The Business World’s Equivalent of a Star!

He is a celebrity. The business World’s equivalent of a star. His marriages make the gossip pages. His name induces fear and fascination in the financial community. Still in his forties, he is a cocky man, by turns charming and choleric. He is a rabid reader whose Sunday afternoons may be spent wandering the Upper East Side of Manhattan, unrecognized in a turtleneck sweater, in search of a bookstore to browse in. He has butted heads with some of the mightiest corporate chieftains, made front-page business news, and built a personal fortune estimated at nearly half a billion dollars. He is also a lawbreaker. What is more, the law he has broken is not some wimpy law against stock market shenanigans or white-collar crime. It is the most macho of laws—that which prohibits violence. Paraphrased for brevity’s sake, here is this story. “After flames broke out in one of my company’s computer centers in a nearby city, our investigators came to the conclusion the fire was set by a pissed-off employee. Trouble is, we didn’t have evidence that would stand up in court, and we couldn’t get the local cops interested. Even if we could, we knew it would take forever to get anything done about it. So we wired up another employee with a hidden tape recorder and sent him to a bar, where he sidled up to the guy we suspected. He admitted it. Even bragged about it. When he did that, I wasn’t going to take any chances. So our security men had a little talk with him and threatened to break his legs (or more) if he didn’t quit his job in my company and get the hell out of town—fast! Was that against the law? Sure. Would I do it again? You bet! The next fire he set would have killed some of my employees. Am I going to wait around for the cops and the courts to see what would happen? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

This story reminds us that in every society there is what might be called a “secondary enforcement system,” which operates around the edges of the formal, official law-enforcement system. However, it also tells us that, under the smooth surface of business, things happen that few wish to speak about. We seldom stop to think about force as a factor in business. Most of the trillions of business transactions carried out each day are so free of anything suggesting violence, so peaceful on the surface, that we seldom lift the lid to see what may be seething below. Yet the same three sources of power we find in family life, government, or any other social institution operate in business as well, and much as we might prefer to think otherwise, violence has always been part of the economy. From the day the first paleolithic warrior smashed a rock into a small animal, violence has been used to produce wealth. Taking preceded making. In may be just a fluke, but Roget’s Thesaurus, which devotes 26 lines to synonyms of the word borrowing and 29 lines to lending, devotes fully 157 lines to alternative descriptions of taking—including “capture,” “colonize,” “conquer,” and “kidnap,” not to mention “rape,” “shanghai,” and “abduct.” The agricultural revolution, starting some 10,000 years ago, represented a dramatic shift from taking—through fishing, foraging, or hunting—to make wealth. However, even agriculture was steeped in violence. Knout and knife, club and quirt were as much a part of the agricultural economy as the sickle, the scythe, or the space. Before the smokestack revolution, when our great-grandparents slaved away on the soil, the whole World was as economically underdeveloped as the poorest, most capital-starved countries to day. There were no “developed” economies to turn to for billion-dollar loans or foreign assistance. Where, then, did the first fortunes come from that financed the earliest smokestack industries? #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Many of them flowed, directly or indirectly, from pillage, plunder, and piracy…from the slavemaster’s whip…from the conquest of land…brigandage…extortion….terrorization of the peasant by the lord…forced Indian labor in gold and silver mines…from the vast tracts of land granted by grateful monarchs to their warriors and generals. Thee pools of red-stained wealth turned pink and later snowflake-white as they passed from father to son and grandson, over the generations. Eventually they funded those first iron foundries, textile mills, shipping lines, and clock factories that came alive in the late 1600s and early 1700s. Violence continued to play a role in the production of wealth in those early factories and mills, as children were shackled to machines and beaten, women miners brutalized or raped, men cudgeled into resignation. Los Angeles is famous for its freeways, one of which, the 405, is notorious for its bumper-to-bumper traffic, so jammed that much of it spills over to the street that parallels it for many miles, Sepulveda Boulevard. It is on Sepulveda that one finds what is surely one of the World’s most unusual business enterprises: A car wash. What makes this particular car wash unique is not the gas pumps and autos you see when you pull up but the surprise that awaits you when you go inside to pay your bill. For what you have entered just could be the World’s only combination car wash and bookstore. And as we will see, it is the spirit that led to that strange juxtaposition that will be needed to overcome—or better yet prevent—the systemic breakdown of the institutions we rely on every day for our lives. From its start in early 1900s until 1980s, American Telephone and Telegraph grew into the World’s biggest company. It is hard today to appreciate just how dominating an institutional presence AT&T was in American life for the part of a century. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

“Ma Bell,” as it was known, was a part of every community. Its black rotary telephone was present in virtually every American home. It had enormous political influence, not only in Washington but in communities all over the nation. Its Bell Labs, bedecked with Nobel Prizes, was commonly regarded as the greatest industrial research and development organization in the World. By the 1970s, AT&T employed almost a million workers. In that age of pre-digital telephones, a tremendous number of these employees were female phone operators, and their number was rising year after year. Broken up by Uncle Sam in 1984. AT&T eventually shrank to a bare wisp of what it once was. And in 2005 its remnants were acquired by SBC Communications. If that can happen to AT&T, it can happen, and a lot faster, to even the most seemingly solid of institutions. Speaking of institutions, one of the problems in World War I that had to be overcome to maintain the stability of cooperation was the rotation of troops. About every eight days, a battalion would change places with another battalion billeted behind it. At longer intervals, larger units would change places. What allowed the cooperation to remain stable was the process of familiarization that the outgoing unit would provide for the incoming unit. The particular details of the tacit understandings with the enemy were explained. However, sometimes it was sufficient for an old timer to point out to a newcomer that “Mr. Bosche ain’t a bad fellow. You leave “im alone; ‘e’ll leave you alone.” This socialization allowed one unit to pick up the game right where the others left it. Still another problem for the maintenance of stable cooperation was the fact that the artillery was much less vulnerable to enemy retaliation the was the infantry. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Therefore, the artillery had a lesser stake in the live-and-let-live system. As a consequence, the infantry tended to be solicitous of the forward observers from the artillery. As a German artillery man noted of the infantry, “If they every have any delicacies to spare, they make us a present of them.” The goal was to encourage the artillery to respect the infantry’s desire to let sleeping dogs lie. A new forward observer for the artillery was often greeted by the infantry with the request, “I hope you are not going to start trouble.” The best answer was, “Not unless you want.” This reflected the dual role of artillery in the maintenance of mututal restraint with the enemy: the passiveness when unprovoked, and the instant retaliation when the enemy broke the peace. The high commands of the British, French, and German armies all wanted to put a stop to tacit truces; all were afraid that they sapped the morale of their men, and all believed throughout the war that a ceaseless policy of offense was the only way to victory. With few exceptions, the headquarters could enforce any orders that they could directly monitor. Thus the headquarters were able to conduct large battles by ordering the men to leave their trenches and risk their lives in charging the enemy position. However, between large battles, they were not able to monitor their orders to keep up the pressure. After all, it was hard for a senior officer to determine who was shooting to kill, and who was shooting with an eye to avoiding retaliation. The soldiers became expert at defeating the monitoring system, as when a unit kept a coil of enemy wire and sent a piece to headquarters whenever asked to prove that they had conducted a patrol of no-man’s-land. What finally destroyed the live-and-let-live system was the institution of a type of incessant aggression that the headquarters could monitor. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

This was the raid, a carefully prepared attack on enemy trenches. If the raid was successful, prisoners would be taken; and if the raid was a failure, casualties would be prof of the attempt. There was no effective way to pretend that a raid had been undertaken when it had not. And there was no effective way to cooperate with the enemy in a raid because neither live soldiers nor dead bodies could be exchanged. The live- and-let live system could not cope with the disruption caused by the hundreds of small raids. After a raid neither side knew hat to expect next. The side that had raided could expect retaliation but could not predict when, where, or how. The side that had been raided was also nervous, not knowing whether the raid was an isolated attack or the first of a series. Moreover, since raid could be ordered and monitored from headquarters, the magnitude of the retaliatory raid could also be controlled, preventing a dampening of the process. The battalions were forced to mount real attacks on the enemy, the retaliation was undampened, and the process echoed out of control. Ironically, when the British High Command undertook its policy of raiding, it did not do so in order to end the live-and-let-live system. Instead, its initial goal was political, namely, to show their French allies that they were doing their part to harass the enemy. Their image of the direct effects of raiding was that it increased the morale of their own troops by restoring an offensive spirit and that it promoted attrition by inflicting an offensive spirit and that it promoted attrition by inflicting more casualties on their own troops by restoring offensive spirit and that it promoted attrition by inflicting more casualties on the enemy in the raids than the raiding troops themselves would suffer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Whether these effects on morale and casualty ratios were realized has been debated ever since. That is clear in retrospect is that the indirect effect of the raids was to destroy the conditions needed for the stability of the tacit restraints widely exercised on the Western Front. Without realizing exactly what they were doing, the high command effectively ended the live-and-let-live system by preventing their battalions from exercising their own strategies of cooperation based on reciprocity. The introduction of raids completed the cycle of the evolution of the live-and-let-live system. Cooperation got a foothold through exploratory actions at the local level, was able to sustain itself because of the duration of contact between small units facing each other, and was eventually undermined when these small units lost their freedom of action. Small units, such as battalions, used their own strategies in dealing with the enemy units they faced. Cooperation first emerged spontaneously in a variety of contexts, such as restraint in attacking the distribution of enemy rations, a pause during the first Christmas in the trenches, and a low resumption of fighting after bad weather made sustained combat almost impossible. These restraints quickly evolved into clear patterns of mutually understood behavior, such as two-for-one or three-for-one retaliation for actions that were taken to be unacceptable. The mechanism of the evolution of these strategies must have been trial and error and the imitation of neighboring units. The mechanisms for evolution involved neither blind mutation nor survival of the fittest. Unlike blind mutation, the soldiers understood their situation and actively tried to make the most of it. They understood the indirect consequences of their acts as embodies in what I call the principle: “To provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of providing it for themselves.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

The strategies were based on thought as well as experience. The soldiers learned that to maintain mutual restraint with their enemies, they had to base that restraint on a demonstrated capability and willingness to be provoked. They learned that cooperation had to be based upon reciprocity. Thus, the evolution of strategies was based on deliberate rather than blinded adaption. Nor did the evolution of strategies was based on deliberate rather than blind adaption. No did the evolution involve survival of the fittest. While an ineffective strategy would mean more casualties for the unit, replacements typically meant that the units themselves would survive. Now, restoration Day Ceremonies are always moving events. For some reason, the seniors always cry, even though they day they are happy. Crying, Tracy Stiegler thinks, does not may any sense. She looks again through the camouflage screen over the sandy Triangle Keys beach, gazing across the Caribbean, toward the Yucatan Peninsula. Soon this will be theirs again, and that is all to the good. Tracy and the other scientists from BioArchive have positions of honor in today’s Restoration Day Ceremony. Since the mid-twentieth century, there has been no living Caribbean monk seals, only grisly relics of the years of their slaughter: seal furs and dry museum specimens. Tracy’s team struggled for years, gathering these relics and studying them with molecular instruments. It had been known for decades—since the 1980s—that genes are tough enough to survive in dried skin, bone, horn, and eggshell. Tracy’s team had collected genes and rebuilt cells. They worked for years, and gave thanks to the strict protection—late, but good enough—that saved one related species. At last, a Hawaiian monk seal had given birth to a genetically pure Caribbean monk seal, twin to a seal long dead. And now there were five hundred, some young, some middle-aged, with decent genetic diversity and five years’ experience living in the confines of a coastal ecological station. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Today, with raucous voices, they are moving out into the World to reclaim their ecological niche. As Tracy watches, she thinks of the voices that will never be heard again: of the species, known and unknown, that left not even a bloody scrap to be cherished and restored. Thousands (millions?) of species had simply been brushed into extinction as habits were destroyed by the farming and logging. People knew—for years they had known—that freezing or drying would save genes. And they knew of the ecological destruction, and they knew they were not stopping it. And the ignorant individuals did not even keep samples. Tracy discovers that she, too, cries at Restoration Day Ceremonies. People will surely push biomedical applications of nanotechnology far and fast for human health care. With a bit more pushing, this technology base will be good enough to restore some species now thought lost forever, to repair some of the damage human beings have done to the web of life. It would be better to preserve ecosystems and species intact, but restoration, even of a few species, will be far better than nothing. Some samples from endangered species are being kept today, but not enough, and mostly for the wrong reasoners. We are also facing an unstable arms race. Disputes over technology development and trade sourced relationships between Singapore and the Japan-United States of America alliance. Diplomatic inquires regard peculiar seismic and sonar readings in the South China Sea had just begun when they suddenly became irrelevant: and estimated one billion tons of unfamiliar, highly automated military hardware appeared in coastal waters around the World. Accusations began to fly between Congress and PeaceWatch personnel: “If you’d done your jobs—” “If you’d let us do our jobs—” And so, in late February, Singapore emerged as a military superpower. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Low cost, high-quality, high-speed production can be applied to many purposes, not all attractive. Nanotechnology has enormous potential for abuse. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo put in place the dynamite that would blow up theology and metaphysics of the medieval World. Newton lit the fuse. In the ensuing explosion, Aristotle’s animism was destroyed, along with almost everything else in his Physics. Scripture lost much of its authority. Theology, once the Queen of the Sciences, was now reduced to the status of Court Jester. Worst of all, the meaning of existence itself became an open question. And how ironic it all was! Whereas men had traditionally looked to Heaven to find authority, purpose, and meaning, the Sleepwalkers (as Arthur Koestler called Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo) looked not to Heaven but to the heavens. There they found only mathematical equations and geometric patterns. They did so with courage but not without misgivings, for they did their best to keep their faith, and they did not turn away from God. They believed in a God who had planned and designed the whole of creation, a God who was a master mathematician. Their search for the mathematical laws of nature was, fundamentally, a religious quest. Nature was God’s text, and Galileo found that God’s alphabet consisted of “triangles, quadrangles, circles spheres, cones, pyramids, and other mathematical figures.” Kepler agreed, and even boasted that God, the author, had to wait six thousand years for His first reader—Kepler himself. As for Newton, he spent most of his later years trying to computer the generations since Adam, his faith in Scripture being unshaken. Descartes, whose Discourse on Method, published in 1637, provided nobility to skepticism and reason and served as a foundation of the new science, was profoundly religious man. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Although he saw the Universe as mechanistic (“Give me matter and motion,” he wrote, “and I will construct the World”), he deduced his law of the immutability of motion from the immutability of God. All of them, to the end, clung to the theology of their age. They would surely not have been indifferent to knowing when the Last Judgment would come, and they could not have imagined the World without God. Moreover, the science they created was almost wholly concerned with questions of truth, not power. Toward that end, there developed in the late sixteenth century what can only be described as a passion for exactitude: exact dates, quantities, distances, rates. It was even thought possible to determine the exact moment of the Creation, which as it turned out, commenced at 9.00 a.m., October 23, 4004 B.C. These men who thought of philosophy (which is what they called science) as the Greeks did, believing that the true object of investigating nature is speculative satisfaction. They were not concerned with the idea of progress, and did not believe that their speculations held the promise of any important improvements in the conditions of life. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, and Newton laid the foundation for the emergence of technocracies, but they themselves were men of tool-using. Nietzsche’s psychology concerns the impulse toward God, for in that impulse the self arrays and displays all its powers; and his influence brought a new burst of religious interest, if not religion, to the intellectual World. God is myth Nietzsche taught. Myths are made by poets. This is just what Plato says in the Republic, and for him it is equivalent to a declaration of war between philosophy and poetry. The aim of philosophy is to substitute truth for myth (which by its definition is falsehood, a fact too often forgotten in our post-Nietzschean fascination with myth). #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Since myths are there first and give men their first opinions, philosophy means a critical destruction of myth (which by its very definition is falsehood, a fact too often forgotten in our post-Nietzschean fascination with myth). Since myths are there first and give men their first opinions, philosophy means a critical destruction of myth in favor of truth for the sake of freedom and living naturally. Socrates, as depicted in the Platonic dialogues, questioning life; and his death at the hands of his countrymen for not believing in their myths epitomizes the risks of philosophy. Nietzsche drew precisely the opposite conclusion from the same facts about myth. There is no nature and no such freedom. The philosopher must do the contrary of what Socrates did. So Nietzsche is the first philosopher ever to have attacked Socrates, because Socrates’ life is not the model life, but a corrupt and monstrous one lacking in all nobility. The tragic life, which is Socrates defused and purged, is the serious life. The new philosopher is the ally of the poets and their savior, or philosophy it itself the highest kind of poetry. Philosophy in the old mode demythologizes and demystifies. It has no sense of the sacred; and by disenchanting the World and uprooting man, it leads into a void. The revelation that philosophy finds nothingness at the end of its quest informs the new philosopher that mythmarking by his central concern in order to make a World. Some call advertisers mythmakers. Advertisers do not care at all is you know the advertising is fictional. They make very little effort to fool you about that, because whether or not you know it is fictional, the image of the product goes into your head. From then on, you have got the image and there is no letting it go. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

If you then always through a supermarket and spot the toothpaste that you have been carrying as an image, a little click goes off in your head. Familiarity. It does not mean you will buy the toothpaste, but the click goes off anyway. They implanted the image, and you then carry it around inside of your like some kind of neuronal billboard. If you are going to keep watching television at all, there is nothing you can do about it. Your knowledge of real and not-real is useless. All images are real. In a sense, the advertising images are more real than other television images because you get to see the image “live” right in your supermarket. First you ingest the image of the toothpaste from television and file it. Then you see it in the store and you recognize it. (Have you heard our child say, “Hey, I saw that on television”? There is a real excitement being expressed.) If you buy the toothpaste, it is then right there in your bathroom, so the image from the screen materializes in your homes. Advertisers are the alchemists of our day. It works the same way, albeit more subtly, with the behavioral content of advertising and programs. You see Archie Bunker of the Waltons solve a family problem. You find yourself in a family situation which is not dissimilar. The image flashes past. You may reject it, but it flashes past nonetheless. If that is the only imagine instance you have available to call upon for such a situation, you are somewhat more likely to be influenced by it. You do not interrupt your behavior to say, “Wait a minute; I have got to keep straight my bank of television imagery from my bank of real-World imagery.” The mind does not work that way. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Many people have been preoccupied with the problem of evil. The struggle must begin within one’s own soul—all else will follow upon this. The darkness out of which one was hewn needed to be taken from nowhere else than from our own slothful and malicious hearts. It is our betrayal of God that has made Gog to grow so great. We are dealing here, as Plato already knew, with truths such as can be communicated adequately to the generality of humankind only in form of the myths. The anthropological exposition shows the domain in which they materialized again and again. Everything conceptual in this connection is merely an assistant, a useful bridge between myth and reality. Its construction is indispensable. Humans know of chaos and creation in the cosmogonic myth and one learns that chaos and creation take place in oneself, but one does not see the former and the latter together; one listens to the myth of Lucifer and hushes it up in one’s own life. One needs the bridge. The Biblical account of the so-called fall of man may well be founded upon a primeval myth of the envy and vengeance of gods, of whose contents we have no more than an inkling: the story that has been written down and preserved for us has acquired a very different meaning. The divine being whose actions are here recorded is repeatedly referred to (with the exception of the dialogue between the serpent and the woman) by appellation, alien to the style of the rest of the Bible, which is compounded out of a proper name—interpreted elsewhere (Exodus 3, 14) as He-is-there—and a genetic term which is plural in form and corresponds most nearly to our “Godhead.” This God is the sole possessor of the power both of creation and of destiny; He is surrounded by other celestial beings, but all these are subject to him without names or power of their own. Of course, he does not impose His will upon man, the last of His works; He does not compel him, He only commands, or rather forbids him albeit under a severe threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14