Anyone reading this page has an amazing skill called literacy. It comes as a shock sometimes to remember that all of us had ancestors who were illiterate. Not stupid nor ignorant, but invincibly illiterate. Simply to read was a fantastic achievement in the ancient World. Saint Augustine, writing in the 5^th century, refers to his mentor, Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who was so learned that he could actually read without moving his lips. Perhaps he had telepathic powers? For this astonishing feat he was regarded as the brainiest person in the World. Not only were most of our ancestors illiterate, they were also “innumerate,” meaning they could not do the simplest arithmetic. Those few who could were deemed downright dangerous. A marvelous warning attributes to Augustine holds that Christians should stay away from people who could add or subtract. It was obvious they have “made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell”—a sentiment with which many a fourth-grade math student today might agree. It was not until a thousand years later that we find “reckoning masters” teaching pupils bound for commercial careers. What is underscores is that many of the simplest skills taken for granted in business today are the product of centuries and millennia of cumulative cultural development. Knowledge from China, from India, from the Arabs, from Phoenician traders, as well as from the West, is an unrecognized part of the heritage relied on today by business executive all over the Word. Successive generations have learned these skills, adapted them, transmitted them, and then slowly built on the result. All economic systems sit upon a “knowledge base.” All business enterprises depend on the preexistence of this socially constructed resource. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

When calculating the “inputs” needed from production, unlike capital, labour, and land, it is usually neglected by economists and business executives. Yet this resource—partly paid for, partly exploited free of charge—is now the most important of all. At rare moments in history the advance of knowledge has smashed through old barriers. The most important of these breakthroughs has been the invention of new tools for thinking and communication, like the ideogram…the alphabet…the zero…and in our century, the computer. Nearly fifty years ago anyone with the slenderest ability to use a computer was described in the popular press as a “mathematical wizard” or a “giant brain,” exactly as Saint Ambrose was in the age of moving lips. Today we are living through one of those exclamation points in history when the entire structure of human knowledge is once again trembling with change as old barriers fall. We are not just accumulating more “facts”—whatever they may be. Just as we are now restructuring companies and whole economies, we are totally reorganizing the production and distribution of knowledge and the symbols used to communicate it. What does this mean? It means that we are creating new networks of knowledge…linking concept to one another in startling ways…building up amazing hierarches of inference…spawning new theories, hypotheses, and images, based on novel assumptions, new languages, codes, and logics. Businesses, governments, and individuals are collecting and storing more sheer data than any previous generation in history (creating a massive, confusing gold mine for tomorrow’s historians). However, more important, we are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context, and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

None of this implies that the data are correct; information, true; and knowledge, wise. However, this does imply vast changes in the way we see the World, create wealth, and exercise power. Not all this new knowledge is factual or even explicit. Much knowledge, as the term is used here, is unspoken, consisting of assumptions piled atop assumptions, of fragmentary models, of unnoticed analogies, and it includes not simply logical and seemingly unemotional information data, but values, the products of passion and emotion, not to mention imagination and intuition. It is today’s gigantic upheaval in the knowledge base of society—not computer hype of mere financial manipulation—that explains the rise of a super-symbolic economy. The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its legitimacy toward the mid-nineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fast as a train could travel: about thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solving particular problems. Prior to the telegraph, information tended to be of local interest. Telegraphy changed all of this, and instigated the second stage of the information revolution. The telegraph removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information, and, for the first time, transportation and communication were disengaged from each other. In the United States of America, the telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified nation-state. However, more than this, telegraphy created the idea of context-free information—that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. However, it did not do so alone. The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized except for its partnership with the penny press, which was the first institution to grasp the significance of the annihilation of space and the saleability of irrelevant information. In fact, the first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred one day after Samuel Morse gave his historic demonstration of the telegraph’s workability. Using the same Washington-to-Baltimore line Morse had constructed, the Baltimore Patriot gave its readers information about action taken by the House of Representatives on the Oregon issue. The paper concluded its report by noting, “…we are thus enabled to give our readers information from Washington up to two o’clock. This is indeed the annihilation of space.” Within two years of this announcement, the fortunes of newspapers came to depend not on the quality or utility of the news they provided but on how much, from what distances, and at what speed. And, one must add, with how many photographs. For, as it happened, photography was invented at approximately the same time as telegraphy, and initiated the third stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it “the graphic revolution,” because the photograph and other iconographs brought on a massive intrusion of images into the symbolic environment: photographs, prints, posters, drawings, advertisements. The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language but tended to replace it as our dominant means for construing understanding, and testing reality. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

By the end of the nineteenth century, advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that a picture was worth not only a thousand words but, in terms of the sales, many thousands of dollars. As a whole, modern society is more multifaceted, diverse, connected, and vocal than ever before in history. Two major forces enable this current reality: a rapid rate of change and massive personalization of products and services. The confluence of these two factors is evidence of the Knowledge Era. Change is happening constantly, yet governments, industries, companies, and people embrace (and adapt to) change at varying rates. This difference in rates of change is called desynchronization. Times marked by desynchronization tend to produce great innovation and creativity—as well as great conflict and turmoil. Compounding the opportunities and challenges, our Knowledge Era is also characterized by demassification—products and services produced in large quantities, but individually tailored for niche groups, people, and special interests. Where this convergence of desynchronization and demassification becomes particularly interesting (and challenging) is where information becomes the commodity being personalized and disseminated at varying paces. A little-noticed consequence of this growing customization of products is a parallel customization of prices in the marketplace—that is, a shift from standard fixed prices for standard products to tiered or negotiable prices for the same item. In pre-industrial markets, buyers and sellers typically haggled over price, as they still do in much of the less affluent World today. By contrast, in mass production economies, “one size fits all” was paralleled by “one price fits all.” Today, in yet another Hegelian flip-flop, we are moving back toward flexible, personal pricing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

As any traveler knows, U.S.A. airline-ticket prices for the same seat on the same flight can vary madly. In one not-surprising case, the same seat was offered for fifteen different amounts. Using “alternative” or “dynamic” pricing models, sellers now manipulate price according to distribution channel, time and individual customer characteristics. The growing personalization of pricing is underscored by the phenomenal success of eBay and other online sites in which prices are set by auction. In fact, in everything from hotel bookings to hardware, Beanie Babies, boats, cars, computers and clothing, we see a proliferation of specialized auction markets. Priceline went a step father with the so-called reverse auction, in which brand-indifferent buyers post the price they are willing to pay and let the sellers come to them. Other specialized variations quickly followed. Auctions, in turn, give rise to yet another niche market-a specialized “payment service” for their participants. An ad from Western Union shows a pleased-as-punch online payment-service customer—clearly not a Metropolitan Museum curator—next to the headline: “Bought a velvet matador painting.” Customers pricing will continue to spread for several convergent reasons. For sellers, customized or semi-customized products do not all cost the same amount to make or provide. Computers can handle the added complexity of multiple pricing schemes. And sellers can now collect more and more detailed information about individual consumers. For buyers, the day has come when individualized online “bots” or “agents” crawl the Web, armed with the power to match the most complex and individualized specs against the lowest price. There is a deeper reason as well. Fixed pricing—ideal for industrial mass production—works best in relatively stable or slowly changing markets. And that is the last thing to expect in the years to come. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Today’s technology mostly works with matter in a few basic forms: gases, liquids, and solids. Though each form has many varieties, all are comparatively simple. Gases, as we have seen, consist of molecules ricocheting through space. A volume of gas will push against its walls and, if not walled in, expand without limit. Gases can supply certain raw material for nanomachines, and nanomachines can be used to remove pollutants from air and turn them into something else. Gases lack structure, so they will remain simple. Liquids are somewhat like gases, but their molecules cling together to form a coherent blob that will not expand beyond a certain limit. Liquids will be good sources of raw materials for nanomachines because they are denser and can carry a wide range of fuels and raw materials in solution (the pipe in the molecular-processing hall contained liquid). Nanomachines can clean up polluted water as easily as air, removing and transforming noxious molecules. Liquids have more structure than gases, but nanotechnology will have its greatest application to solids. Solids are diverse. Solid butter consists of molecules stronger than steel, but the molecules cling to one another by the weaker forces of molecular stickiness. A little heat increases thermal vibrations and makes the solid structure disintegrate into a blob of liquid. Butterlike materials would make poor nanomachines. Metals consist of atoms held together by stronger forces, and so they can be structurally stronger and able to withstand higher temperatures. The forces are not very directional, though, and so planes of metal atoms can slip past one another under pressure; that is why spoons bend, rather than break. This ability to slip makes metals less brittle and easier to shape (with crude technology), but it also weakens them. Only the strongest, hardest, highest-melting-point metals are worth considering as parts of nanomachines. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

Diamond consists of carbon atoms held together by strong, directional bonds, like the bonds down the axis of a protein chain. These directional bonds make it hard for planes of atoms to slip past one another, making diamond (and similar material) very strong indeed—ten to a hundred times stronger than steel. However, the planes cannot easily slip, so when the material fails it does not bend, it breaks. Tiny cracks can easily grow, making a large object seem weak. Glass is similar material: glass windows seem weak—and a scratch makes glass far weaker—yet thin, perfect glass fibers are widely used to make composite materials stronger and lighter than steel Nanotechnology will be able to build with diamond and similar strong materials, making small, flawless fibers and components. In engineering today, diamond is just beginning to be used. Japan has pioneered a technology for making diamond at low pressure, and a Japanese company sells a speaker with excellent high-frequency response—the speaker cone is reinforced with a light, stiff film of diamond. Diamond is extraordinary stuff, made from inexpensive materials like natural gas. U.S.A. companies are scrambling to catch up. All these materials are simple. More complex structures lead to more complex properties, and begin to give some hint of what molecular manufacturing will mean for materials. What if you strung carbon atoms in long chains with side-groups, a bit like a protein chain, and linked them into a big three-dimensional mesh? If the chains were kinked so that they could not pack tightly, they would coil up and flop around almost like molecules in a liquid, yet the strong bonds would keep the overall mesh intact. Puling the whole network would tend to straighten the chains, but their writing motions would tend to coil them back up. This sort of network has been made: it is called rubber. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

Rubber is weaker mostly because the network is irregular. When stretched, first one chain breaks, then another, because they do not all become taut at the same time to share and divide the load. A more regular mesh would be as soft as rubber at first, but when stretched to the limit would become stronger than steel. Molecular manufacturing could make such stuff. The natural World contains a host of good materials—cellulose and lignin in wood, stronger-than-steel proteins in spider’s silk, hard ceramics in grains of sand, and more. Many products of molecular manufacturing will be designed for great durability, like sand. Others will be designed to fall apart easily for easy recycling, like wood. Some may be designed for uses where they may be thrown away. In this last category, nanotailored biodegradables will shine. With care, almost any sort of product from a shoe to computer-driven nanomachines can be made to last for a good long time, and then unzip fairly rapidly and very thoroughly into molecules and other bits of stuff all kinds normally found in the soil. This gives only a hint of what molecular manufacturing will make possible by giving better control of the structure of solid matter. The most impressive applications will not be superstrong structural materials, improved rubber, and simple biodegradable materials: these are uniform, repetitive structures not greatly different from ordinary materials. These materials are “stupid.” When pushed, the resist, or the stretch and bounce back. If you shone light on them, they transmit it, reflect it, or absorb it. However, molecular manufacturing can do much more. Rather than heaping up simple molecules, it can build material from trillions of motors, ratchets, light-emitters, and computers. Muscle is smarter than rubber because it contains molecular machines: it can be told to contact. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

The products of molecular manufacturing can include materials able to change shape, colour, and other properties on command. When a dust mote can contain a supercomputer, materials can be made smart, medicine can be made sophisticated, and the World will be a different place. We will discuss smart material more in the near future. Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces exchange itself. It is also a necessary device for holding together a community based on the first symptoms of unequal life. Tolstory’s statement that “art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling,” elucidates art’s contribution to social cohesion at the dawn of culture. Socializing rituals required art; art works originated in the service of ritual; the ritual production of an art and the artistic production of ritual are the same. “Music,” wrote Aaliyah Haughton, “is what unifies.” As the need for solidarity accelerated, so did the need for ceremony; art also played a role in its mnemonic function. Art, with myth closely following, served as the semblance of real memory. In the recesses of the caves, earliest indoctrination proceeded via the paintings and other symbols, intended to inscribe rules in depersonalized, collective memory, especially the memory of obligations, as the beginning of civilized mortality. Once the symbolic process of art developed it dominated memory as well as perception, putting its stamp on all mental functions. Cultural memory meant that one person’s actions could be compared with those of another, including portrayed ancestors, and future behavior anticipated and controlled. Memories became externalized, akin to property but not even the property of the subject. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Art turns the subject into object, into symbol. The shaman’s rile was to objectify reality; this happened to outer nature and to subjectivity alike because alienated life demanded it. Art provided the medium of conceptual transformation by which the individual was separated from nature and comminated, at the deepest level, socially. Art’s ability to symbolize and direct human emotion accomplished both ends. What we were led to accept as necessity, in order to keep ourselves oriented in nature and society, was at base the invention of the symbolic World, the Fall of Man. As Adam and Eve puzzled over the words Good, Evil, Death, Adam said, “Come, maybe we can find Satan. He might know these things.” Then Satan came forth, still gazing upon Eve and admiring, and said to her—“You have not seen me before, sweet creature, but I have seen you. I have seen all the animals, but in beauty none of them equals you. Your hair, your eyes, your face, your flesh-tints, your form, the tapering grace of your white limps—all are beautiful, adorable, perfect.” It have her pleasure, and she looked herself over, putting out a foot and a hand and admiring them; then she naively said—“It is a joy to be so beautiful. And Adam—he is the same.” Even turned him about, this way and that, to show him off, with such guileless pride in her pale blue eyes, and he—he took it all as just matter of course, and was innocently happy in it, and said, “When I have flowers on my head it is better still,” Eve said, “It is true—you shall see,” and she flitted hither and thither like a butterfly and plucked flowers, and in a moment laced their stems together in a glowing wreath and set it upon his head; then tip-toed and gave it a pat here and there with her nimble fingers, with each pat enhancing its grace and shape, none knows how, or why it should so result, but it in there is a law somewhere, though the delicate art and mystery of it is her secret alone, and not learnable by another; and when at last it was to her mind she clapped her hands for pleasure, then reached up and kissed him—as pretty a sight, taken altogether, as in his experience as he had seen. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

Satan then thought to himself about the words Eve wanted to know and if he should tell her. Satan said to Eve, “How should you know pain? Pain is not of your World; pain is impossible to you; you have never experienced a physical pain. Reduce that to a formula, a principle, and what have we? This: Things which are outside our orbit—our own particular World—things which by our constitution and equipment we are unable to see, or feel, or otherwise experience—cannot be made comprehensible to us in words. There you have the whole thing in a nutshell. It is a principle, it is axiomatic, it is a law. Now do you understand?” Of course Eve missed the point. Necessarily she would. Yet her effort was success for Satan, for it was a vivid confirmation of the truth of what he had been saying. Axiomatic was for the present a thing outside of the World of her experience, therefore it had no meaning for her. Satan continued: “Fear. Naturally you would not know it. You have not felt it, you cannot feel it, it does not belong in your World. With a hundred thousand words I should not be able to make you understand what fear is. How then am I to explain Death to you? You have never seen it, it is foreign to your World, it is impossible to make the word mean anything to you, so far as I can see. In a way, it is a sleep—but death is a long sleep—very long.” Satan knew that some day Eve would know what a pathetic truth it was to experience death. He knew that some day, she would say, out of a broken heart, “Come to me, oh, Death, the compassionate! Step me in thy merciful oblivion, of refuge of the sorrowful, friend of the forsaken and the desolate!” Then Satan said aloud, “But this sleep is eternal.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

The word went over her head Necessarily it would. “Eternal. Ah, that also is outside your World, as yet. There is no way to make you understand it.” It was a hopeless case. Words referring to things outside her experience were a foreign language to her, and meaningless. She was like a little baby whose mother say to it, “Do not put your finger in the candle-flame, it will burn you.” Burn—it is a foreign word to the baby, and will have no terrors for it until experience shall have revealed its meaning. It is not worth while for mamma to make the remark, the baby will goo-goo cheerfully, and put its fingers in the pretty flame—once. After these private reflections Satan had, he knew it was no way he could explain eternal to make Eve understand. The World must be mediated by art (and human communication by language, and being by time) due to division of labour, as seen in the nature of the ritual. The real object, in its particularity, does not appear in ritual; instead, an abstract one is used, so that the terms of ceremonial expression are open to substitution. The conventions needed in division of labour, with its standardization and loss of the unique, are those of ritual, of symbolization. The process is at base identical, based on equivalence. Production of goods, as the hunter-gatherer mode is gradually liquidated in favour of agriculture (historical production) and religion (full symbolic production), is also ritual production. The agent, again, is the shaman-artist, en-route to priesthood, leader by reason of mastering one’s own immediate desires via the symbol. All that is spontaneous, organic, instinctive is to be neutered by art and myth. Good and evil is difficult. They have place in a moral kingdom only. Some have no morals. Morals are based on a system of law which distinguishes between right and wrong, good morals and bad. These things do not exit for many, and no one can make them clearly understand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Obedience to constituted authority is a moral law. Suppose Adam should forbid you to put your child in the river and leave it there overnight—would you put the child there? If they wanted to, some people would. It is because they do not know any better; they have no idea of duty, command, obedience, these things also have no meaning for them. In their present estate they are in no possible way responsible for anything they do or say or think. They are what the law calls incompetent and cannot be held responsible for their actions because of a mental defect. Now, this incompetent and insanity ruling brings up a very good question. If most adults under 25 not fully mature, and people under the age of 18 do not have fully developed brains, can they truly be held responsible for their actions, or legally engage in contracts? TIT FOR TAT may be an effective strategy for an egoist to use, but it is a moral strategy for a person or a country to follow? The answer depends, of course, on one’s standard for morality. Perhaps the most widely accepted moral standard is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In the context of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Golden Rule would seem to imply that you should always cooperate, since cooperation is what you want from others. This interpretation suggests that the best strategy from the point of view of mortality is the strategy of unconditional cooperation rather than TIT FOR TAT. The problem with his view is that turning the other cheek provides an incentive for the other individual to exploit you. Unconditional cooperation can not only hurt you, but it can hurt other innocent bystanders with whom the successful exploiters will interact later. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Unconditional cooperation tends to spoil the other individual; it leaves a burden on the rest of the community to reform the spoiled individual, suggesting that reciprocity is a better foundation for morality than is unconditional cooperation. The Golden Rule would advise unconditional cooperation, since what you would really prefer the other play to do is to let you get away with some defections. Yet, basing a strategy on reciprocity does not seem to be the height of morality either—at least not according to our everyday intuitions. Reciprocity is certainly not a good basis for a morally aspiration. Yet it is more than just the morality of egoism. It actually helps not only oneself, but others as well. It helps others by making it hard for exploitative strategies to survive. And not only does it help others, but it asks no more for oneself than it is willing to concede to others. A strategy based on reciprocity can allow the other individual to get the reward for mutual cooperation, which is the same payoff it gets for itself when both strategies are doing their best. The insistence on no more than equality is a fundamental property of many rules based upon reciprocity. It is most clearly seen in the performance of TIT FOR TAT in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It always lets the other individual defect first, and no one really comes out ahead because it will never defect more times than the other individual will. TIT FOR TAT wins not by doing better than the other individual, but by eliciting cooperation from the other individual. In this way, TIT FOR TAT does well by promoting the mutual interest rather than by exploiting the other’s weakness. A moral person could not do much better. What gives TIT FOR TAT its slightly unsavory taste is its insistence on an eye for an eye. This is rough justice indeed. However, the real issue is whether there are any better alternatives. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

In situations where people can rely on a central authority to enforce the community standards, there are alternatives. The punishment might fit the crime without having to be as painful as the crime itself was. When there is no central authority to do the enforcement, the individuals must rely on themselves to give each other the necessary incentives to elicit cooperation rather than defection. In such a case the real question is just what form this enticement should take. The trouble with TIT FOR TAT is that once a feud gets state, it can continue indefinitely. Indeed, many feuds seem to have just this property. For example, in Albania and the Middle East, a feud between families sometimes goes on for decades as one injury is repaired by another, and each retaliation is the start of the next cycle. The injuries can echo back and forth until the original violation is lost in the distant past. This is a serious problem with TIT FOR TAT. A better strategy might be to return only nine-tenths of a tit for a tat. This would help dampen the echoing of conflict and still provide an incentive to the other player not to try any gratuitous defections. It would be a strategy based on reciprocity, but would be a bit more forgiving than TIT FOR TAT. It is till rough justice, but in a World of egoists without central authority, it does have the virtue of promoting not only its own welfare, but the welfare of others as well. A community using strategies based upon reciprocity can actually police itself. By guaranteeing the punishment of any individual who tires to be less than cooperative, the deviant strategy is made unprofitable. Therefore the deviant will not thrive, and will not provide an attractive model for others to imitate. This self-policing feature gives you an extra private incentive to teach it to others—even those with whom you will never interact. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

Naturally, you want to teach reciprocity to those with whom you will interact so that you can build a mutually rewarding relationship. However, even if you never interact with that person, you also have a private advantage from another person using reciprocity, the other’s reciprocity helps to police the entire community by punishing those who try to be exploitive. And this decreases the number of uncooperative individuals you will have to deal with in the future. So teaching the use of nice strategies based upon reciprocity helps the pupil, helps the community, and can indirectly help the teacher. No wonder that an educational psychologist, upon hearing of the virtues of TIT FOR TAT, recommended teaching reciprocity in the schools. There is no fixed nature, just different levels of spirituality. The coming to awareness of the infrastructure of culture is deadly to culture because of the crisis of a civilization. Sublimation has lost its creative or molding power, and now there is desiccated culture and besmirched nature. However, I do not think this was how it was received by Americans. They were titillated and really took the Fall of Man as an early manifesto of the sexual liberation movement. Even the most distinguished talents, or especially the most distinguished talents, suffer from these obscure longings repressed by society. There is nothing so bad about them; and people should not be intimidated by public opinion, should learn to accept themselves. They have nothing to fear but fear itself. In short, a lot of people have to “come out of the closet.” The is a need to be open about repressed desires, which, because of the climate of our time, has to come out in a tragic grab, lacerating themselves, weeping and wailing. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

In order to be sexually liberated, we must be sueprmen, beyond good and evil. To the extent that such self-expression might be someone intention, it has to be the sign of one’s own decadence, one’s creative impotence, and desire to escape responsibility in aimless creature, as opposed to creator, pleasures. The sexual interpretations of art and religion so powerfully made by Nietzsche, and less powerfully but more popularly made by Dr. Freud, had a corrupting effect on Americans. They noticed the sublime less than the pleasures of the flesh in sexual sublimation. What in Nietzsche was intended to lead the heights was used here to debunk the heights in favor of present desire. Any explanation of the higher in terms of the lower has that tendency, especially in a democracy, where there is envy of what makes special claims, and the good is supposed to be accessible to all. And this is one of the deep reasons why Dr. Freud found such an immediate audience in America. For all of the Continental sturm und drang, he belied in nature, and nature as Locke taught it, animal nature. He just added pleasures of the flesh to work to compose his formula for healthy living—“love and work”—for he really could not explain love. This is what we were raised to believe. It accords with science rather than relying, as does Nietzsche, on poetic vapors. There is a solid ground, one that appeals to our native empiricism, in his interpretation of what eros really wants. Moreover, science rather than poetry is our preferred means of talking about the obscene. All this, plus the promise of some kind of satisfaction of our desires and relief from our miseries, made Dr. Freud a winner from the outset, the most accessible of all the great Continentals. This is manifestly connected with the idea that the process of the first birth is only made possible by special divine intervention, presumably at the time of the initial labour-pains, for reason also every firstborn of man and beast, as the “breaking open of the womb,” belongs to God. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

However, only here is it directly indicated that God Himself assists a firstborn into the World, and just this firstborn is the first murderer. The beief, not formulated conceptually till a late date, that God set man in the World as a primordially free being has here found its strangest and most fearful expression. Dr. Freud provided the centrality of pleasures of the flesh in public life, which is so characteristic of our day. He ultimately seemed too moralistic, not open enough. However, all one had to do was imagine new social structures that demanded less repression for their functioning. This was where Marx was useful. Or one could simply forget about the problems concerning the relation between eros and culture, or else posit a natural harmony between the two. Dr. Freud, riding the crest of a wave of German philosophy, enabled Americans to think the satisfaction of their desires for pleasures of the flesh was the most important element of happiness. He provided rationalization for instinct, although this was surely not his intention. Sex immigrated to the United States of America with the special status given those who make scientific and literary contributions to our culture. However, when it got here, it behaved just like everything else American. Gone was the plaintive tone, the poetry, the justification based on civilization’s dependence on sublimation. Just as we have cut away the camouflage disguising economic needs—such as the Parthenon and Chartres—in order to concentrate efficiently on those needs themselves, so we demystified desires for pleasures of the flesh, seeing them for that they really are, in order to satisfy them more efficiently. This brought into the Lockean World the second focus of human nature, the one concentrated on by Rousseau and those he influenced. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The basic rights are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property and sex.” “Give us your poor, our sexually starved…” Dr. Freud made it possible to consider repression of pleasures of the flesh a medical complaint, and therefore endowed it with the prestige automatically enjoyed by anything having to do with health in a nation devoted to self-preservation. There is a tendency to neglect Rousseau’s reminder that one does not die from not satisfying this hunger, and that even great seducers’ lusts can be calmed by the certainty of the death penalty. Thus we demystify economy and sexuality, satisfying their primary demands, taking away what our philosophy tells us is their creative impulse, and then we complain we have no culture. We can always go to the opera between office and bed. In Russian they are dependent on operas from the bad old days, because tyranny prevents artistic expression; we are dependent on the same operas, because the thirsts that produced the artistic need have been slacked. I cannot forget the Amherst freshman who asked in naïve and good-natured bewilderment, “Should we go back to sublimation?” To the sugar-free diet substitute, as it were. This is what happened in America to the sublime, in all of the subtle meanings given to it from Rousseau and Kant to Nietzsche and Dr. Freud. I was charmed by the lad’s candor but could not regard him as a serious candidate for culture. Because we have all come to take the unnecessary to be necessary, we have lost all sense of necessity, either natural or cultural. To get an idea of the extent to which television is dependent upon technical tricks to maintain your interest, I suggest you try the following experiment, which I call the Technical Events Test. Put on your television set and simply count the number of times there is a cut, a zoom, a superimposition, a voice-over, the appearance of words on the screen—a technical event of some kind. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

You will find it goes something like this. You are looking at a face speaking. Just as you are becoming accustomed to it, there is a cut to another face. (technical event) Then there might be an edit back to the first fact. (technical event) Intercut with the scenes might be some other parallel line of the story. It may be a series of images of someone in a car racing to meet the people on that street we have just visited. (technical event) The music rises. (technical event) And so on. Each technical event—each alteration of what would be natural imagery—is intended to keep your attention from waning as it might be otherwise. The effect is to lure your attention forward like a mechanical rabbit teasing a greyhound. Each time you are about to relax your attention, another technical event keeps your attached. The luring forward never ceases for very long. If it did, you might become aware of the vacuousness of the content that can get through the inherent limitations of the medium. Then you would be aware of the boredom. If, for example, the camera made no movements and there was no cutting in time and place; if one camera merely sat in one place and recorded the entire length of a conversation, including all the pauses, redundancies, diversions, inaction—the way conversations happen in real life and real time—you would be disinclined to watch for very long. The program would have to be hours long before much of anything happened. Television cannot wait for this, so it stimulates your interest technically. One you actually try the Technical Events Test you will probably find that in the average commercial television program, there are eight or ten technical events for every sixty-second period. That is, the flow of natural imagery is interrupted eight or ten times every minute, sometimes much more often than that. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

You may also find that there is rarely a period of twenty seconds without any sort of technical event at all. That may give you an idea of the extent to which producers worry about whether the content itself can carry your interest. One can only guess at the effect upon viewers of these hyperactive images, aside from fixating attention on the television set. Dr. Matthew Dumont mentioned that these technical effect help cause hyperactivity among children. They must surely also contribute to the decline of attention span and the inability to absorb information that comes muddling along at natural, real-life speed. To be constantly buffeted by bizarre and impossible imagery cannot help but produce stress in viewers. To have one’s attention interrupted every ten seconds must jar mental processes that were otherwise attuned to natural, personal informational rhythms in which such interruptions would be literally maddening. Therefore, perhaps it is best not to watch the news at all, and this might suggest why people who read books and the newspaper tend to be more relations and more intelligent. Leaving the television set to go outdoors, or to have an ordinary conversation, becomes unsatisfying. One wants action! Life become boring, and television interesting, all as a result of a system of technical hypes. Meanwhile, the speed and activity of commercial programming are further exaggerated in advertising When you try the Technical Events Test on a few thirty-or sixty-second television commercials you will find that advertising has roughly twice the technical action of the already hyped-up programs that the ads interrupt. On the average, a thirty second commercial will have from ten to fifteen technical events. There is almost never a six-second period without a technical event. What is more, the technical events in advertising have much more dimension than those in the programming. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

In addition to the camera zooms, pans, rolls, and cuts, they are far more likely to have words flashing on and off the screen, songs going on and off, and cartoon characters doing bizarre things, voice-overs, shots from helicopters and so on. The television is a lot like occult subjection. Since occult subjection is a religious issue, the treatment is not to be found in psychiatry or psychotherapy. A person who has become occultly subjected has at the same time become the object and target of demonic forces. Help lies neither with the doctor nor with the theologian. No one really knows what the supernatural is or how to control it, and that is what makes it so scary. Television is the same, its light can cause harm to the human body and mind that goes beyond radiation, it can also distort plant life making things grown abnormally tall and skinny, or distorted and large. And the results of the method of programming on the human mind is as of yet unknown. This suggests that people need to control themselves, not the guns, and spend less time watching television, stop worshipping that false idol God warned you about. Jesus Christ alone can help and deliver. The only place where freedom can be found is at the cross of Calvary, not with a politician. It was there that deliverance and redemption was bought for all mankind. Yet to the human mind the cross is a scandal and an offence. Nevertheless, deliverance is not so much a matter of reason than faith, as we find it revealed in the New Testament. Faith in Christ overcomes the powers of darkness. Christ came as the light of the World and the darkness cannot overcome the light. It was for this purpose that the Son of God appeared that He might destroy the works of darkness. Christ on the cross overcame and conquered all the powers of evil. “Oh, how merciful is out God! And now behold, since it has been as much as we could do to get our strains taken away from us, and our awords are made bright, let us ide them away that they may be kept bright, as a testimony to our God at the last day, r at the day that we shall be brought to stand before Him to be judged, that we have not stained our swords in the blood of our brethren since He imparted His words unto us and has made us clean thereby,” reports Alma 24.15. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

Cresleigh Homes

Now that we’re all moved into our Residence 2 home at #CresleighRanch, it’s nothing but sunshine and blue skies. 😎

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