deal. Which is why Romanian steel entered Canada and began to undersell the domestic product. The Romanian scam, combining technological espionage with an economic rip-off, is less unusual than it might appear in a World in which research cost are skyrocketing and the cost of stolen technology is extremely inexpensive by comparison. In fact, according to Count de Marenches, former chief of French intelligence: “In any intelligence service worthy of the name you would easily come cross cases where the whole year’s budget has been paid for in fully by a single operation. Naturally, intelligence does not receive actual payment, but the country’s industry profits.” This—not just military considerations—explains why spies swarm around any center of new technology, why the Soviets and others have focused on Silicon Valley, why the Russians even tried to buy Valley companies. It is why Japan, too, is a major target today. (According to a former KGB officer stationed there, “Even the special audio equipment used by the KGB residency to monitor radio communications between Japanese National Police surveillance teams was stolen from Japan.”) #RandolphHarris 22 of 25
The entire Romanian system was modeled after the much bigger technology espionage apparatus constructed by the Soviet Union and centered in the so-called Line X of the KGB, its Directorate T, the scientific and technological section. A 1987 U.S.A. State Department report based on CIA data charged that one third of all the officials of the Soviet Chamber of Commerce and Industry are, in fact, known or suspected KGB or GRU officers. “Hosting over 200 trade exhibitions and about 100 Western business delegations annually, and inspecting thousands of goods each year give its employees extraordinary access to imported equipment…” The Soviets pay special attention to robots, deep-sea marine technology, and industrial chemicals. As the lack of hard currency makes it difficult for many in it, they are irresistibly drawn to illegal acquisitions. This suggests a coming step-up in technological espionage by the less affluent countries of Africa, Asia, and South America. If they themselves cannot use the knowledge their engineers or students steal, they can at least sell it. Indeed, one of the frequently ignored aspects of technological espionage is what might be termed the “resale” market. Furthermore, as knowledge become ever more central to economic, military, and political power, techno-espionage causes increasing friction among former allies. Note the recent changes that French intelligence has intercepted IMB transatlantic communications, passed them to Groupe Bull, and also planted agents in American computer firms. Witness, too, CoCom. #RandolphHarris 23 of 25
CoCom is the Paris-based Coordinating Committee on Multilateral Export Controls set up by sixteen nations to prevent the seepage of Western high technology to what was then the Soviet bloc. CoCom, the scene of escalating dissension among its members, now face possible disintegration. Members increasingly resent its restrictions on trade, and accuse one another of using it to gain commercial advantage. At the initiative of the Europeans and Japanese, moves are under way to shorten the list of restricted technologies and embargoed countries. However, in 1983, when the United States of America, the main force behind CoCom, proposed that Chia be struck from the list, a howl arose. Wester European nations fearing that the U.S.A. would take over the Chinese market vehemently opposed this proposal and kept it from ever seeing the light of day. Japan had recently been embarrassed by the Toshiba affair. This centered on a Toshiba subsidiary’s illegal sale to the Soviets of highly sophisticated equipment for grinding submarine propellers blades. Under heavy U.S.A. pressure, Japan tightened its own domestic export controls to precent a recurrence. One result, however, was to cut itself off from part of its Chinese market. Thus, Japanese machine tool exports to China plummeted by 66 percent in the single years 1987. Japan was furious, therefore, when a Cincinnati Milacron machining center turned up in Shanghai. #RandolphHarris 24 of 25
This kind of commercial war now threaten to explode CoCom altogether. Moreover, European economic integration means that the exports controls of individual European nations are weakened, since goods can flow freely among the twelve EC nations. The rise of the super-symbolic global economy also brings with it, as we saw, the creation of transnational or multinational business groups, along with multiple, boundary-crossing commercial alliances and joint ventures. These increase the cross-flows of knowledge, and make it far harder to police. For all these reasons, technology will join economies as a top-priority target for the World’s spies. The spy of the future is less likely to resemble James Bond, whose chief assets were his fists and Ultimate Driving Machine, than the Line X engineer who lives quietly down the block and never does anything more violent than turn a page of a manual or flick on his microcomputer. O Lord, our hope in every generation, we rejoice in the wonderous deliverance Thou didst bring to pass for our fathers. When Haman rose to crush us, Thou wast at our side. Thou didst bring to naught his base designs, delivering us from destruction. In our day, too, O Lord our God, we trust in Thy saving power. We know it is Thy will that evil be subdued and righteousness prevail. Keep us ever steadfast the no weapon formed against us may prosper. Inspire us like Mordecai of old, to be unswerving in our devotion to Thee. Like Esther, may we ever be eager to serve our people, even at the peril of our lives. Cause us to know as Mordecai knew, that whether we be born to high or low estate, we share alike our people’s lot. That though we dwell in safety, blessed with abundance, our brother’s hurt is our hurt, their sorrow, ours. Hasten the day when all oppression shall cease, and tyranny shall forever be crushed: when strife shall no longer set off man from man, but all shall unite in true brotherhood to serve each other, and thus, O Lord, serve Thee. #RandolphHarris 25 of 25
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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
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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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Randolph Harris II International 