Lemming Truth Has Started Wars and Financial Collapse

To avoid the impression of overconfidence, one must keep the celebration quiet and dignified. Often times, events do not occur at the same time, and the remarks offered are offered with quite different intentions. Nonetheless, when juxtaposed, they provide us with a short but provocative dialogue on the state of the situation in general. There are an increasing number of people who are well educated, and who are using ideas in print. It is not always necessary to have the largest audience, but it is more important to have an extremely active audience. The eighteenth century was a revolution in the structure of the arts and that is when reading really commenced. It was characterized by the rise of the book as a mass medium, the emergence of public libraries, and the development of the general-interest periodical. As a consequence, there came into being a happy relationship between the best that was thought and written, and a mass audience prepared and eager to read it. That relationship broke down in the first two decades of the twentieth century, so that reading in the sense that Erasmus or Balzac or Jefferson or even Mark Twain would have understood the word is no longer an active of the lasses. The period from the French Revolution to the catastrophes of World War marks an oasis, an oasis of quality, in which very great literature, very great non-fiction did reach a mass audience. We have now passed the oasis and reentered the desert, with the result that we shall be left with three kinds of reading. The first is reading for distraction—which is what make the airport book so popular. The second is reading for information—which comes to mind when one is confronted by such terms as “computer printout,” “microcircuit,” and “teletext.” The third kind of reading is a residue of the great age of literacy, now receding rapidly under the compulsion of the Age of Information. It requires silence, patience, a ready capacity for reflection, the training to be challenged by complexity and, above all, a willingness to suspend from the distractions of the World so that reader and text may become a unity of time, space, and imagination. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

This kind of reading is called hope for the future of the literate. However, many are concerned about reading in the old, archaic, private, silent sense. The concern is that this may become as specialized a skill and avocation as it was in the scriptoria and libraries of the monasteries during the so-called Dark Ages. That is why many magazines and authors are proceeding with a sense of gloomy uncertainty. The Columbian in 1786 was America’s first magazine in the same way that we settle upon Gutenberg’s Bible in 1456 as the beginning of the printed book. In addition to providing both a shape to and an outlet for the development of American literature, the nineteenth-century magazine made another important contribution to American culture, a contribution from which we have not yet recovered and perhaps never will: magazines created the advertising industry. Although magazine advertising was not unknown before the 1880s, the situation changed drastically when Congress passed the Postal Act of March 3, 1879, which gave magazines low-cost mailing privileges. As a consequence, they emerged as the best available conduits for national advertising. To give one example of how quickly both magazines and merchants seized their opportunities, the November 12, 1885, issue of The Independent ran ads for the following products and services: peas, baking powder, bikes, glue, R. H. Macy & Co., life insurance, pianos, rail travel, boots, picket fences, reversible collars, cuffs, cures for deafness, and the Grand Union Hotel in Saratoga Springs. Such advertising not only made the names of companies well known but also changes methods of manufacturing and distribution. Consumers turned away from home-made and local products and toward mass-produced, national brands sold to the largest possible market. When George Eastman invented the portable camera in 1888, he spent $25,000 advertising it in magazines. By 1895, “Kodak” and “camera” were synonymous, as to some extent they still are. Companies like Royal Baking Powder, Baker’s Chocolate, Ivory Soap, and Gillette moved into a national market by advertising their products in magazines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Even magazines moved into a national market by advertising themselves in magazines, the most conspicuous examples being Ladies’ Home Journal. Its publisher, Cyrus H. K. Curtis, spent half a million dollars between 1883 and 1888 advertising his magazine in other magazines. By 1909, Ladies’ Home Journal had a circulation of over 1 million readers. Curtis’s enthusiasm for advertising notwithstanding, the most significant figure in mating advertising to the magazine was Frank Munsey, who upon his death in 1925 was eulogized by William Allen White with the following words: “Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind have about succeeded in transforming a once-noble profession into an 8 percent security. May he rest in trust.” What was the sin of the malevolent Munsey? Simply, he made two discoveries. First, a large circulation could be achieved by selling a magazine for much less than it cost to produce; and, second, huge profits could be made from the high volume of advertising that a large circulation would attract. In October 1893, Munsey took out an ad in The New York Sun announcing that Munsey’s Magazine was cutting its price from 25 cents to 10 cents, and reducing a year’s subscription from $3 to $1. The first 10-cent issue claimed a circulation of 40,000; within four months, the circulation rose to 200,000; two months later, it was 500,000. Although Munsey’s was filled with pulp writing, his discoveries about how to conduct the business of magazines established the pattern for all magazines. The Harper’s contained more advertising than it had carried in all its preceding twenty-two years. With national advertising as its economic base, with the tradition of publishing the best being thought and written, and with a large, receptive readership, the magazine soared to new heights in the early years of this century. In the pages of The Smart Set, American Mercury, The New Yorker, The Saturday Review of Literature, Harper’s, The Atlantic Monthly, Vanity Fair, The Nation, and The New Republic, American prose—both fiction and non-fiction—sang with an unprecedented vibrancy and intensity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Who would have dared to say then that this was a nightingale’s song, most brilliant and sweet as the singer nears the moment of death? Indeed, even now one holds back from saying it. However, there is no denying that underneath the melody, some new notes were sounding, playing a new kind of tune that would bring down the curtain—not perhaps on the general magazine but on its days of glory. What happened was the electric plug, to which were attached media of great variety and allure, all of them attacking the prestige, economics, and monopoly of the literate, general-interest magazine. Together, radio, movies, and television—“the media,” as they have become known—assaulted magazines from several different directions. First, they undermined their economic base by robbing them of advertising revenues. In 1950, for example, $515 million was spent on magazine advertising, or 9 percent of all advertising expenditures, and only $171 million, or 3 percent, was spent on television. By 1966, $1.295 billion was spent on magazines (7.8 percent) and $2.765 billion for television (16.7 percent). This trend has continued unabated. Radio also played a part in reducing magazines revenues, as did movies. Movies, of course, did not compete directly for advertising money but, instead, took a piece of the money and time people normally spent on other leisure activities. The second, related point is that the media altered the structure of leisure activities. Radio, for example, made it unnecessary for people to read to each other, or to read at all. Movies led people out of their homes; television brought them back but not to read. At the present time, approximately 90 million Americans are watching television every night during prime time. However, out of the 121 million TV homes in the United States of America, whilst the number of TV households continues to grow, pay TV is becoming less popular. The pay TV penetration in the United States of America was pegged at 71 percent in 2021, marking a drop of over 10 percent in just five years. The trend of consumers (especially younger generations) cutting the cord and instead moving online to streaming services has meant that many pay TV providers are struggling to keep afloat. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

“Watching television” is something quite different from “watching a television program.” The latter implies a selection, the former a compulsion. The point is worth making because to some extent the general magazine addressed itself to an audience of compulsive readers, now replaced by compulsive screen watchers. Moreover, the availability of a variety of media (including the stereo and the much-understanding telephone) altered both the sound and distraction levels of the average home so that conditions for serious reading were degraded. Third, movies and television, assisted by the development of photography, helped to create a visual culture. To a great extent, the picture has replaced the word as the central mode of public discourse in America. Politicians, ministers, journalists, and judges are now known by their faces, not their words. Even worse, audiences have grown accustomed to receiving information in the form of images—indeed, rapidly moving images—and no longer have the patience or possibly the ability to process the fixed, lineal, abstract word. Moreover, the instantaneity of speed-of-light media has made the printed word seem obsolescent. Not only is yesterday’s newspaper old news but so is today’s newspaper. And finally, the media have drawn to themselves much of the talent that in an earlier time would have devoted itself to writing for magazines. Writing screenplays and television sit-coms holds the promise of a degree of fame and fortune with which magazine writing cannot compete. And so, as readers abandon the form as too complex or too slow or too out-of-date, writers abandon the form as too low-paying or too limited in audience. Where do we go from here? Eulogies, one hopes, are premature. For one thing, some magazines have changed their form to accommodate the new role of reading in people’s lives. Harper’s, for example, has reduced the length of its stories and articles to suit its readers’ impaired capacity for sustained concentration. For another, there is some accumulating evidence then television advertising. The corporate World be significantly strengthened. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Third, the spread of both illiteracy and aliteracy (the ability without the inclination to read) has, at long last, become visible as a national crisis. Educators and legislators have begun to offer solutions that may in the long run give substance to optimism. It has been suggested that we convert all our undergraduate colleges into schools of reading. There is even a cadre of educators who want to carry this proposal to the high school. And, of course, changes in the structure of education may yet do much to restore the importance of the printed word. There is nothing far-fetched about this possibility. After all, changes in the structure of education in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contributed enormously to the prestige and power of the printed word. And we may draw a small measure of optimism from the fact that there is no result of media change so inevitable that we can speak with certainty of the future. The study of media history reveals—time and again—that there are always surprises in store. Those who make predictions—either giddy or somber—about the demise of serious forms of literature may turn out to be quite wrong. Here, uncertainty is our friend. And so, with full appreciation of the struggle that the general-interest magazine is now engaged in, we may raise our colours in its behalf by honouring its two-hundred and thirtieth birthday and telling our young of its robust history. And, of course, by not failing to renew our subscriptions. The goal of conferences today, which are sponsored by the Environmental Education Program of the School of Natural Resources and the Division of Technology and Environment Education of the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare is to provide guidelines to the government on how to grant money for environmental education projects. It became apparent that while these people speak about teaching others about an organic environment, the artificial environments that they are teaching is are saying that nature is irrelevant, separate from us, and of only intellectual value. If the natural environment exists anywhere, it is only in the minds, and memories of people being held in classrooms that look like traditional basements with no windows. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Of course, the cost of education is very high, and now for safety reasons and budget reasons, classrooms are not made to look like they are being held in resorts. Parents spend an average of $1,017.37 to $20,521.90 to send their children to public school. For a child attending public school from kindergarten to 12^th Grade, parents can expect to spend a total of roughly $162,899.86 on their child’s education and related activities. For children attending private school, parents can expect to spend a total of $292,719.86. So, there is there is no such thing as a “free lunch,” it should be included in the program as a compliment. The state also contributes a total of $274.7 billion to K-12 public education or $6,789 per student. Local governments contribute $269.3 billion total or $6,656 per student. Federal public education funding is equivalent to 0.20 percent of total taxpayer income. State and local funding is equivalent to 2.62 percent. The average cost of attendance at any 4-year institution is $35,331. I think some time that people forget that education is not always a requirement, but is more of a luxury and students are not supposed to think they are in Palm Springs, but should be thankful they are receiving an education. As a result of expectation, many people do not have a sense of rightness or wrongness of each new technological wonder. We hear about a “green revolution,” which will feed the starving millions and we buy expert’s word, just as everyone else does. However, many people already forget that the World is overpopulated by 3 billion people as it is and we need more education about birth control and more methods of birth control to be put into use in our communities and developing nations. It is important to support feeding others, but we also have to remember, when people are eating, they will only produce more offspring. So a comprehensive vision needs to be in place. Without any experience with natural balance, we forget that things grow only so fast. If you accelerate the process artificially, something is lost. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

We read studies by scientists which say that the ozone layer is safe despite aerosols, and we read other studies by scientists which say the ozone layer is in danger. We wonder which is true? Which scientists are correct? However, this wondering signifies that we have sold out instinctive knowledge. Obviously, any artificial alteration of the ozone layer changes the volume of radiation which reaches the planet, and is harmful. We read the whales and dolphins are beaching themselves and we wonder why. Scientists tell us that the leader whale or dolphin may have parasites in its brain, goes crazy and leads the other to the beach, some Wiccans believe the beaching is caused by someone using too much magic. Millions of people read the “official” story and find it logical, because their knowledge of whales is confined to the length, weight, mating habits, breeding ground, commercial uses, and optimum sustainable yield. And yet, the Solomon Islanders have long descriptions of whales and dolphins beaching themselves every year for thousands of years. The islanders say it is a human-animal communications ritual, part of a cycle which is obscure to us. If they are right, I do not know either. I do know that whales do not leaders—they operate in groups—and given their brain size they are probably the most intelligent mammals on Earth. I do not believe it is a parasite problem. Reading a textbook certainly does transmit a kind of knowledge, but there are also subjective informational-receptive modes. Walking through a forest is different from attending classes on forests because each others information of an entirely different sort; classes on forest can never help us “relate” to forests, or to care about them at all. If you do not care about a subject, you can never understand nor relate to the material. Only being in one can accomplish that, just as the only way to know what dancing is about is to dance. When we are inside the walls of our homes, we begin to think the natural World has nothing to teach us. We environmentalists suffer the same distorted notion of education that all Western people do. We think of education as objective, quantifiable and verbal. Our own words become our basis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Put all our eggs into a single basket; we have assumed that empirical objectified process produce knowledge equal to what the environment offers as information. We have assumed our knowledge is growing. I am not so sure. This just sort of proves that there is a romanticism of the idea that the environment—whether windowless walls, or rivers—itself teaches. Teachers teach. Education is cerebral not sensory. It was our role to help the teachers know what to teach. We were the ones who know. We all know that nature is pleasant. However, as long as we are on an important mission, we may as well just get on with the work and cease the with the division. However, the other side of the argument is that when moving knowledge away from natural sources and deeper into the realm of the expert, in turn, this makes it easier for government and industry to expropriate it, alter it, and feed it back to us through the media in techno-jargon explicable only to techno-minds. With nature obscure, nearly everything we know comes to us processed and it may be right or it may be wrong. We know only what we are told. For most of us the TV news is now our source. Without any basis of comparison, as the news report changes, our understanding changes. Mother’s milk is unsanitary. Mice like cheese. Mars has life on it. Technology will cure cancer. The stars do not influence us. Nuclear power is safe. Nuclear power is not safe. Mars has no life on it. Food dyes are safe. Saccharin is safe. Technology causes cancer. Columbus proved the World was round. A little X ray is okay. The Vietnam War was not a civil war. We will have an epidemic of COVID. Mother’s milk is healthy. Technology will clean up pollution. Preservatives do not cause cancer. Economic growth is in the offing. Red food dyes are not safe. COVID vaccine is safe. The Viet Nam War was a civil war. Hierarchy is natural. Humans are the royalty of nature. Saccharin is not safe. COVID vaccine causes paralysis. We have the highest standard of living. Hormones in beef cause cancer. Hugging your children is good for them. Too much sun causes cancer. And so it goes. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Our modern media spring from a common source, an invention that is rarely mentioned today but that had as decisive a role in shaping society as the internal combustion engine or the incandescent lightbulb The invention was called the Audion. It was the first electronic audio amplifier, and the man who created it was Lee de Forest. Even when judged by the high standards set by America’s mad-genius investors, de Forest was an oddball. Nasty, ill-favored, and generally despised—in high school he was voted “homeliest boy” in his class—he was propelled by an enormous ego and an equally outsized inferiority complex. When he was not marrying or divorcing a wife, alienating a colleague, or leading a business to ruin, he was usually in court defending himself against charges of fraud or patent infringement—or pressing his own suit against one of his many enemies. De Forest grew up in Alabama, the son of a schoolmaster. After earing a doctorate in engineering from Yale in 1896, he spent a decade fiddling with the latest radio and telegraph technology, desperately seeking the breakthrough that would make his name and fortune. In 1906, his moment arrived. Without quite knowing what he was doing, he took a standard two-pole vacuum tube, which sent an electric current from one wire (the filament) to a second (the plate), and he added a third wire to it, turning the diode into a triode. He found that when he sent a small electric charge into the third wire—the grid—it boosted the strength of the current running between the filament and the plate. The device, he explained in a patent application, could be adapted “for amplifying feeble electric currents.” De Forest’s seemingly modest invention turned out to be a World changer. Because it could be used to amplify an electrical signal, it could also be used to amplify audio transmissions sent and received as radio waves. Up to then, radios had been of limited use because their signals faded so quickly. With the Audion to boost the signals, long-distance wireless transmissions because possible, setting the stage for radio broadcasting. The Audion became, as well, a critical component of the new telephone system, enabling people on opposite sides of the country, or the World, to hear each other talk. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

De Forest could not have known it at the time, but he had inaugurated the age of electronics. Electric currents are, simply put, streams of electrons, and the Audion was the first device that allowed the intensity of those streams to be controlled with precision. As the twentieth century progressed, triode tubes came to form the technological heart of the modern communications, entertainment, and media industries. They could be found in radio transmitters and receivers, in hi-fi sets, in public address systems, in guitar amps. Arrays of tubes also served as the processing units and data storage systems in many early digital computers. The first mainframes often had tens of thousands of them. When, around 1950, vacuum tubes began to be replaced by smaller, cheaper, and more reliable solid-state transistors, the popularity of electronic appliances exploded. In the miniaturized form of the triode transistor, Lee de Forest’s invention became the workhorse of our information age. In the end, de Forest was not quite sure whether to be pleased or dismayed by the World he had helped bring into being. In “Dawn of the Electronic Age,” a 1952 article he wrote for Popular Mechanics, he crowed about his creation of the Audion, referring to its as “this small acorn from which has sprung the gigantic oak that is today World-embracing.” At the same time, he lamented the “moral depravity” of commercial broadcast media. “A melancholy view of our national mental level is obtained from a survey of the moronic quality of the majority of today’s radio programs,” he wrote. Looking ahead to future applications of electronics, he grew even gloomier. He believed that “electron physiologist” would eventually be able to monitor and analyze “thought or brain waves,” allowing “joy and grief [to] be measured in definite, quantitative units.” Ultimately, he concluded, “a professor may be able to implant knowledge into the reluctant brains of his 22-century pupils. What terrifying political possibilities may be lurking there! Let us be thankful that such things are only for posterity, not for us.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Though students do not have books, they most emphatically do have music. Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music. This is the age of music and the states of soul that accompany it. To find a rival to this enthusiasm, one would have to go back at least a century to Germany and the passion for Wagner’s operas. They had the religious sense that Wagner was creating the meaning of life and that they were not merely listening to his works but experiencing that meaning. Today, a very large proportion of young people between the ages of ten and fifty live for music. It is their passion; nothing else excites them as it does; they cannot take seriously anything alien to music. When they are in school and with their families, they are longing to plug themselves back into their music. Nothing surrounding them—school, family, church—has anything to do with their musical World. At best that ordinary life is neutral, but mostly it is an impediment, drained of vital content, even a thing to be rebelled against. Of course, the enthusiasm for Wanger was limited to a small class, could be indulged only rarely and only in a few places, and had to wait on the composer’s slow output. The music of the new votaries, on the other hand, knows neither class nor nation. It is available twenty-four hours a day, everywhere. There is the stereo in the home, in the car, on the mobile phone; there are concerts; there are music videos, with special channels exclusively devoted to them, on the air nonstop; there are the Walkmans so that no place—not public transportation, not the library—prevents students from communing with the Muse, even while studying. And, above all, the musical soil had become tropically rich. No need to wait for one unpredictable genius. Now there are many geniuses, producing all the time, two new ones rising to take the place of every fallen hero. There is no dearth of the new and the startling. The power of music is in the soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Classical music is not dead among the young. This assertion will, I know, be hotly disputed by many who, unwilling to admit tidal changes, can point to the proliferation on campuses of classes in classical music appreciation and practice, as well as performance groups of all kinds. Their presence is undeniable, but they involve not more than 5 to 10 percent of the students. Classical music is now a special taste, like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand. Thirty years ago, most middle-class families made some of the old European music a part of the home, partly because they liked it, partly because they thought it was good for the kids. University students usually had some early emotive association with Beethoven, Chopin and Brahms, which was a permanent part of their makeup and to which they were likely to respond throughout their lives. This was probably the only regularly recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated in America. Many, or even most, of the young people of that generation also swung with Benny Goodman, but with an element of self-consciousness—to the hip, to prove they were not snobs, to show solidarity with the democratic ideal of a pop culture out of which would grow a new high culture. So there remained a class distinction between high and low, although private taste was beginning to create doubts about whether one really liked the high very much. However, all that has changed. Rock music is as unquestioned and unproblematic as the air the students breathe, and very few have any acquaintance at all with classical music. This is a constant surprise to me. And one of the strange aspects of my relations with good students I come to know well is that I frequently introduce them to Mozart. This is a pleasure for me, inasmuch as it is always pleasant to give people gifts that please them. It is interesting to see whether and in what ways their studies are complemented by such music. However, this is something utterly new to me as a teacher; formerly my students usually knew much more classical music than I did. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Music was not all that important for the generation of students preceding the current one. The romanticism that has dominated serious music since Beethoven appealed to refinements—perhaps overrefinements—of sentiments that are hardly to be found in the contemporary World. The lives people lead or wish to lead and their prevailing passions are of a different sort than those of the highly educated German and French bourgeoisie, who were avidly reading Rousseau and Baudelaire, Goethe and Heine, for their spiritual satisfaction. The music had been designed to produce, as well as to place, such exquisite sensibilities had a very tenuous relation to American lives of any kind. So romantic musical culture in America had had for a long time the character of a veneer, as easily susceptible to ridicule as were Margaret Dumont’s displays of coquettish chasteness, so aptly exploited by Groucho Marx in A Night At The Opera. I noticed this when I first started teaching and lived in a house for gifted students. The “good” ones studied their physics and then listened to classical music. The students who did not fit so easily into the groove, some of them just vulgar and restive under the cultural tyranny, but some of them also serious, were looking for things that really responses to their needs. Almost always they responded to the beat of the newly emerging rock music. They were a bit ashamed of their taste, for it was not respectable. However, I instinctively sided with this second ground, with real, if coarse, feelings as opposed to artificial and dead ones. Then their musical sans-culotteism won the revolution and reigns unabashed today. No classical music has been produced that can speak to this generation. Symptomatic of this change is how seriously students now take the famous passages on musical education in Plato’s Republic. In the past, students, good liberals that they always are, were indignant at the censorship of poetry, as a threat to free inquiry. However, they were really thinking of science and politics. They hardly paid attention to the discussion of the music itself and, to the extent that they even thought about it, were really puzzled by Plato’s devoting time to rhythm and melody in a serious treatise on political philosophy. Their experience of music was as an entertainment, a matter of indifference to political and moral life. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Students today, on the contrary, know exactly why Plato takes music so seriously. They know it affects life very profoundly and are indignant because Plato seems to want to rob them of their most intimate pleasure. They are drawn into argument with Plato about the experience of music, and the dispute centers on how to evaluate it and deal with it. This encounter not only helps to illuminate the phenomenon of contemporary music, but also provides a model of how contemporary students can profitably engage with a classic text. They very fact of their fury shows how much Plato threatens what is dear and intimate to them. They are little able to defend their experience, which has seemed unquestionable until questioned, and it is most resistant to cool analysis. Yet if a student can—and this is most difficult and unusual—draw back, get a critical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficult step toward the philosophic conversion. Indignation is the soul’s defense against the wound of doubt about its own; it reorders the cosmos to support the justice of its cause. It justifies putting Sokrates to death. Recognizing indignation for what it is constitutes knowledge of the soul, and is thus an experience more philosophic than the study of mathematic. It is Plato’s teaching that music, by its nature, encompasses all that is today most resistant to philosophy. So it may well be that through the thicket of our greatest corruptions runs the path to awareness of the oldest truths. Music is the medium of the human soil in its most ecstatic condition of wonder and terror. A mixture of the soul’s primitive and primacy speech, without articulate speech or reason, is not only irrational, but it is hostile to sensibility. Even when articulate speech is added, it is utterly subordinate to and determined by the music and the passion it expresses. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Civilization or, to say the same thing, education is the taming or domestication of the soul’s raw passions—not suppressing or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy—but forming and informing them as art. The goal of harmonizing the enthusiastic part of the soul with what develops later, the rational part, is perhaps impossible to attain. However, without it, humans can never be whole. Music, or poetry, which is what music becomes are reason emerges, always involves a delicate balance between passion and reason, and, even in its highest and most developed forms—religious, warlike and erotic—that balance is always tipped, if every so slightly, toward the passionate. Decisions, sometimes affecting the life or death of a business or even a person, are often based on obsolete, misleading, inaccurate or flat-out false knowledge. Today the computer, the Internet, the new hypermedia environment, special effects and other new tools make online fraud and fabrication easier, while the sheer mass of innocent, but just plain unverified and untrue, knowledge on the Web skyrockets. In consequence, questions that were once the province of philosophers, theologians and epistemologist will increasingly confront decision-makers in every field. Every estimate of risk, every consumer decision to buy or not to buy, every investor’s decision to invest or wait and every executive decision—to outsource or insource, quit or stay, hire or layoff, partner or go it alone—is ultimately based on torrents of data, information and knowledge. How, in the face of all that, can we know what is—or is not—true? There are at least six rival criteria by which most of us decide whether something is true. While different people and cultures may have used other tests of truth at one time or another, these six filters or screens are surely among the most prevalent. Ironically, market research, political pollsters, advertising agencies, survey firms and others go to great expensive length to ask people what they believe. Rarely do they ask the more revealing question: Why do they believe it? The answer largely depends on which of these six criteria is used for validation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

A lot of what we call truth is assumed to be correct because of consensus. It is conventional wisdom. Everyone “knows” X to be true, therefore, it must be true. We absorb consensus truth from family, friends, co-workers and the surrounding culture, usually without thinking twice. It forms the zeitgeist of the lemmings. Going alone with the crowd requires no thought. Even better, lemming truth is safely uncontroversial. If it turns out to be wrong, you do not look foolish. After all, everyone else believed it, too—even smart people. We saw lemming behavior in the herd of investors who stampeded into the early dot-coms—and them out again. We see it in the otherwise intelligent business executives who rush to adopt, then jettison, the latest managerial fad. New ideas whip through the ranks of senior management, are taken on, implemented, imposed on people and quickly discarded. They frequently have direct, destructive impacts on the economy, leading, for example, to illconsidered mass layoffs, imitative mergers and the like. Whole industries even now are being restructured or bent out of shape as a result of management reliance on “lemming truth.” Nor are disasters based on lemming truth limited to business and the economy. The U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee accused America spy agencies of “groupthink” in concluding Iraq had, or was about to acquire, weapons of mass destruction. In response to critics, the agencies noted that the friendly intelligence organizations of other nations had confirmed the information on which they based their conclusion. Consensus was doing its persuasive work. Only much later did the public learn that Iraqi defectors, eager for the United States to overthrow Saddam’s regime, had spread false information to the spy agencies of France, Germany, England, Spain, Denmark, Italy and Sweden, thus “gaming the system” and helping create the fake consensus on which the U.S agencies relied. Here lemming truth helped start a war. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17