The Highest-Quality of Power Comes from the Application of Knowledge

After wrestling throughout their lives with malfunctioning homes, schools, and medical institutions; after being fleeced by corrupt financial institutions and finally reaching retirement, American workers look ahead to their “golden years—the long-awaited time to take a breath, stroll to the mailbox and pick up one’s pension check. However, here Americans young and old face yet another institutional disaster—this one in the pension system. Critics of the current pension arrangements warn of a coming “financial meltdown.” Once considered heresy, such doubts have been attributed to no less an authority than a U.S. secretary of the Treasury. An underfunded pension plan is an employee benefit plan for retirement income that has fewer assets than liabilities, or what it owes in benefits. If a pension plan is underfunded, it is not on track to have enough money to pay out all its promised benefits and other expenses. Damage from corporate pension-plan losses has been piling up like a slow-motion train wreck. Once recent three-year period saw assets of U.S. private pension funds shrink by 15 percent, while liabilities soared nearly 60 percent. People who rely on their company pension plans to fund their retirement may be in for a shock: of the 200 biggest defined-benefit plans in the S&P 500 based on assets, 186 are not fully funded. Simply put, they do not have enough money to fund current and future retirees. A big part of the reason is the poor returns they got from their assets in the superlow interest rate environment that followed the financial crisis. It left a hole of $382 billion for the top 200 plans. Of course, the percentage of workers covered by traditional defined benefit plans—those that pay a lifetime annuity, often based on the years of service and salary—has been declining for decades as companies shift to defined contribution plans such as 401(k)s. However, each time a pension plan is terminated, canceled or altered, thousands of workers are affected.

The mothers of the under-funded pensions is no less a behemoth. General Electric Co. has a major problem. The company ended its defined benefit plan for new hires in 2012, but its primary plan, covering about 467,000 people, is one of the largest in the U.S.A. And at $31 billion, GE’s pension shortfall is one of the largest in the S&P 500. INTC US Equity, DAL US Equity, DLPH US Equity, AAL US Equity, APC US Equity, along with automakers, airlines and paper industries are also majorly underfunded. The good news is that the funded states of the 100 largest corporate defined benefit pension plans rose by $43 billion during March of 2022. The funded states surplus improved to $86 billion from $43 billion at the end of February 2022 thanks to liability gains, which improved due to an increase in the benchmark corporate bond interest rates used to value pension liabilities. As of March 31, the funded ratio rose to 105.2 percent, up from 102.5 percent at the end of February. March’s increase caps an impressive first quarter of 2022 which saw a $92 billion improvement in funded status. This is the highest funded ratio recorded by the Pension Funding Index (PFI) in nearly 15 years—since the end of 2007. The Milliman 100 PFI asset value fell by $16 billion to $1.738 trillion at the end of March due to investment losses of 0.56 percent. By comparison, the 2021 Milliman Pension Funding Study reported that the monthly median expected investment return during 2020 was 0.50 percent annualized. The projected benefit obligation (PBO), or pension liabilities, decreased to $1.652 trillion at the end of March. The change resulted from an increase of 26 basis points in the monthly discount rate to 3.62 percent for March from 3.36 percent for February 2022. March caps off the fourth consecutive month of discount rate increases.

The first quarter ending March 31, 2022, assets fell by $105 billion while plan liabilities decreased by $197 billion. Despite investments posting losses of 4.75 percent during the first quarter of 2022, discount rates rose 82 basis points and helped propel the funded status improvement, which totaled $92 billion by the end of the first quarter. The funded ratio of the Milliman 100 companies improved to 105.2 percent at the end of March from 99.7 percent at the beginning of 2022. The nation’s state retirement systems, however, finished the 2021 fiscal year in the best condition since the Great Recession of 2007-09. The gap between the cost of pension benefits that states have promised their workers and what they have set aside to pay for them dropped in 2021 to its lowest level in more than a decade. For the first time since 2008, approximately 80 percent of the state retirement systems are now funded. A decade of increasing pension contributions and the strong stock market rally of 2021 have combined to help stabilize state pensions funds. And total unfunded state pension obligations were less than $800 billion at the end of fiscal year 2021, the greatest progress in closing the state pension plan funding gap—the difference between plan liabilities and assets—this century. However, not all state pension funds are approaching long-term fiscal sustainability, defined as government revenue matching expenditures without a corresponding increase in public debt. As part of a larger project to develop a fiscal sustainability matrix highlighting the practices of successful state pension systems and presenting a critical 50-state data that facilitates comparative analyses and plan assessments, The Pew Charitable Trusts is producing individual state fact sheets. For example, California’s main pension plans—the California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS) and the California State Teachers’ Retirement System (CalSTRS)—are the nation’s largest state plans.

CalPERS requires that participating employers make the full actuarially recommended contributions but has been managing pension debt attributed to unfunded benefit increases offered in 1999. CalSTRS received less than the actuarially recommended contribution for several years, but reforms in 2014 strengthened the plan’s funding policy. The average state funded ratio as of 2019 is 71 percent. At the same time, some 40 percent of Americans cannot afford to come afford to come up with $400 dollars for an unexpected expense. If—or, more likely, when—they are confronted with such an expense, they would probably have to sell something or go into debt. Furthermore, roughly 46 percent of all Americans expect to retire in debt, and debt repayment is even harder on a fixed income and can threaten one’s retirement security. Maintaining enough cash on hand to cover recurring bills with interest is harder on a fixed income and adds another obstacle to the challenge of living comfortably. Debt can derail a lot of peoples’ retirement plans. These days, older Americas owe more than every before. The total debt burden for Americas over age 70 increased 614 percent through 2021 from 1999, to $1.27 trillion. Also, 43 percent of Americans fear their retirement dreams could be disrupted by Social Security going bankrupt. Already, the U.S. Department of the Treasury has said the Social Security trust fund will run out of money sooner than expected due to the COVID pandemic. A lot of people have been relying on credit cards to get through the pandemic, but this also has caused interest rates to rise. Your retirement income—monthly payments from investments and Social Security should cover debt payments and still afford one a comfortable lifestyle. Otherwise, one may need to work longer or find a supplement source of income from a part-time job.

California is becoming one of the nation’s most expensive states to live in with gas prices hitting $7 a gallon and a small basket of strawberries costing $8.00. If inflation increases by more than 7 percent between 2021 and 2022, the law says the minimum wage must increase to $15.50 per hour for everyone. However, official inflation figures will not be final until this summer. California has about 3 million minimum wage workers. The increase in the minimum wage will be about $3 billion, or less than 0.1 percent of the $3.3 trillion in personal income Californians are projected to earn. This is a mixed blessing. It means that people will get paid more, but they businesses will also hire or keep less employees. With that being the case, the employees they hire or retain will be those who are highly skilled, which should increase productivity. So, it is a huge benefit for big companies, but not so greater for incompetent workers, or customers who will have to pay higher prices. Yet, at this rate of pay, minimum wage will still be below market value. Analysis say it should be around $30 an hour, which would also mean that other workers are also underpaid. This is all due to globalization, sending our jobs and money overseas suppressed wages for American workers. Faced with a rapidly aging population and underfunded pensions, an intergenerational was is brewing among pensioners on one side and young workers on the other, who fear their will be nothing left for them by the time they retire. Confronted by failing institutions on all sides, many Americans seek help from charitable organizations, long regarded as ethically cleaner than the profit-making sector. That, however, was before some of the most prestigious nonprofits such as the United Way and the American Red Cross came under investigation for false accounting or misapplication of contributed funds.

Meanwhile, where did many Americans go to find out more about all these crises? The Internet, of course. However, as newspapers take pains to point out, much of what appears on the Net is unverified, biased or mistaken. What is needed, publishers say, is credible, accurate carefully checked and rechecked information. Yes. However, the print and broadcast media are themselves facing a credibility crisis that threatens their future, as journalistic scandals recently erupted at The New York Times, USA Today, NBC News, CNN, CBS News, Newsweek and other media outlets. It is not just that people are reading the newspaper less or watching the news less. These scandals take place against a background of declining readers and dwindling audiences, partly because people are busy, they do not trust the news, and they have digital content to watch. The estimated U.S. daily newspaper circulation (print and digital combined) in 2020 was 24.3 million from its 1983 peak of 63.3 million, while the U.S. population has grown by 100 million. A quarter of all U.S.A. newspapers have died in 17 years. At least 1,800 communities that had a local news outlet in 2004 were without one at the beginning of 2020. More than 300 newspapers have failed, bring the death toll to 2,100, of the 9,000 newspapers than were being published 17 years ago. The list of institutional breakdowns in superpower America could be extended to include the failure of the U.S. intelligence and counterintelligence agencies—in combination with the White House under both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush—to present the 9/11 disaster despite various early warnings to correctly assess the threat of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. It is not much different than the southern boarder crisis. While many people do not want to deport unregistered immigrants, they would like to stop the 18,000 the are coming into the country daily without being registered. That is approximately 7 million people a year, while many America institutions are running dry. Joe Biden has been warned about the danger of ignoring the crisis.

Crisis, it may be said, is in the eye of the beholder—or in the rhetoric of self-interested parties demanding dramatic change. However, even allowing for statistical inadequacy, simplistic trend extrapolation and exaggerated rhetoric, or for difference in their importance, intensity or immediacy, they very multiplicity of these cases tells us something important: The whole adds up to more than its parts. Until recently, most observers, America or not, have viewed all these institutional crises in the United States of America as unrelated. However, that view is no longer tenable. America’s seemingly separate and distinct crises are increasingly interconnected. Health care and pensions. Pension and the corporate crisis. Family and education. The political crisis and all the rest feed into one another. What is developing, therefore, inside the United States of America is a systemic breakdown of its vital institutional infrastructure at the very time when many believe its power in the World is diminishing. Most conventional assumptions about power, in Western culture at least, imply that power is a matter of quantity. However, while some of us clearly have less power than others, this approach ignores what may now be the most important factor of all: the quality of power. Powe comes in varying grades, and some power is decidedly low in octane. In the fierce struggles soon to sweep through our schools, hospitals, businesses, trade unions, and governments, those who understand “quality” will gain a strategic edge. No one doubts that violence—embodies in a mugger’s switchblade or nuclear missile—can yield awesome results. The shadow of violence or force, embedded in the law, stands behind every act of government, and in the end every government relies on soldiers and police to enforce its will. This ever-present and necessary threat of official violence in society helps keep the system operating, making ordinary business contracts enforceable, reducing crime, providing machinery for the peaceful settlement of disputes. In this paradoxical sense, it is the veiled threat of violence that helps make daily life nonviolent.

However, violence in general suffers from important drawbacks. To begin with, it encourages us to carry a can of Mace, or to crank up an arms race that increases risks to everyone. Some people target shoot so often that they develop a callous on their thumb and seemed to be possessed by a feeling of wanting to look a man in the eye and rob him of his power and life. So, it is not the gun that is the problem, it is the individual who uses it to feel powerful that is the problem. Even when it “works” violence produces resistance. Its victims or their survivors look for the first chance to strike back. That is why it is not good to harm anyone nor get into an altercation, or even a car accident; some people will want to retaliate right then or later on. The main weakness of brute force or violence, however, is its sheer inflexibility. It can only be used to punish. It is, in short, low-quality power. Wealth, by contrast, is a far better tool of power. A fat wallet is much more versatile. Instead of just threatening or delivering punishment, it can also offer finely graded rewards—payments and payoffs, in cash or kind. Wealth can be used in either a beneficial or harmful way. It is, therefore, much more flexible than force. Wealth yields medium-quality power. The highest-quality of power, however, comes from the application of knowledge. Actor Sean Connery, in a movie set in Cuba during the reign of the dictator Batista, plays a British mercenary. In one memorable scene the tyrant’s military chief says: “Major, tell what your favorite weapon is, and I will get it for you.” To which Connery replies: “Brains.” High-quality power is not simply clout. Not merely the ability to get one’s way, to make others do what you want, though they might prefer otherwise. High quality implies much more. It implies efficiency—using up the fewest power resources to achieve a goal. Knowledge can often be used to make the other party like your agenda for action. It can even persuade the person that one originated it.

Of the three root sources of social control, therefore, it is knowledge, the most versatile, that produces what Pentagon brass like to call “the biggest bang for the buck.” It can be used to punish, reward, persuade, and even transform. It can transform enemy into ally. Best of all, with the right knowledge one can circumvent nasty situations in the first place, so as to avoid wasting force or wealth altogether. Knowledge also serves as a wealth and force multiplier. It can be used to augment the available force or wealth or, alternatively, to reduce the amount needed to achieve any given purpose. In either case, it increases efficiency, permitting one to spend fewer power “chips” in any showdown. Of course, maximum power is available to those in a position to use all three of these tools in cleaver conjunction with one another with one another, alternating the threat of punishment, the promise of reward, along with persuasion and intelligence. The truly skilled power players know intuitively—or through training—how to use and interrelate their power resources. To assess the different contenders in a power conflict—whether a negotiation or a war—therefore, it helps to figure out what commands access to which of the basic tools of power. Knowledge, violence, and wealth, and the relationships among them, define power in society. Francis Bacon equated knowledge with power, but he did not focus on its quality or on its crucial links to the other main sources of social power. Nor could anyone until now foresee today’s revolutionary changes in the relationships among these three. Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts. Moses, Jesus Christ, Homer, Buddha: these are the creators, the men who formed horizons, the founders of Jewish, Christian, Greek and Indian culture. It is not the truth of their thought that distinguished them, but its capacity to generate culture.

If it is life-preserving and life-enhancing, only then it is a value. The quasi-totality of men’s values consists of more or less pale carbon copies of the originator’s values. Egalitarianism means conformism, because it gives power to the sterile who can only make use of old values, other men’s ready-made values, which are not alive and to which their promoters are not committed. Egalitarianism is founded on reason, which denies creativity. Everything in Nietzsche is an attack on rational egalitarianism, and shows what twaddle the habitual talk about values is these days—and how astonishing is Nietzsche’s respectability on the Left. Since values are not rational and not grounded in the natures of those subject to them, they must be imposed. They must defeat opposing values. Rational persuasion cannot make them believe, so struggle is necessary. Producing values and believing in them are acts of the will. Lack of will, not lack of understanding, becomes the crucial defect. Commitment is the equivalent of faith when the living God has been supplanted by self-provided values. It is Pascal’s wager, no longer on God’s existence but on one’s capacity to believe in oneself and the goals one has set for oneself. Commitment values the values and makes them valuable. Not love of truth but intellectual honesty characterizes the proper state of mind. Since there is no truth in the values, and what truth there is about life is not lovable, the hallmark of the authentic self is consulting one’s oracle while facing up to what one is and what one experiences. Decisions, not deliberations, are the movers of deeds. One cannot know or plan the future. One must will it. There is no program. The great revolutionary must destroy the past and open up the future for the free play of creativity.

Politics are revolutionary; but unlike the Glorious Revolution, the American Revolution, the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution, the new revolutions should be unprogrammatic. They are to be made by intellectually honest, committed, strong-willed, creative men. Nietzsche was not a fascist; but this project inspired fascist rhetoric, which looked to the revitalization of old cultures or the foundation of new ones, as opposed to the rational, rootless cosmopolitanism of the revolution of the Left. Nietzsche was a cultural relativist, and he saw what that means—war, great cruelty rather than great compassion. War is the fundamental phenomenon on which peace can sometimes be forced, but always in the most precarious way. Liberal democracies do not fight wars with one another because they see the same human nature and the same rights applicable everywhere and to everyone. Culture fight wars with one another. They must do so because values an only be asserted or posited by overcoming others, not by reasoning with them. Cultures have different perceptions, which determine what the World is. They cannot come to terms. There is no communication about the highest things. (Communication is the substitute for understanding when there is no common World men share, to which they can refer when they misunderstand one another. From the isolation of the closed system of self and culture, there are attempts to “get in contact,” and “failures of communication.” How individuals and culture can “relate” to one another is altogether a mysterious business.) Culture means a war against chaos and a war against other cultures. The very idea of culture carries with it a value: man need culture and must do what is necessary to create and maintain cultures. There is no place for a theoretical man to stand. To live, to have any inner substance, a man must have values, must be committed, or engage. Therefore a cultural relativist must care for culture more than truth, and fight for culture while knowing it is not true.

This is somehow impossible, and Nietzsche struggled with the problem throughout his career, perhaps without a satisfactory resolution. However, he knew that the scientific view is deadly to culture, and that the political or moral cultural relativist of the ordinary sort is doomed to have no culture. Culture relativism, as opposed to relativism simply, teaches the need to believe while undermining belief. A difficulty with this concept of collective stability when applied to the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is that it can be very hard actually to determine which strategies have it and which do not. Others have dealt with this difficulty by restricting the analysis to situations where the strategies are particularly simple, or by considering only some arbitrarily limited set of strategies. The problem has now been solved, making it possible to characterize all collectively stable strategies for the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. For present purposes, it is not necessary to be so general. It is sufficient to take a particular strategy and see under what conditions it can resist invasion by any other strategy. A good strategy to investigate is TIT FOR TAT. TIT FOR TAT cooperates on the first move, and then does whatever the other person did on the previous move. Thus a population of people using TIT FOR TAT will cooperate with each other. If another strategy is to invade this population, it must get a higher expected value than this. What kind of strategy might be able to get more than this when negotiating with a person using TIT FOR TAT? The first thing that can be said is that such a strategy must defect at some point. When it first does it will get the temptation, which is the highest payoff. However, then TIT FOR TAT will defect. Consequently, if the negotiation is likely to last long enough for the retaliation to counteract the temptation to defect, TIT FOR TAT can avoid being invaded by such a rule. If the discount parameter is sufficiently large, no rule can TIT FOR TAT.

Culture is the only framework within which to account for what is specifically human in humans. Humans are pure becoming, unlike any other being in nature; and it is in culture that one become something that transcends nature and has no other mode of existence and no other support than a particular culture. The actuality of plants and the other animals is contained in their potentialities; but this is not true of humans, as is indicated by the many cultural flowers, essentially unlike, produced from the same seed, man. Nietzsche’s contribution was to draw with perfect intransigence the consequences of that idea and try to live with them. If there are many cultures, unsolicited by one perfect or complete culture in which man is man, simply—without prefix such as Greek, Chinses, Christian, Buddhist (id est, if Plato’s Republic, outlining the one best regime, is simply a myth, a work of Plato’s imagination), then the very word “man” is a paradox. There are as many kinds of man as there are cultures, without any perspective from which man can be spoken of in the singular. This is true not only of one’s habits, customs, rituals, fashions, but above all of one’s mind. There must be as many different kinds of mind as there are cultures. If the mind itself is not included among the things that are relative to cultures, the observations of cultural relativism are trivial and have always been accepted. Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns one. The physicist wants to save one’s atoms; the historian, one’s events; the moralist, one’s values. However, they are all equally relative. If there is an escape from one truth from the flux, then there is in principle no reason why many truths are not beyond it; and then the flux, becoming, change, history or what have you is not what is fundamental, but rather, being, the immutable principle of science and philosophy.

Now let us go a step further. Please bring to mind a baseball game or a football game. Have you got one? Hold it for a moment. If you are like most Americans, you have actually been to a game. You have seen one directly and probably participated in one personally. You have probably also watched at least one of them on television. Here is the question: Which one did you bring to mind? The television version or the one you experienced directly? If only because it was the most recent, although the answers vary on this point, many people I have asked will report that the television image is one which springs to mind first Most will say the images rotate. Once images are inside your head, the mind does not really distinguish between the image that was gathered directly and the one that derived from television. Of course you can distinguish. When I asked you whether it was a television image or a firsthand image, you were certainly able to identify which was which. However, until I asked you, you may not have thought to do that. Have you ever met movie stars or famous television personalities? Whenever I have met them I have always remarked to myself upon the difference in the personal image they presented and the television or film image. I could recognize them when I saw them in person, I am only saying that it was different. The main point is this: When I think about them now, in retrospect, their television images are just as likely to spring into my mind as their real-life images. If I wish to, I can decide to bring up their real images, but if their names are mentioned in passing conversation, or I read a review of a production they have been in, I am actually more likely to bring up a media image than one of the real person I have met.

Have you every visited McDonald’s? Which images dominate in your mind, those from your actual visit or those from television? They rotate, do they not? They take on a certain equality in your memory banks. You can make the distinction between the direct image and the advertising image, but do you? If for some reason the subject of McDonald’s comes up in conversation, which image comes into your mind as you talk? Do you make the distinction? If you are like most people to whom I have asked this question, it is only with great effort that you are able to distinguish which one is the personal experience and which is the television experience. It takes a certain amount of effort to do so; one does not ordinarily bother. The television image can be as real in effect as the personally experienced image. The mind does not automatically distinguish which image is from direct experience and which has been imposed by the media. If I should now ask you to erase the television image of McDonald’s, leaving only the reality—the personally experienced direct contact—can you do that? See if you can. Please make an effort. We are left a very bizarre phenomenon. Television is capable of dominating personally derived imagery—from books or imagination—and it is also capable, at least some of the time, of causing confusion as to what is real experience and what is television experience. The mind is very democratic about its image banks, all are equally available for our recall and use. And so when we call on our images for whatever purpose we may have for them, we are as likely to produce an implanted image as the one which was originally our own. The root of this unfortunate problem lies with the fact that until very recently, human beings had no need to make distinctions between artificial images of distant events and life directly lived. The process of universalizing the art context goes back at least as far as Duchamp’s showing Readymades. Dada and Surrealism, of course, had their input. However, the tendency came to maturity in the middle to late 50s, when Alain Robbe-Grillet, for example, insisted that is art is going to by anything, it has to be everything.

At about the same time Yves Klein, extending the tradition of French dandyism, said, “Life, it self…is the absolute art.” Similarly, in America, Allan Kaprow suggested that “the line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps as indistinct, as possible.” Duchamp had appropriated by signature, as Klein did when, in about 1947, he signed the sky. Later Klein would designate anything as art by painting it with his patented International Klein Blue. Manzoni sometimes designated preexisting objects as art by singing them, and at other times by placing them on a sculpture base. In 1967 Dennis Oppenheim produced his “Sitemarkers,” ceremonial stakes used to mark off areas of the World as art. These procedures were sometimes employed in conscious parody of the theological concept of creation by the word. In 1960 Klein, imitating divine fiat, appropriated the entire Universe into his Theatre of the Void, as his piece for the Festival d’ Art d’ Avant-garde, in Paris. In the next year he painted a topographical globe International Klein Blue, thereby appropriating the Earth into his portfolio; soon Manzoni, responding, placed the Earth upon his Sculpture Base (Socle du monde, 1961), wresting it from Klein’s portfolio into his own. Of course there is a difference between fiat and appropriation. The purely linguistic procedure of forcefully expanding the usage boundaries of word does not create a wholly new reality, but shifts focus on an existing one. Any action that takes place in the appropriation sone is necessarily real as itself—yet semantically a kind of shadow-real. Insofar as the act’s prior category is remembered, it remains what it was, just a loan-word may retain a trace of its prior meaning—only it is reflected, as it were, into a new semantic category. Thus the process of universal appropriation has certain internal or logical limits; it is based on the assumption that a part can contain the whole, that art, for example, can contain life.

However, the only way that a part an contain its whole is by reflection, as a mirror may reflect a whole room, or by implication, as a map of a city implies the surrounding nation. The appropriation process, in other words, may rearrange the entire Universe at the level of a shadow or reflection, and this is its great power. At the same time, as with the gems strung together in the Net of Indra, only the shadowy life of a reflection is really at issue, and this is its great limit. The infinite regress implicit in such a procedure was illustrated when, in 1962, Ben Vautier signed Klein’s death and, in 1963, Manzoni’s, thereby appropriating both those appropriations of the Universe. The idea of signing a human being or a human life was in fact the central issue. In 1961 Manzoni exhibited a nude model on his sculpture base and signed her as his work. Later he issued his “Certificates of Authenticity,” which declared that the owner, having been signed by Manzoni, was now permanently an artwork. However, it was Klein who most clearly defined the central issue, saying, “The painter only has to create one masterpiece, oneself, constantly.” The idea that the artist is the work became a basic theme of the period in question. Ben acted it out, not long after the signing of Klein’s death, by exhibiting himself as a living sculpture. Soon Gilbert & George did the same thing. As early as 1959 James Lee Bryars had exhibited himself, seated alone in the center of an otherwise empty room. Such gestures are fraught with strange interplays of artistic and religious forms, as the pedestal has always been a variant of the altar. It was in part the Abstract Expressionist emphasis on the direct expression of the artist’s person was in fact the art. Through the survival in the art realm of the Romantic idea of the specially inspired individual, it was possible, though in a sort of bracketed parody, to confer on an artist the status of a royal or sacred being who is on exhibit to other humans.

When it comes to technologies, they can create problems for the spiritual life of medieval Europe. For example, the mills to which farmers flocked to have their grain ground became a favorite place for women of the evening to attract customers. The problem grew to such proportions that Saint Bernard, the leader of the Cistercian order in the twelfth century, tried to close down the mills. He was unsuccessful, because the mills had become too important to the economy. In other words, it is something of an oversimplification to say that tool-using cultures never had their customers and symbolic life reoriented by technology. And, just as there are examples of such cases in the medieval World, we can find queer but significant instance in technologically primitive societies of tools attacking the supremacy of custom, religion, or metaphysics. Egbert de Vries, a Dutch sociologist, has told of how the introduction of matches to an African tribe altered their habits of pleasures of the flesh. Members of this community believed it necessary to start a new fire in the fireplace after each act of pleasures of the flesh. This custom meant that each act of pleasures of the flesh was something of a public event, since when it was completed, someone had to go to a neighboring hunt to bring back a burning stick with which to start a fresh fire. Under such conditions, adultery was difficult to conceal, which is conceivably why the custom originated in the first place. The introduction of matches changed all this. It became possible to light a new fire without going to a neighbor’s hut, and thus, in a flash, so to speak, a long-standing tradition was consumed. In reporting on de Vries finding, Alvin Toffler raises several intriguing questions: Did matches result in a shift in values? Was adultery less or more frowned upon as a result? By facilitating the privacy of pleasures of the flesh, did matches alter the valuation of placed upon it?

We can be sure that some changes in cultural values occurred, although they could not have been as drastic as what happened to the Ihalmiut tribe early in the twentieth century, after the introduction of the rifle. The replacement of bows and arrows with rifles is one of the most chilling tales on record of a technological attack on a tool-using culture. The result in this case was not the modification of a culture but its eradication. However, people were also tired of sneak attacks, getting rob, having their livestock killed and stolen and their homes broken into. Nonetheless, after one acknowledges that no taxonomy ever neatly fits the realities of a situation, and that in particular the definition of a tool-using culture lacks precision, it is still both possible and useful to distinguish a tool-using culture from a technocracy. In a technocracy, tools play a central role in the thought-world of the culture. Everything must give away, in some degree, to their development. The social and symbolic Worlds become increasingly subject to the requirements of that development. Tools are not integrated into the culture; they attack the culture, but also provide new freedoms and protection. For the most part tools become the culture. As a consequence, tradition, social mores, myth, politics, ritual, and religion have to fight for their lives. With nanotechnology will mean for human life is beyond out predicting, but a good way to understand what it could mean is to paint scenarios. A good scenario brings together different aspects of the World (technologies, environments, human concerns) into a coherent whole. Major corporations use scenarios to help envision the paths that the future may take—not as forecasts, but as tools for thinking. In playing the “What if?” game, scenarios present trial answers and pose new questions. The following scenarios cannot represent what will happen, because no one knows. They can, however, show how post-breakthrough capabilities could mesh with human life and Earth’s environment. The results will likely seem quaintly conservative from a future perspective, however much they seem like science fiction today.

In Plumas, California, Jillian Harris flips on the light in her Cresleigh Home on a dark winter morning. The light comes on, powered by stored solar electricity. Nanotechnology can make solar cells efficient, as inexpensive as newspaper, and as tough as asphalt—tough enough to use for resurfacing roads, collecting energy without displacing any more grass and trees. Together with efficient, inexpensive storage cells, this will yield low-cost power (but no, not “too cheap to meter”). Jake Harris of Plumas, California, has been a bit hoarse for weeks, and just came down with a horrid head cold. For the past six months, he has been seeing ads for At Last! : The Cure for the Common Cold, so he spend his five dollars and takes the nose-spray and throat-spray doses. Within three hours, 99 percent of the viruses in his nose and throat are gone, and the rest are on the run. Within six hours, the medical mechanisms have become inactive, like a pinch of inhaled but biodegradable dust, soon cleared from the body. He feels much better and will not infect his friends at dinner. The human immune system is an intricate molecular mechanism, patrolling the body for viruses and other invaders, recognizing them by their foreign molecular coats. The immune system, though, is slow to recognize something new. For his five dollars, Justin bought 10 billion molecular mechanisms primed to recognize not just the viruses he had already encountered, but each of the five hundred most common viruses that cause cold, influenzas, and the like. Weeks have passed, but the hoarseness Justin had before his cold still has not gone away; it gets worse. He ignores it through a long vacation, but once he is back and caught up, Jake finally foes to see his doctor. He looks down his throat and says, “Hmmm.” He asked him to inhale an aerosol, cough, spit in a cup, and go read a magazine.

The diagnosis pops up on a screen five minutes after he pours the sample into his cell analyzer. Despite his knowledge, his training and tools, he feels chilled to read the diagnosis pops up on a screen five minutes after he pours the sample into his cell analyzer. Despite his knowledge, his training and tools, he feels chilled to read the diagnosis: a malignant cancer of the throat, the same disease that has cropped up all too often in his own mother’s family. He touches the “Proceed” button. In twenty minutes, he looks at the screen to check progress. Yes, Jake’s cancerous cells are all of one basic kind, displaying one of the 16,314 known molecular markers for malignancy. They can be recognized, and since they can be recognized, they can be destroyed by standard molecular machines primed to react to those markets. The doctor instructs the cell analyzer to prime some “immune machines” to go after the cancer cells. He tests them on cells from the sample, watches, and sees that they work as expected, so he has the analyzer prime up some more. Jake puts the magazine down and looks up. “Well Doc, what is the word?” he asks. “I found some suspicious cells, but this should clear it up,” he says. He gives him a throat spray and injection. “I would like you to come back in three weeks, just to be sure.” “Do I have to?” he asks. “You know,” he lectures him, “we need to make sure it is gone. You really should not let things like this go so far before coming in.” “Yes, fine, I will make an appointment,” he says. Leaving the office, Jake thinks fondly of how old-fashioned and conservative Dr. Buber is. The molecular mechanism of the immune system already destroys most potential cancers before they grow large enough to detect. With nanotechnology, we will build molecular mechanisms to destroy those that the immune system misses. God shows man the way to the righteous. To recognize God’s ways is to know. This knowing is developed in the realm of a relation of the soul to other beings, where the fact of mutuality changes everything.