Harold did not really like himself although, at times, he felt that the admiration he seemed to have attained had been well earned.  Well, … mostly.  Some of it had obviously been lucky misperceptions. 

He had the ability to crush the spirits of those who crossed him so long as they were among those who loved him, or at least cared for him, but he’d hated himself all too soon every time he’d done so.  And generally, after having loved him, they would, following an altercation, come to hate him, or at least to despise him.  Or so it seemed.  Not all fences could be mended and in his case, few ever were despite his subsequent attempts to make amends, or at least, to recognize that he’d over reacted.

His fantasies were weird, they involved people doing him ill and his exacting a terrible revenge after experiencing significant suffering.  The latter seems a dangling modifier as it is not clear whether the suffering was his or of those that had wronged him but the dangling part is easily resolvable.  It was both.

Notwithstanding his shortcomings (they may have been many but perhaps were few, but serious), Harold was, in fact, intelligent and well informed with an analytical mind and he was very frequently correct in his prognostications hence the sobriquet “the Harbinger”.  But, as in the case of the legendary Trojan princess, Cassandra, being right did not lead to happiness, or even to success, at least in the long term.  Still, people were initially drawn to him, almost always, and many cared for him and respected him a great deal.  As long as they did not become too close to him.  Which led to a series of serial relationships, all wonderful until they ended.

Harold the Harbinger wrote a great deal.  Indeed, he was a writer although not all that frequently independently published.  Then again, he lived in an era where self-publication was the norm and self-publication permitted him to fully express his views without editorial alteration, something he valued.  And it permitted him to publish his views on a timely basis, something his activities as an academic had rarely if ever permitted.  After research, writing numerous drafts, proof reading, peer review etc., the issues he dealt with would almost always have become less than relevant in normal academic proceedings (where published research was rarely read at all, especially by those most in need of the related findings).  That was probably why so many of his peers concentrated on regurgitating state of the art recompilations for which they received plaudits, plaudits which translated into profits. 

Harold preferred generating fresh and unexpected hypotheses others could seek to disprove.  Harold was somewhat strange in that respect.  Plaudits were not really his thing.  The quest for truth was.  But truth was a complex concept which, in his day and age, was considered a relative variable by those in power, a manipulable variable and those willing to engage in its manipulation, if they were good at it, were richly rewarded.  Those like Harold who believed that truth was static and absolute were relegated to independent “journalism” and independent “research” and were rarely rewarded at all, so, frequently, their work was researched, written and published pro bono publico, i.e., unremunerated.

Harold was very complex with respect to his perception of success.  He’d had tastes of it and was not impoverished, but he did tend to rattle too many cages so what to others was a glass ceiling, was, in his case, often a cast iron dome.  Yet from within that dome Harold could be and was frequently prolific.  However, while Mohamed had purportedly claimed that “faith could move a mountain”, it was a slow and tedious process at best, and it seemed to Harold that evil was ascendant, indeed rampant but, as a historian, Harold had to admit that that was really nothing new, it had seemingly always been the case notwithstanding other “harbingers”, people like Siddhartha, called by many the Buddha, or Yešu the Nazarene, called by many the Christ, or Mohamed, or even non-religious moral philosophers like Kung-fu-tzu, widely known in the West as Confucius, and Lao-tze, now known as Laozi (another ancient Chinese sage), and Aristotle, the Macedonian famous for his reflections while an undocumented alien in Athens, and perhaps even Immanuel Kant who wrote of “perpetual peace”.  Or more recently, people like democratic socialists Albert Einstein and Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. and Nelson Mandela and Pepe Mujica and the late Pope, Francis I.  Of course, Harold realized that he was not in their class, but they were his heroes.  And like them, he did not measure success in terms of financial rewards but in how, if at all, his work had some impact, even if minimal, in making the world more just, less corrupt, more equitable, more sustainable.

Perhaps it did.  After all there was a hypothesis that the beating of a butterfly’s wing could impact the world’s weather and thus its history, just as a loose horseshoe could lose a war.  So Harold wrote and he bickered and he was intolerant and he made mistakes and he regretted the trauma he sometimes caused others but kept causing it just the same, although, to be fair, less and less so as he matured.  And he watched the world seem to warble in all the wrong directions as if an antichrist really existed and had attained control from offices in Tel Aviv and Washington, DC and London Paris and and Berlin and in the Hague, etc.  And although it seemed there was nothing he could do to remedy things, he kept trying; one article at a time, one conversation at a time; like Cassandra, regretting the times things he had warned about came to pass with his warnings all but unnoticed.

Harold the Harbinger was not a bad person, just too catalytic at times, and too unaware of the impact he had on others (which was not always positive).  And he’d been too distant at times to know that he’d been happy and that he’d had some success.  But there may have been people whom he’d never met who were glad that he had lived.  Sort of in the sense that Sigmund Freud (the sex absorbed drug addict deemed among our species’ most interesting men) wrote in a prefatory note to his book, Moses and Monotheism, (written in Vienna in 1938 just before fleeing Nazi persecution): “in darker times there lived a man who thought as you do”.

Harold would have liked Professor Freud and Sigmund Freud might well have liked Harold, and they both might well have understood each other.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.  Dedicated to my sons, Alex, Billy and Edward.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.