The actions people take in life are not necessarily even conscious choices. A person who sometimes returns a favor, and sometimes does not, may not think about what strategy is being used. There is no need to assume deliberate choice at all. Nor is it necessary to assume, as the sociobiologist do, that important aspects of human behavior are guided by one’s genes. Many times, the approach being used is strategic rather than genetic for certainly no intelligent person should make an important choice without trying to the complicating factors of the situation into account. The value of an analysis is that one can help to clarify some of the subtle features of the interaction—features which might otherwise be lost in the maze of complexities of the highly particular circumstances in which choice must actually be made. It is the very complexity of reality which makes the analysis of an abstract interaction so helpful as an assistant to understanding. The theory of Cooperation in biological systems can occur even when the participants are not related, and even when they are unable to appreciate the consequences of their own behavior. What makes this possible are the evolutionary mechanisms of genetics and survival of the fittest. An individual able to achieve a beneficial response from another is more likely to have offspring that survive and that continue the pattern of behavior which elicited beneficial responses from others. Thus, under suitable conditions, cooperation based upon reciprocity proves stable in the biological World. Potential applications are spelled out for specific aspects of territoriality, mating, and disease. The conclusion is that Darwin’s emphasis on individual advantage can, in fact, account for the presence of cooperation between individuals of the same or even different species. As long as the proper conditions are present, cooperation can get started, thrive, and prove stable.

While foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation, it can certainly be helpful. If the facts of Cooperation Theory are known by participants with foresight, the most promising finding is that the evolution of cooperation can be speeded up. The most important kingmaker is based on an “outcome maximization” principle originally developed as a possible interpretation of what human subjects do in the Prisoner’s Dilemma laboratory experiments. This rule is called DOWNING, is a particularly interesting rule in its own right. It is well worth studying as an example of a decision rule which is based upon a quite sophisticated idea. Unlike most of the others, its logic is not just a variant of TIT FOR TAT. Instead it is based on a deliberate attempt to understand the other player and then to make the choice that will yield the best long-term score based upon this understanding. The idea is that if the other individual does not seem responsive to what DOWNING is doing, DOWNING will try to get away with whatever it can by defecting. If the other individual does seem responsive, on the other hand, DOWNING will cooperate. To judge the other’s responsiveness, DOWNING estimates the probability that the other individual cooperates after it (DOWNING) cooperates, and also the probability that the other individual cooperates after DOWNING defects. For each move, it updates its estimate of these two conditional probabilities and then selects the choice which will maximize its own long-terms payoff under the assumption that it has correctly modeled the other individual. If the two conditional probabilities have similar values, DOWNING determines that it pays to defect, since the other player seems to be doing that same thing whether DOWNING cooperates or not.

Conversely, if the other individual tends to cooperate after a cooperation but not after a defection by DOWNING, then the other individual seems responsive, and DOWNING will calculate that the best thing to do with a responsive player is to cooperate. Under certain circumstances, DOWNING will even determine that the best strategy is to alternate cooperation and defection. Schizophrenic writing is not infrequently possessed of genius since it emerges from a dialogue between inner soul and outer surroundings unmediated by the burden of “correct” societal conduct. In the World of advertising and mass media, the post-hypnotic magic of the suggestive ad slogan or the metabolic programming of muzak blurs the distinction between the perceived and the perceiver. Vide the recent Citibank slogan: “We’re thinking what you’re thinking.” The schizophrenic takes this sort of programming seriously enough to believe that one is being spoken to as an individual and might even reverse the syllogism to read, “I’m thinking what Citibank is thinking.” Forgiveness of a rule can be informally described as its propensity to cooperate in the moves after the other individual has defected. Of all the nice rules, the one that scored the lowest was also the one that was least forgiving. This is FRIEDMAN, a totally unforgiving rule that employs permanent retaliation. It is never the first to defect, but once the other defects even once, FRIEDMAN defects from then on. In contrast, the winner, TIT FOR TAT, is unforgiving for one move, but thereafter is totally forgiving of that defection After one punishment, it lets bygones be bygones. One of the main reasons why the rules that are not nice do not do well is that most of the rules are not very forgiving. The cause of war is individual and collective maladjustment of men and women in social space. Release from Magnetic Straitjacket Seclusion by Gravity, Restriction, Vacuum, Constant Observation. They are free-showing me how capitalism crushes communism.

Society appears to be largely composed of extremists and habitual criminals not normal human animals subjects or citizens of respectable states. This magnetic phenomenon not only is to be viewed as the predisposing cause of way, may be considered likewise to qualify as a predisposing influence in the cause of cancer, an explanation of the galactic hiss” noted by astronomers in extraterrestrial radio reception, the source of the “voices” complained of by patients in mental institutions and certainly the “magnetic straitjacket” painfully endured by all ordinary patients in such confinement, as well as many other distressing conditions and infirmities. The single fundamental issues is: the relation between reason, or science, and the human good. When one speaks of happiness and the last man, one does not mean that the last man is unhappy, but that one’s happiness is nauseating. An experience of profound contempt is necessary in order to grasp our situation, and our capacity for contempt is vanishing. Those who have esteem or revere and are therefore not self-satisfied, those who have values or, to say the same thing, have gods, in particular those who create gods or found religion have learned that the sacred is the most important human phenomenon. “God is dead,” Nietzsche proclaimed. However, he did not say this on a note of triumph, in the style of earlier atheism—the tyrant has been overthrown and man is now free. Rather he said it in the anguished tones of the most powerful and delicate piety of its proper object. Man, who loved and needed God, has lost his Father and Savior without possibility of resurrection. The joy of liberation one finds in Marx has turned into terror at man’s unprotectedness. Honesty compels serious men, on examination of their consciences, to admit that the old faith is no longer compelling.

It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity, the greatest sacrifice a Christian can make. Enlightenment killed God; but like Macbeth, the men of the Enlightenment did not know that the cosmos would rebel at the deed, and the World became “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Consider the case of JOSS, a sneaky rule that tries to get away with an occasional defection. This decision rule is a variation of TIT FOR TAT. Like TIT FOR TAT, it always defects immediately after the other individuals defect. However, instead of always cooperating after the other individual cooperates, 10 percent of the time it defects after the other individual cooperates. Thus it tries to sneak in an occasional exploitation of the other individual. This decision rule seems like a fairly small variation of TIT FOR TAT, but in fact its overall performance was much worse, and it is interesting to see exactly why. A major lesson in this situation is the importance of minimizing echo effects in an environment of mutual power. When a single defection can set off a long string of recriminations and counterrecriminations, both sides suffer. A sophisticated analysis of choice must go at least three levels of analysis is the direct effect of a choice. This is easy, since a defection always earns more than a cooperation. The second level considers the indirect effects, taking into account that the other side may or may not punish a defection. This much of the analysis was certainly appreciated by many of the entrants. However, the third level goes deeper and takes into account the fact that in responding to the defections of the other side, one may be repeating or even amplifying one’s own previous exploitative choice. Thus a single defection may be successful when analyzed for its direct effects, and perhaps even when its secondary effects are taken into account. However, the real costs may be in the tertiary effects when one’s own isolated defections turn into unending mutual recriminations.

With the other play serving as a mechanism to delay the self-punishment by a few moves, this aspect of self-punishment was not picked up by many of the decision rules. Despite the fact that none of the attempts at more or less sophisticated decision rules was an improvement on TIT FOR TAT, it was easy to find several rules that would have preformed substantially better than TIT FOR TAT in the environment of the situation. The existence of these rules should serve as a warning against the facile belief that an eye for an eye is not necessarily the best strategy. Nietzsche replaces easygoing or self-satisfying atheism with agonized atheism, suffering its human consequences. Longing to believe, along with intransigent refusal to satisfy that longing, is, according to him, the profound response to our entire spiritual condition. Marx denied the existence of God but turned over all His functions to History, which is inevitably directed to a goal of fulfilling of man and which takes the place of Providence. If one is so naïve, one might as well be a Christian. Prior to Nietzsche, all those who taught that man is a historical being presented his history as in one way or another progressive. After Nietzsche, a characteristic formula for describing out history is “the decline of the West.” Nietzsche surveyed and summed up the contradictor strands of rule in culture or soul, that it cannot defend itself theoretically and that its human consequences are intolerable. This constitutes a crisis of the West, for everywhere in the West, for the first time ever, all regimes are founded on reason. Human founders, looking only to universal principles of natural justice recognizable by all humans through their unassisted reason, established governments on the basis of the consent of the governed, without appeal to revelations or tradition.

However, reason has also discerned that all previous cultures were founded by and on gods or belief in gods. Only if the new regimes are enormous successes, able to rival the creative genius and splendor of other cultures, could reason’s rational foundings be equal or superior to the kinds of foundings that reason knows were made elsewhere. However, such equality or superiority is highly questionable; therefore reason recognizes its own inadequacy. There must be religion, and reason cannot found religions. This was already implicit in the first wave of criticism of Enlightenment. Rousseau said a civil religion is necessary to society, and the legislator has appeared draped in the colors of religion. Tocqueville concentrated on the centrality of religion to America. With the failure of Robespierre’s kind of civil religion, there was a continuing effort to promote a revised or liberal Christianity, inspired by Rousseau’s Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar. The very idea of culture was a way of preserving something like religion without talking about it. Culture is a synthesis of reason and religion, attempting to hide the sharp distinction between the two poles. Nietzsche examines the patient, observes that the treatment was not successful, and pronounces God is dead. Now there cannot be religion; but inasmuch as man needs culture, the religious impulse remains. No religion but religiosity. This suffuses Nietzsche’s analysis of modernity, and, unnoticed, it underlies the contemporary categories of psychology and sociology. He brought the religious question back to the center of philosophy. The critical standpoint from which to view modern culture is its essential atheism; and that more repulsive successor of the bourgeois, the last man, is the product of egalitarian, rationalist, socialist atheism.

Thus the novel aspects of the crisis of the West is that it is identical with a crisis of philosophy. Reading Thucydides shows us that the decline of Greece was purely political, that what we call intellectual history is of little importance for understanding it. Old regimes had traditional roots; but philosophy and science took over as rulers in modernity, and purely theoretical problems have decisive political effects. One cannot imagine modern political history without a discussion of Locke, Rousseau, and Marx. Theoretical implausibility and decrepitude are, as everyone knows, at the heart of the Russian malaise. And the Free World is not far behind. Nietzsche is the profoundest, clearest, most powerful diagnostician of the disease. He argues that there is an inner necessity for us to abandon reason on rational grounds—that therefore our regime is doomed. There is, however, a much larger sense in which changes in knowledge are causing or contributing to enormous power shifts. The most important economic development of our lifetime has been the rise of a new system for creating wealth, based no longer on muscle but on mind. Labor in the advanced economy no longer consists of working on “things,” writes historian Mark Poster of the University of California (Irvine), but of “men and women acting on other men and women, or…people acting on information and information acting on people.” The substitution of information or knowledge for brute labor, in fact, lied behind the trouble General Motors (GM) once faced and the rise of Japan as well. For while GM still was tied to the economy, that is why leaders say, “What’s good for GM is Good for America.” At the same time, Japan was exploring its edges and discovering otherwise. As early as 1970, when American business leaders, and even the general public, were being bombarded by books, newspaper articles, and television programs heralding the arrival of the “information age” and focusing on the 21^st century.

While the end-of-industrialism concept was dismissed with a shrug in the United States of America, it was welcomed and embraced by Japanese decision-makers in business, politics, and the media. Knowledge, they concluded, was the key to economic growth in the 21^st century. It was hardly surprising, therefore, that even though the United States of America started computerizing earlier, Japan moved more quickly to substitute the knowledge-based technologies of the Third Wave for the brute muscle technologies of the Second Wave past. Robots proliferated. Sophisticated manufacturing methods, heavily dependent on computers and information, began turning out products whose quality could not be easily matched in the World markets. Moreover, recognizing that its old smokestack technologies were ultimately doomed, Japan took steps to facilitate the transition to the new and to buffer itself against the dislocations entailed in such a strategy. The contrast with General Motors—and American policy in general—could not have been sharper. If we also look closely at many of the other powers shifts cited above, it will become apparent that in these cases, too, the changed role of knowledge—the rise of the new wealth-creation system—either caused or contributed to major shifts of power. The spread of this new knowledge economy is, in fact, the explosive new force that has hurled the advanced economies into bitter global competition, confronted the socialist nations with their hopeless obsolescence, forced many “developing nations” to scrap their traditional economic strategies, and is not profoundly dislocating power relationships in both personal and public spheres. In a prescient remark, Winston Churchill once said that “empires of the future are empires of the mind.”  Today that observation has come true. What has not yet been appreciated is the degree to which raw, elemental power—at the level of private life as well as at the level of empire—will be transformed in the decades ahead as a result of the new role of the “mind.”

For centuries, the word Timbuktu has been used in the West as shorthand for the remotest possible place. Not long ago or Australian friend, the renowned author/adventurer Paul Raffaele, visited Timbuktu after a two-day drive another from Bamako, the capital of Mali in West Africa. He later e-mailed of this account. Little has changed in Timbuktu for centuries…Nomads herd donkey trains to market, while turbaned Tuareg men in robes an veils, hiding all but their eyes, stride through the alleys and past the fourteenth-century mud mosque….But ahead I see something that looks like a mirage. Scores of teenagers, black, white, and brown, clad in American ghetto-style clothing, are streaming along the street. The boys wear dark gym pants, high-tech sneakers, and long, loose basketball shirts boasting the names of teams like the Lakers…The girls wear tight jeans, sneakers and T-shirts. They are heading toward City Hall, and Paul joins them. “We’re having a rap competition,” a body explains. Timbuktu’s young people, he tells Paul, “discovered rap a couple of years ago, but now it’s their favorite music…Timbuktu now has cable TV, and we see rap all the time on MTV.” Inside the hall, hundreds of similarly dressed kids—Arab, Tuareg, Fulani and Songhai—are screaming and foot-stomping as four young men clutch the mikes. Over the next two weeks, however, Paul seldom saw anything but traditional garb in the streets of Timbuktu and in the desert. “On that one afternoon,” he wrote, “when the kids of Timbuktu flaunted their addiction to modern garb and music, did I get a glimpse of the future?” Raffaele’s question echoes that millions of parents around the World who see their cultures under attack. The United States of America, they feel, is seducing their kids.

However, it might be asked, away from what? Paul offers one powerful clue: “I ask [a boy] why there seem to be no girls older than sixteen in the audience. ‘That’s when their parents marry them off and they spend most of their time inside the house.’ I ask whether the girls choose whom they marry. ‘Of course not,’ he replies. ‘Marriage is too important for the girl or boy to make the choice. Our parents always decide.’” So Paul’s account makes clear, there are strict limits on Timbuktu’s conversion to the American Way. While Hollywood sent its message that freedom means unrestrained hedonism, Wall Street was sending a parallel message contending that unrestrained business and trade offer the best path to wealth. Washington, echoing this theme, chanted the mantra that the unrestrained freed trade and a “level playing field” benefit everyone. This, as we have seen, was combined with a magic formula: liberalization + globalization = democracy. For several decades America thus told the whole World—and itself—that laissez-faire (especially privatization and deregulation) would deliver democracy—as though any mechanistic, one-size-fits-all formula would work everywhere, overriding all differences in religion, culture, history and levels of economic and institutional development. If what America represents to the World is an across-the-board lack of restraint—and if that is its definition of freedom—it is hardly surprising that adults in other culture see it not as freedom but as chaos. Unrestrained hedonism and free-marketism are not, however, inherent or inevitable accompaniments of Third Wave economic development. Instead, they reflect the fact that the process of moving from an industrial economy and society to a knowledge-based economy and society is unprecedented. No previous generation has undergone, let alone completed, a similar transition. No model exists.

America, therefore, arrogant though it often seems, is shaken and uncertain as it experiments with novel ideas, social structures and values. It may well jettison some of today’s lack of restraint as unworkable models of behavior are tried and abandoned. When critics around the World complain that the United States of America is attempting to dominate and homogenize their culture, they fail to understand that the thrust towards homogeneity comes not from the advanced Third Wave sectors of America’s economy and society but from Second Wave holdovers. The mass-media, mass-marketing and mass-distribution methods that lie behind America’s exports of mass culture and values are perfect expressions of yesterday’s industrial mass society, not tomorrow’s knowledge economy based, if anything, on the customization and de-massification. In fact, the very variety that comes with knowledge-based development ensures that other countries will adopt quite different economic, social and political pathways to the future. They will not look like America. However, then, neither will tomorrow’s America. In Myth America, Carol Wald and Judith Papachristou detail a history of the images of women from 1865 to 1945, as presented in print media. They argue that the images, created exclusively by men, formed the operative visual myths about women in America and that as the images spread and entered people’s minds, they became mirrors of reality. Men wanted their women to be that way; women, seeing only those images, attempted to and eventually did become like the images. It was a kind of alchemy in which the image finally produced the reality. “To the degree that pictures seem real, people were inclined to accept what the [male] artist saw in good faith…Through such an arrangement, the myth becomes apparent…Myths prevail. Here, all the expected roles of women are illustrated, from romatic elopement, blushing bride, and honeymoon to household drudge and nagging wife…All are expression of [male] feeling made visible through art.”

The authors are careful to point out that the images of women had little to do with the reality of women’s lives, which were filled with hardship, and the need to solve problems against enormous odds, many times on their own. Nonetheless, because the images were everywhere, they began to dominate the reality, making women wish to be like men’s images of women, encouraging men to perceive women in those terms and helping institute a power arrangement between the genders that is only now being challenged. The images become the mirror against which the whole society compared women’s behavior, and because of their power they succeeded in becoming a personal and also a political and economical reality. Yet, those were print images, which are not nearly so powerful as the moving images that have since achieved an even greater presence in everyone’s mind. The women’s movement of today, like all other movements that are interested in recovering self-definition—African American, Asian, Indian, worker, homosexual and others—has discovered that its struggle must be waged not only against the creators of the images—the people and the media who purvey them—but also against the very mental images women already carry with their own behavior. Because of this, many political movements have taken on aspects of personal therapy movements. The goal is to rid oneself of what are called “tapes.” This phrase, heard equally from political people and people involved in many therapy systems—from “radical psychiatry” to, yes, est—is used quite literally. The tape is the image, the picture one carries in one’s mind that is continually replicated, unconsciously, however useless, self-destructive, or idiotic it may be. When women carry inside their heads the image of the idealized subservient housewife-mother-secretary, they automatically tend to imitate the image. This continues until the moment when they say, “Wait, I did not create this person in my head; who did?”

When Marvin Gaye invented the image “Black is beautiful,” and “I’m Black and I’m proud,” the points were to destroy a previous image carried in the minds of Americans alike that black was not beautiful. Only then could personal change be made, leading to political results. The suppression of Indian people in this country, at first achieved with guns, was later accelerated and confirmed by the media images of the Indian savage who needed to be saved by Agent Wonder Bread, the Blue-Eyed Wonder, who was Western educated, and had morality and a lifestyle of appropriate means. The critical ingredient in this was the implantation within young Indians themselves of the belief that this image was a correct one. With that came self-hatred. Only by realizing that the image carried in the mind—the tape—is real and implanted is possible to disconnect oneself from the cycle of taped replay and subvert an otherwise inevitable process whereby the image is translated into reality. You may be among those who believe that the evolution of image into reality takes place via the mysterious process implied by Hermes, the Tantras, the Cabbala or the Rosicrucians. Or you may be impressed with the biophysiological evidence that images are carried in the cells. Or you may believe that the emulation process is the primary way image becomes reality. Or you may believe, as I do, that the evolution of image into reality involves all these routes and others. However, whichever is most important, the result is the same. We evolve into the images we carry around in our minds. We become what we see. And in today’s America, what most of us see a lot of television. However, such prejudices are not always apparent at the start of a technology’s journey, which is why no one can safely conspire to be a winner in technological change. Who would have imagined, for example, whose interests and what World-view would be ultimately advanced by the invention of the mechanical clock?

The clock had its origin in the Benedictine monasteries of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The impetus being the invention was to provide a more or less precise regularity to the routines of the monasteries, which required, among other things, seven periods of devotion during the course of the say. The bells of the monastery were to be rung to signal the canonical hours; the mechanical clock was the technology that could provide precision to these rituals of devotion. And indeed it did. However, what the monks did not foresee was that the clock is a means not merely of keeping track of the hours but also of synchronizing and controlling the actions of men. And thus, by the middle of the fourteenth century, the clock had moved outside the walls of the monastery, and brought a new and precise regularity to the life of the workman and the merchant. “The mechanical clock,” as Lewis Mumford wrote, “made possible the idea of regular production, regular working hours and a standardized product.” In short, without the clock, capitalism would have been quite impossible. The paradox, the surprise, and the wonder are that the clock was invented by men who wanted to devote themselves more rigorously to God; it ended as the technology of greatest use to men who wished to devote themselves to the accumulation of money. In the eternal struggles between God and Mammon, the clock quite unpredictably favored the latter. Unforeseen consequences stand in the way of all those who think they see clearly the direction in which a new technology will take us. Not even those who invent a technology can be assumed to be reliable prophets, as Thamus warned. Gutenberg, for example, was by all accounts a devout Catholic who would have been horrified to hear that accursed heretic Luther described printing as “God’s highest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.”

Luther understood, as Gutenberg did not, that the mass-produced book, by placing the Word of God on every kitchen table, makes each Christian one’s own theologian—one might even say one’s own priest, or, better, from Luther’s point of view, one’s own pope. In the struggle between unity and diversity of religious belief, the press favored the latter, and we can assume that this possibility never occurred to Gutenberg. Humans must be taught to distinguish the right way from the wrong way. The right way, the way of God, is followed by “the proven ones.” Those who continue on their own way, and refuse to do that way, are called “the wicked,” those who miss that way again and again are called sinners. The real struggle of the direction is therefore with the wicked, whereas the “good” and “upright” God again and again directs sinners the way that is, helps them to find their ways back. LOOK AHEAD is inspired by techniques used in artificial intelligence programs to play chess. It is interesting that artificial intelligence techniques have inspired a rule which was in fact better than any of the riles designed by theorists specifically for the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It allows one to envision the future based on what strategy one may use to solve a problem and see what all outcomes of their choices may be. There is a lot to be learned about coping in an environment of mutual power. Even expert strategists from political science, sociology, economics, psychology, and mathematic have made the systemic errors of being too competitive for their own good, not being forgiving enough, and being too pessimistic about the responsiveness of the other wide. The effectiveness of a particular strategy depends not only on its own characteristics, but also on the nature of the other strategies with which it must interact. For this reason, the results of a single situation are not definitive. This is not a wish and not a promise. It is not that humans deserve happiness or that one may be certain of being happy whether in this Earthly life or another, future life. It is a joyful cry and a passionate statement—“how happy this person is!”

WELCOME TO CRESLEIGH RANCH

Four distinct communities in one iconic neighborhood.

Thank you for your interest in this highly coveted community. While homes at Brighton Station are no longer available, its neighboring community, Mills Station, is still actively selling with two new communities coming soon.

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