Along with the venality of its controllers, the technology of television predetermines the boundaries of its content. Some information can be conveyed completely, some partially, some not at all. The most effective telecommunications are the gross, simplified linear messages and programs which conveniently fit the purposes of the medium’s commercial controllers. Television’s highest potential is advertising. This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology. A good way to think about television—in fact all the media—is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looking. Then from it perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on average) 120 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 120 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment. If the telescope has selected a shooting from an entire planet’s worth of activities, in the next moment it may choose a Super Bowl game, or a threatening remark by someone who is unhappy with America, or a program of people trying to win prizes, or a movie about the Old West. All others subjects were not selected, at least in this moment. The telescope did not select views of the ocean as the tide comes in, or people sitting on front porches, or young people knocking on doors to tell a neighbourhood about a zoning hearing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

If there is logic in this selection is the question to ask. Are there reasons why the telescope selects one thing and not another? There certainly are. Dozens of them. The first and most obvious of these reasons is the one that most critics of television devote themselves to. The people who control television, businessmen, operate strictly out of considerations of budget and profit, in addition to brining alone their own political, perceptual, and social biases. It was to allay their influence that so many thousands of media reformers devoted years of effort to democratizing access to the medium and its content. And yet at present there are still no poor people running television, no marginalized group, no ecologist, no political radicals, no Zen Buddhists, no factory workers, no revolutionaries, no artists, no Communists, no Luddites, no hippies, no botanists, to name only a few excluded groups. To have only businessmen in charge of the most powerful mind-implanting instrument in history naturally creates a boundary to what is selected for dissemination to nearly 335 million people. If other categories of people had control, there can be little disagreement with the point that the choices would be different. If television is a medium of brainwash, then with it now being a more diverse brainwashing system, it is surely an improvement over the sort we got in the past. Still that is debatable because with less diversity in the past, the programs were more family friendly. The overriding bias of television, then, the bias which contains all the other biases, is that it offers preselected material, which excludes whatever is not selected. Now, of course, this is utterly obvious. And, yes, it is true of all experiences. When you are doing one thing, you exclude everything else that you might be doing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

When we forget that someone has selected our experience for us, and we have given up awareness, information and experience that is not part of television, this only then becomes significant concerning television. When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. Even if we had an overabundance of good television programs, it would not solve the problem. The act of sitting in front of television is itself a replacement of other modes of experience and the awareness these would bring. In this way, television is an acceleration of a condition that began with our artificial environments. We are already separated from most experiences with an unmediated planet. We have given up our personal sensory informational systems. The artificial forms around us already limit our experience and awareness. Our knowledge of the outside World was confined to a narrower field even before television was invented. With television, however, the artificial information-field is brought inside our darkened rooms, inside our stilled minds, and shot by cathode guns through out unmoving eyes into our brains, and recorded. We have no participatory role in gathering data. Our information is narrowed to only what the telescope provides. If we do not experience a wider information field, we lose knowledge of that field’s existence. We become the hermit in the cave who knows only what the TV offers. We experience what is, not knowing what is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

The people who control television become the choreographers of choosing information. We live within their conceptual frameworks. We travel to places on the planet which they choose and to situations which they decide we should see. What we can know is narrowed to what they know, and then narrowed further to what they select to send us through this instrument of theirs. The kind of people who control television is certainly a problem. However, this is only the beginning. While our field of knowledge is constrained by their venality and arrogance, the people who run television are constrained by the instrument itself. Television is no open window through which all perception may pass. Quite the opposite. There are many technological factors that conspire to limit what the medium can transmit. Some information fits and some does not. Some information can pass through, but only after being reshaped, redefined, packaged, and made duller and coarser than before. Some ways of mind can be conveyed and some cannot. The wrinkle in the story is what can be conveyed through television are the ways of thinking and the kinds of information that suit the people who are in control. This is why they like it so much. It is obviously efficient for them to concentrate their communications within a medium that is good at conveying their forms of mind, just as a person with a drive for power is more apt to express that in politics than in gardening. Conversely, it is logical that the medium will not respond well to people or attitude that defy its limits. It will throw them off, or distort their messages, as a computer would shun anyone who wishes to use it to express feelings of loving tenderness. It might program such a message, but only the words will come out on the tape; not the loving tenderness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

So we have a chicken-egg problem. It is difficult to tell which came first, the technology or its controllers. It may not be that the corporate mentality won the war to control television. The technology itself picked its master, through the inexorable technological factors that confine its use. Molecules matter because matter is made of molecules, and everything from air to flesh to spacecraft is made of matter. When we learn how to arrange molecules in new ways, we can make new things, and make old things in new ways. Perhaps this is why Japan’s MITI has identified “control technologies for the precision arrangement of molecules” as a basic industrial technology for the twenty-first century. Molecular nanotechnology will give thorough control of matter on a large scale at low cost, shattering a whole set of technological and economic barriers more or less at one stroke. A molecule is an object consisting of a collection of atoms held together by strong bonds (one-atom molecules are a special case). “Molecule” usually refers to an object with a number of atoms small enough to be counted (a few to a few thousand), but strictly speaking a truck tire (for instance) is mostly one big molecule, containing something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Counting this many atoms aloud would take about 10,000,000,000 billion years. Scientists and engineers still have no direct, convenient way to control molecules, basically because human hands are about 10 million times to large. Today, chemists and materials scientists make molecular structures indirectly, by mixing, heating, and the like. The idea of nanotechnology begins with the idea of a molecular assembler, a device resembling an industrial robot arm but built on a microscopic scale. A general-purpose molecular assembler will be a jointed mechanism built from rigid molecular parts, driven by motors, controlled by computers, and able to grasp and apply molecular-scale tools. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Molecular assemblers can be used to build other molecular machines—they can even build more molecular assemblers. If given the raw materials, assemblers and other machines in molecular-manufacturing systems will be able to make almost anything. In effect, molecular assemblers will provide the microscopic “hands” that we lack today. (Chemists are asked to forgive this literary license; the specific details of molecular binging and bonding do not change the conclusion.) Nanotechnology will give better control of molecular building blocks, of how they move and go together to form more complex objects. Molecular manufacturing will make things by building from the bottom up, starting with the smallest possible building blocks. The nano in nanotechnology comes from nanos, the Greek word for dwarf. In science, the prefix nano– means one-billionth of something, as in nanometer and nanosecond, which are typical units of size and time in the World of molecular manufacturing. When you see it tacked onto the name of an object, it means that the object is made by patterning matter with molecular control: nanomachine, nanomotor, nanocomputer. These are the smallest, most precise devices that make sense based on today’s science. (Be cautious of other usages, though—sone researchers have begun to use the nano– prefix to refer to other small-scale technologies in the laboratory today. As we use it, nanotechnology means the precise, molecular nanotechnology of the future. British usage also applies the term to the small-scale and high-precision technologies of today—even to precision grinding and measurement. The latter are useful, but hardly revolutionary.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Digital electronics brought an information-processing revolution by handling information quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: bits and bytes. Likewise, nanotechnology will bring a matter-processing revolution by handling matter quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: atoms and molecules. The digital revolution has centered on a device able to make any desired patterns of bits: the programmable computer. Likewise, the nanotechnological revolution will center on a device able to make (almost) any desired pattern of atoms: the programmable assembler. The technologies that plague us today suffer from the messiness and wear of an old phonography record. Nanotechnology, in contrast, will bring the crisp, digital perfection of a compact disc. Say only, “It is here.” However, when did ‘here’ begin? When did Bacon’s ideology become a reality? When, to use Siegfried Giedion’s phrase, did mechanization take command? To be cautious about it, we might locate the emergence of the first true technocracy in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century—let us say with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1765. From that time forward, a decade did not pass without the invention of some significant machinery which, take together, put an end to medieval “manufacture” (which once meant “to make by hand”). The practical energy and technical skills unleashed at this time changed forever the material and psychic environment of the Western World. An equally plausible date for the beginnings of technocracy (and, for Americas, easier to remember) is 1776, when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published. As Bacon was no scientist, Smith was no inventor. However, like Bacon, he provided a theory that gave conceptual relevance and credibility to the direction in which human enterprise was pointed. Specifically he justified the transformation from small-scale, personalized, skilled labour to large-scale, impersonal, mechanized production. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Smith not only argued convincingly that money, not land, was the key to wealth, but gave us his famous principle of the self-regulating market. In a technocracy—that is, a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and drive by the impulse to invent—an “unseen hand” will eliminate the incompetent and reward those who produce cheaply and well the goods that people want. It was not clear then, and still is not, whose unseen mind guides the unseen hand, but it is possible (the technocratic industrialists believed) that God could have something to do with it. And if not God, then “human nature,” for Adam Smith had named our species “Economic Man,” born with an instinct to barter and acquire wealth. In any case, toward the end of the eighteenth century, technocracy was well underway, especially after Richard Arkwright, a barber by trade, developed the factory system. In his cottons-pinning mills, Arkwright trained workers, mostly children, “to conform to the regular celerity of the machine,” and in doing so gave an enormous boost to the growth of modern forms of technocratic capitalist. He exemplified in every particular the type of nineteenth-century entrepreneur to come. As Siegfried Giedion has described him, Arkwright created the first mechanization of production “[in] a hostile environment, without protectors, without government subsidy, but nourished by a relentless utilitarianism that feared no financial risk or danger.” By the beginning of the nineteenth century, England was spawning such entrepreneurs in every major city. By 1806, the concept of the power loom, introduced by Edmund Cartwright (a clergyman no less), was revolutionizing the textile industry by eliminating, once and for all, skilled workers, replacing them with workers who merely kept the machines operating. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

By 1850, the machine-tool industry was developed—machines to make machines. And beginning in the 1860s, especially in America, a collective fervor for invention took hold of the masses. To quote Giedion again: “Everyone invented, whoever owned an enterprise sought ways and means to make his goods more speedily, more perfectly, and often of improved beauty. Anonymously and inconspicuously the old tools were transformed into modern instruments.” Because of their familiarity it is not necessary to describe in detail all of the inventions of the nineteenth century, including those which gave substance to the phrase “communications revolution”: the photograph and telegraph (1830s), rotary-power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), the transatlantic cable (1866), the telephone (1876), motion pictures and wireless telegraphy (1895). Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done, it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that it to say, as market. Not everyone agreed, of course, especially with the last notion. In England, William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills,” which stripped men of their souls. Matthew Arnold warned that “faith in machinery” was mankind’s greatest menace. Carlyle Ruskin, and William Morris railed against the spiritual degradation brough by industrial progress. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

In France, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola documented in their novels the spiritual emptiness of “Economic man” and the poverty of the acquisitive impulse. The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of “utopian” communities, of which perhaps the most famous is Robert Owen’s experimental community in Scotland called New Lanark. There, he established a model factory community, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, and innovative education for the children of workers. In 1824, Owen came to America and founded another utopia at New Harmony, Indiana. Although none of his or other experiments endured, dozens were tried in an effect to reduce the human costs of a technocracy. In America charisma is not just a description but something good that has to do with leadership. It even seems to confer an extralegal title to leadership by virtue of “something special” inhering in the leader. Although Webber was thinking of Moses and Buddha, or of Napoleon, the gang leader formally suits his definition of charisma. Weber sought to make a place in politic for things that political legalism excludes and that claim to have a title to attention although they are not founded on reason or consent—the only titles to rule in liberal democracy. It is not to be wondered at, then, that all the demagogic appetites frustrated by our constitutional system should latch on to a word that appears to legitimize and to flatter them. Moreover, democratic individualism does not officially provide much of a place for leaders in a regime where everyone is supposed to be one’s own master. Charisma both justifies and excuses followers. The very word gives a positive twist to rabble-rousing qualities and activities treated as negative in our constitutional tradition. And its vagueness makes it a tool for frauds and advertising men adept at manipulating image. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Charisma, as Weber knew perfectly well, is God-given grace, which confers leadership through God’s sanction. In keeping with his analysis in the Protestant Ethic, he treats the self’s value-positing as the human truth of God-given grace. His account of it appears to be merely descriptive, but it becomes prescriptive. In passages deeply influenced by Nietzsche, he analyzes the state as a relation of domination of man by man, founded on legitimate violence—that is, violence that is considered to be legitimate. If they have certain beliefs, men inwardly accept being dominated. There is no more foundation to legitimacy than the inner justification the dominated make to themselves in order to accept the violence of those who dominate them. These justifications are, according to Weber, of three kinds: traditional, rational, and charismatic. Some men submit because that is the way it has always been; others consent to obey competent civil servants who follow rationally established rules; and other are enchanted by the extraordinary grace of an individual. Of the three, charismatic legitimacy is the most important. No matter what conservatives think, traditions had a beginning that was not traditional. They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist. The fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator. Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinized the charisma. It is what it is because of that original impulse. So charisma is the condition of both the charismatic and the traditional legitimacies. It is also the splendid form of legitimacy. The rational is not informed by charisma, and the civil servants—bureaucrats—are therefore unable to make real decisions or take responsibility. They cannot, as we would say, determine the broad outlines of policy or, put more classically, establish ends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Mere competence can only serve already established goals and decide according to the established rules. It must be at least supplemented by charismatic leadership in order to be pointed in the right, or any, direction. So again charisma comes out on top. Value creation, the activity that writes the table of laws by which a people is constituted and lives, is, as Nietzsche tells, the nut in the shell of existence. Whatever the merit of Weber’s analysis and categories, they became holy writ for hosts of intellectuals. They were, as Weber recognized, not only an academic exercise. They expressed his vision of the crisis of the twentieth century. This is a case where the alleged facts also spoke the values. The tradition-based regimes had exhausted their impulse and were on their way to extinction. The ones based on rationality were simply becoming the administration for “the last man,” the intolerable negative pole. Imperative, then, was a stab at some form of charismatic leadership in order to revitalize the politics of the West. The whole undertaking rested on the assurance that Nietzsche was right that the last man is also the worst possible man, or more generally that his critique of reason was correct. Foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. The theory of biological evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between member of the same species and even members of different species. Before about 1960, accounts of the evolutionary process largely dismissed cooperative phenomena as not requiring special attention. This dismissal followed from a misreading of theory that assigned most adaptation to selection at the level of populations or whole species. As a result of such misreading, cooperation was always considered adaptive. Recent reviews of the evolutionary process, however, have shown no sound basis for viewing selection as being upon benefits to whole groups. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Quite the contrary. At the level of a species or a population, the processes of selection are weak. The original individualistic emphasis of Darwin’s theory is more valid. To account for the manifest existence of cooperation and related group behaviour, such as altruism and restraint in competition, evolutionary theory has recently acquired two kinds of extension. These extensions are, broadly, genetical kindship theory and reciprocity theory. Most of the recent activity, both in fieldwork and in further developments of theory, has been on the side of kindship. Formal approaches have varied, but kindship theory has increasingly taken a gene’s-eye view of natural selection. A gene, in effect, looks beyond its mortal bearer to the potentially immortal set of its replicas existing in other related individuals. If the players are sufficiently closely related, altruism can benefit reproduction of the set despite losses to the individual altruist. In accord with this theory’s predictions, almost all clear cases of altruism, and most observed cooperation—apart from their appearance in the human species—occur in context of high relatedness, usually between immediate family members. The evolution of the suicidal barbed sting of the honeybee worker could be taken as paradigm for this line of theory. Conspicuous examples of cooperation (although almost never of ultimate self-sacrifice) also occur where relatedness is low or absent. Mutually advantageous symbioses offer striking examples such as these: the fungus and alga that compose a lichen; the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants which, in turn, protect the trees; and the fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig flowers, serve as the tree’s sole means of pollination and seed set. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Usually the course of cooperation in such symbioses is smooth, but sometimes the partners show signs of antagonism, either spontaneous or elicited by particular treatments. Although kindship may be involved, as will be discussed later, symbioses mainly illustrate the other recent extension of evolutionary theory—the theory of reciprocity. In societies where the shamanic profession is intact, shamans have been perhaps the most fully rounded and powerful cultural figures in history. The poets, mythographers, visual artists, musicians, medical doctors, psychotherapists, scientist, sorcerers, undertakers, psychopomps, and priests of their tribal groups, they have been one-person cultural establishments. They have also been independent, uncontrollable, and eccentric power figures whose careers have often originated in psychotic episodes—what anthropologists call the “sickness vocation.” As a result, when societies increase their demands for internal order, the old shamanic role, with its unassimilable combination of power and freedom, is broken up into more manageable specialty professions; in our society, the doctor, the poet, the artist, and so on, have each inherited one scrap from the original shaman’s robe. Beginning with the Romantic period an attempt was made to reconstitute something like the fullness of the shamanic role within the art realm; poets especially were apt to attribute both healing and transcendentalizing powers to the art experience. This project has been acted out in the last twenty years by those artists whose work appropriates its material from the early history of religion. Perhaps the most shocking element in the various performance works mentioned here is the practice of self-injury and self-mutilation. This has, however, been a standard feature of shamanic performances and primitive initiation rites around the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Siberian shamans cut themselves while in ecstatic states brought on by drugs, alcohol, drumming and dancing. Tibetan shamans are supposedly able to slit their bellies and exhibit their entrails. Related practices are found in the performance art under discussion. Chris Burden crawled through broken glass with his hands behind his back. Dennis Oppenheim did a piece in which for half an hour rocks were thrown at him. Linda Montano inserted acupuncture needles around her eyes. The Australian performance artist Stelarc, reproducing a feat of Ajivika ascetics in India, has had himself suspended in various positions in the air by means of fishhooks embedded into his flesh. The number of instances could be easily multiplied. The element of female imitation, found in the works of Brus, McCarthy Jones, and others, is also a standard shamanic an initiatory motif, involving sympathetic magic. Mae shamans and priests around the World, as well as tribal boys at their puberty initiations, adopt female dress to incorporate the female and her powers. In lineages as far apart as North Asian and Amerindian, shamans have worn women’s clothing and ritually married other men. Akkadian priests of Ishtar dressed like their goddess, as did Ramakrishna in nineteenth-century India. A Sanskrit religious text instructs the devote to “discard the male (purusa) in thee and become a woman (prakriti).” Various tribal rites involve the ritual miming, by men, of female menstruation and parturition, as in the works of McCarthy. Freudian and Jungian theories of bisexuality of the psyche and the need to realize it are relevant both to archaic and to modern exercises of this sort. Female imitation and self-mutilation combine in certain practices of ritual surgery found in primitive cultures around the World, though most explicit in Australia. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

 In Central Australian initiation rites, for example, a vulvalike opening is cut into the urethral surface of the male organ, symbolically incorporating the female principle into the male body. Bruno Bettelheim has observed this motif in the fantasies of disturbed children. Brus, in a performance, once cut a vuvalike slit in his groin, holding it open with hooks fastened in his flesh. Ritual surgery to create an androgynous appearance is common in archaic religious practice generally, as an attempt to combine male and female magical powers into one center. The emphasis on the mutilation of the male genitals in much of the Viennese work is relevant here. In classical antiquity the priests of Cybele castrated themselves totally (both the male organ and testicles) in their initiation, to become more like their goddess; thereafter they dressed like women and were called “females.” In subsequent ecstatic performances they would cut themselves in the midst of frenzied dancing and offer blood to the goddess. The public performance of taboo acts is also an ancient religious custom with roots in shamanism and primitive magic. Both art and religion, through the bracketing of their activities in the half-light of ritual appropriationism, provide zones where deliberate inversions of social custom can transpire; acts repressed in the public morality may surface there, simultaneously set loose for their power to balance and complete the sense of life, and held safely in check by the shadow reality of the arena they occur in. Art can be very unusual and interest and even reflect things that we may have never considered as forms of art. However, many different cultures and many different people all enjoy different ways to express life, emotion, feel, and creativity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

When it comes to business, we sometimes find striking cases of sham transformation, at the global level, and this particularly case was fond in the halls of the United Nations (UN). Facing a sever crisis in the U.N., Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced in 2003 the “urgent need” to restructure the Security Council to reflect the new “geopolitical realties” of the twenty-first century. The Security Council today reflects power as it was half a century ago, just after the United States of America, Britain, Russian, France, China and their allies defeated the attempt by Germany, Italy and Japan to jointly take over the World. Each of the main victors was rewarded with a permanent Security Council seat and the right to veto any proposed action by the full council. Since then, some of the Big Five have lost power while such countries as Japan, India Brazil, and Germany have gained in global economic and diplomatic importance, yet lack permanent seats and vetoes. Annan wants to fix this problem. However, it will take much more than a redistribution of seats among nation-states to save the United Nations. The U.N.’s influence in the World today is bleeding away because, as a group, nations and/or states are themselves losing power. As we shall see shortly, other forces are gaining clout—global corporations, bond and currency markets, resurgent World religions, tens of thousands of NGOs, sub- and supranational regional units. All these vitiate the dominance of individual nations and states. Collectively, to an even greater extent, they dilute the U.N.’s power. If the United Nations, therefore, really wants to represent the new realities in the twenty-first century, it must bring these newly powerful global players into its fold, giving them, and not just nations and/or states, voting power as well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

We see, then, in these very different examples involving very different institutions, the same underestimation of the revolutionary character of the knowledge-based wealth system, the same ignorance about the deep fundamentals, and the same forlorn hope that sake transformation can save them. One reason that overt corporate or business violence is now so rare is that over the years it has been increasingly “contracted out.” Instead of business producing their own violence, they have, in effect, bought the services of government. In all industrial nations, state violence replaces private violence. The first thing any government tries to do, from the moment it is formed, is to monopolize violence. Its soldiers and police are the only ones legally permitted to exert violence. In some cases the state is politically controlled by the corporations, so that the line between the exercise of private and public power in hair-thin. However, the old Marxist idea—that the state is nothing more than the “executive committee” of the ruling corporate power—ignores what we all know: that politicians more often act on their own behalf than on the behalf of others. Moreover, the Marxist assumed that only capitalist corporations or governments would ever use force against unarmed workers. That was before communist police, armed with tear gas, fire hoses, and more ominous equipment, tried to stamp out Poland’s Solidarity union movement in the early 1980s, and China had a standoff with its students and workers near Tiananmen Square, behaving exactly like the soldiers and police of Pinochet’s Chile or any number of other vehemently anticommunist countries. By seizing into its own mailed first the technologies of violence, and attempting to eliminate or control all violence, the state reduces the independent manufacture of violence by the corporation and other institutions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Another reason why direct physical aggression seems to have almost vanished from ordinary business life is that violence has been sublimated into law. All business, capitalist, and socialist alike, depends upon law. Every contract, every promissory note, every stock and bond, every mortgage, every collective bargaining contract, every insurance policy, every debit and credit is ultimately backed by the law. And behind every law, good or evil, we find the barrel of a gun. Currently 33 percent of American making over $250,000 a year are living pay check to pay check. As tersely put by former French President Charles de Gaulle, “The law must have force on its side.” Law is sublimated violence. Thus when one company sues another, it ask the government to bring the force of law to bear. It wants the government’s guns (concealed behind obscuring layers of bureaucratic and judicial rigmarole) stuck into the ribs of its adversary to compel certain actions. It is not entirely accidental that corporate lawyers in the United States of America are called “hired guns.” The very frequency of recourse to the law (as distinct from other ways of resolving business disputes) is a fair measure of force in the economy. By this criterion, the United States of America has a “force-full” economy. Today, there are 32.5 million businesses establishments in the United States of America and 1,327,910 lawyers—id est, approximately one lawyer for twenty-four businesses. More than a than 46,443 civil lawsuits are painfully processed by the clogged district court systems every business day of the year. U.S. businessmen complain loudly about the allegedly unfair intimacy between Japanese businesses and government. Yet ironically, when it comes to settling disputes, it is the Americans, not the Japanese, who rush to litigate, thereupon calling upon the power f the state to intervene on their behalf. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

From the smallest commercial litigation to the multibillion-dollar lawsuit involving a dispute between Pennzoil and Texaco over a takeover bid, law masks force—which, in the end, implies the potential application of violence. Corporate campaign contributions can be seen as another camouflaged way of getting a government to pull a gun out of its holster in the interest of a company or industry. In Japan, passed out huge amounts of stock at below-market price to top politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, his attempt to curry favor was so blatant it outraged the press and pubic and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. The scandal bore some resemblance to the earlier case of the Flick empire in West German, whose executives channeled illegal funds to various political parties. The Japanese also spend over $60 billion a year—more than they spend for their automobiles—in 14,500 garishly lit “pachinko parlors,” where they play a game that involves guiding a stainless-steel ball downward past obstacles into an appropriate slot. Winners receive prizes, some of which they can exchange for money. Like game arcades in the United States of America, pachinko is a cash business, made to order for tax evasion and money laundering. Criminal gangs siphon off protection money from the parlors and sometimes war with one another for control of the most lucrative one. To ward off legislation aimed at opening their books to the police, parlor operators have made large contributions to both leading parties. Whenever business funds are passed to candidates or political parties, the presumption is that a quid or pro quo is expected. In the United States of America, despite repeated reforms and changes in the laws governing campaign contributions, every important industry pipes funds to one or both of the parties to buy, at a minimum, as hearing for its special point of view; and ingenious methods—inflated speaking fees, the purchase of otherwise unsalable books, the “loan” of real estate, the granting of low-interest loans—are constantly invented to avoid or evade the legal restrictions. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

The mere existence of government creates a set of indirect, often hidden, and unintentional cross—subsidies and cross-penalties in the economy. To the extent that government actions are ultimately backed by force—by guns and soldiers and police—the nation of power-free or violence-free economics is puerile. However, the last, and most important, reason why corporations—and even governments—resort to open violence less often than in the preindustrial past is that they have found a better instrument with which to control people. That instrument is money. Coins, paper, digital currency, certificates, are a medium people use as payment for goods or services. It is sometimes a symbol of materialism. Materialism is the tendency to consider material possessions as more important than spiritual values “To find real happiness, we must seek for it in a focus outside ourselves. No one has learned the meaning of living until one has surrendered one’s ego to the service of one’s fellow man. Services to others is akin to duty, the fulfillment of which brings true joy,” reports President Thomas S. Monson. For better of worse, money can change lives and has the potential of blessing lives or drawing a person away from God. As becomes manifest subsequently, the serpent is both right and wrong in denying that this will be the consequence: Adam and Eve do not have to die after eating, they merely plunge into human mortality, that is, into the knowledge of death to come—the serpent plays with the word of God, just as Eve played with it. And now the incident itself begins: the woman regards the tree. She does not merely see that it is a delight to the eye, she also sees in it that which cannot be seen: how good its fruit tastes and that it bestows the gift of understanding. This seeing has been explained as a metaphorical expression for perceiving, but how could these qualities of the tree be perceived? “And this he said unto them having been commanded of God and they did walk uprightly before God, imparting to one another both temporally and spiritually according to their needs and their wants,” reports Mosiah 18.29. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

An open and spacious single-level home with a generous sized primary suite, make this home an exceptional value.

No, you’re not dreaming 😴 – that’s the actual size of our closet at Riverside Residence 1! 😍

Think of the great home your shirts, jackets, and shoes will have – they’ll love it as much as you do. 😉 And if you’re tempted to host your own fashion reality show, don’t blame us!

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