Many changes in the society’s knowledge system translate directly into business operations. This knowledge system is an even more pervasive part of every firm’s environment than the banking system, the political system, or the energy system. If there were no language, culture, data, information, and knowledge, apart from the fact that no business could open its doors, there is a deeper fact that of all the resources needed to create wealth, none is more versatile than these. In fact, knowledge (sometimes just information and data) can be used as a replacement for other resources. Knowledge—in principle inexhaustible—is the ultimate substitute. Take technology. In most smokestack factories it was inordinately expensive to change any product. It required highly paid tool-and-die makers, jig setters, and other specialists, and resulted in extended “downtime” during which the machines were idle and ate up capital, interests and overhead. If you could make longer and longer runs of identical products, that is why cost per unit went down. Instead of these long runs, the latest computer-driven manufacturing technologies make endless variety possible. Philips, the giant Dutch-based electronics firm, manufacture one hundred different models of color TV in 1972. Today the variety has grown to five hundred different models. Bridgestone Cycle Company in Japan is promoting the “Radac Tailor-Made” bike, Matsushita offers a semicustomized line of heated carpets, and the Washington Shoe Company offers semicustomized women’s shoes—thirty-two designs for each size—depending on the individual customer’s feet as measured by computer in the shoe store. Standing the economics of mass production on their head, the new information technologies push the cost of diversity toward zero. Knowledge thus substitutes for the once-high cost of change in the production process. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Or take materials. A smart computer program hitched to a lathe can cut more pieces out of the same amount of steel than most human operators. Making miniaturization possible, new knowledge leads to smaller, lighter products, which, in turn cuts down on warehousing and transportation. And as we saw in the case of CSX, the rail and shipping firm, up-to-the-minute tracking of shipments—id est, better information—means further transportation savings. New knowledge also leads to the creation of totally new materials, ranging from aircraft composites to biologicals, and increases our ability to substitute one material for another. Everything, from tennis rackets to jet engines, is incorporating new plastics, alloys, and complex composites. Allied-Signal, Inc., of Morristown, New Jersey, makes something called Metglas, which combines features of both metal and glass and is used to make transformers far more energy-efficient. New optical materials point to much faster computers. New forms of tank armor are made of a combination of steel, ceramics, and uranium. Deeper knowledge permits us to customize materials at the molecular level to produce desire thermal, electrical, or mechanical characteristics. The only reason we now ship huge amounts of raw materials like bauxite or nickel or copper across the planet is that we lack the knowledge to convert local materials into usable substitutes. Once we acquire that know-how, further drastic savings in transportation will result. In short, knowledge is a substitute for both resources and shipping. The same goes for energy. Nothing illustrates the substitutability of knowledge for other resources than the recent breakthroughs in superconductivity, which at a minimum will drive down the amount of energy that now must be transmitted for each unit of output. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

At present, according to the American Public Power Association, up to 15 percent of electricity generated in the United States of America is lost in the process of moving it to where it is needed, because copper wires are inefficient carriers. This transmission loss is the equivalent of the output of fifty generating plants. Superconductivity can slash that loss. Similarly, Bechtel National, Inc., in San Francisco, along with Ebasco Services, Inc., of New York, is working on what amounts to a giant, football-field-sized “battery” for storing energy. Down the road such storage systems can help eliminate the power plants that are there to provide extra electricity in peak periods. In addition to substituting for materials, transportation, and energy, knowledge also saves time. Time itself is one of the most important of economic resources, even though it shows up nowhere on a company’s balance sheet. Time remains, in effect, a hidden input. Especially when change accelerates, the ability to shorten time—for instance, by communicating swiftly or by brining new products to market fast—can be the difference between profit and loss. New knowledge speeds things up, drives us toward a real time, instantaneous economy, and substitutes for time expenditure. Space, too, is conserved and conquered by knowledge. GE’s Transportation System division builds locomotives. When it began using advanced information-processing and communications to link up with its suppliers, it was able to turn over its inventory twelve times faster than before, and to save a full acre of warehouse space. Not only miniaturized products and reduced warehousing, but other savings are possible. In one year, the United States of America turns out 1.3 trillion documents—sufficient, according to some calculations, to “wallpaper” the Grand Canyon 107 times. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Of these documents, all but 5 percent of this is still stored on paper. Advanced information technologies, including document scanning, promise to compress at least some of this. More important, the new telecommunications capacity, based on computers and advanced knowledge, makes it possible to disperse production out of high-cost urban centers, and to reduce energy and transport costs even further. So much is written about the substitution of computerized equipment for human labour that we often ignore the ways in which it also substitutes for capital. Yet all the above also translate into financial savings. Indeed, in a sense, knowledge is a far greater long-term threat to the power of finance than are organized labour or anticapitalist political parties. For, relatively speaking, the information revolution is reducing the need for capital per unit of output. In a “capital-ist” economy, nothing could be more significant. Vittorio Merloni was an eighty 83-year-old businessman who founded Merloni Elettrodomestici and became the chairman, holding the position continuously until 29 April 2010. His family owned 75 percent of the company. In a small side room at the education center of the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro in Rome, he conversed candidly about his firm. Ten percent of all the washing machines, refrigerators, and other major household appliances sold in Europe are made by Merloni’s company. His main competitors were Electrolux of Sweden and Philips of Holland. For four turbulent years Meloni served as head of Confindustria, the Italian confederation of employers. According to Merloni, Italy’s recent economic advances are a result of the fact that “we need less capital now to do the same thing” that required more capital in the past. “This means that a poor country can be much better off today with the same amount of capital than five or ten years ago.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

The reason, he says, is that knowledge-based technologies are reducing the capital needed to produce, say, dishwashers, stoves, or vacuum cleaners. To begin with, information substitutes for high-cost inventory, according to Merloni, who uses computer-aided design and shoots data back and forth via satellite between his plants in Italy and Portugal. By speeding the responsiveness of the factory to the market and making short runs economical, better and more instantaneous information makes it possible to reduce the amount of components and finished goods sitting in warehouses or railroad sidings. Merloni was able to cut a startling 60 percent from his inventory costs. Until recently, his plants needed an inventory of 200,000 pieces for 800,000 units of output. Today they turn out more than 3 million units a year with only 300,000 in the pipeline. He attributes this massive saving to better information. Merloni’s case is not unique. In the United States of America, textile manufacturers, apparel makers and retailers—organized into a Voluntary Inter-Industry Communications Standards (VICS) committee—are looking forward to squeezing $12 billion worth of excess inventory out of their system by using a shared industrywide electronic data network. In Japan, NHK Spring Company, which sells seats and springs to most of the Japanese carmakers, is aiming to synchronize its production lines to those of its customers so perfectly as to virtually eliminate buffer stocks. Say one NHK official: “Id this system can be implemented, we can theoretically reduce taxes, insurance, and overhead. Similarly, Merloni points out, he is able to transfer funds from London or Paris to Milan or Madrid in minutes, saving significant interest charges. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Even though the initial costs of computers, software, information, and telecommunications may itself be high, he says, the overall savings mean that his company needs less capital to do the same job it did in the past. These ideas about capital are spreading around the globe. In the words of Dr. Haruo Shimada of Keio University in Tokyo, we are seeing a shift from corporations that “require vast capital assets and a large accumulation of human capital to carry out production” to what he calls “flow-type” corporations that use “much less extensive capital assets.” As though to underscore this shift and the importance of knowledge in the economy of tomorrow, the major Japanese corporations are now, for the first time, pouring more funds into research and development than into capital investment. Michael Milken, who, for better or worse, knows a thing or two about investment, has summed it up in six words: “Human capital has replaced dollar capital.” Knowledge has become the ultimate resource of business because it is the ultimate substitute. What we have seen so far, therefore, is that in any economy, production and profits depend inescapably on the three main sources of power—violence, wealth, and knowledge. Violence is progressively converted into law. In turn, capital and money alike are now being transmuted into knowledge. Work changes in parallel, becoming more and more dependent on the manipulation of symbols. With capital, money, and work all moving in the same direction, the entire basis of the economy, which operates according to rule radically different from those that prevailed during the smokestack era. Because it reduces the need for raw materials, labour, time, space, and capital, knowledge becomes the central resource of the advanced economy. And as this happens, its value soars. For this reason, as we will see next, “info-wars”—struggles for the control of knowledge—are breaking out everywhere. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Further hastening the retreat from mass markets is today’s upheaval in media and advertising—tools without which capitalist markets as we know them could barely exist. Yesterday’s dominant mass media have been giving way to de-massified media capable of targeting ever smaller micromarkets. This process began as far back as 1961 and rapidly spread, as we forecast at the time in an IBM publication. By 2004 it was so hard to miss that the Financial Times belatedly announced the coming of “The Audience of One” and “The End of the Mass Market.” Companies that have failed to make the transition to the new marketplace complain about “fragmentation.” Those that are thriving in the new environment hail the choices offered to customers who themselves are increasingly individuated. The speed at which individual markets and entire market sectors rise and fall is unprecedented. The metabolism of capitalism is racing, raising the question of what happens when it breaks far past its normal limits. Take, for example, rates of marketization and de-marketization. No market can exist unless it has something to sell. Thus markets, by definition, need inputs—items put up for sale, otherwise known as commodities. Those commodities can be Btu’s of energy, hours of labour, a pair of gloves, a DVD, a patent, a BMW or, for that matter, a ticket to The Winchester Mystery House. Today the number and variety of buyable items available for purchase around the World is astronomical and growing every minute. The sum of all these on-sale items is not known. It is, after all, a prime feature of competitive capitalism to commodify—that is, to put up for sale—as many things, services and experiences, as much data, information and knowledge, and as many hours of available labour, as are thought to be salable. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The spread of market capitalism, hypercompetition, faster rates of innovation and population growth are simultaneously pushing toward further commoditization. Put differently, more “things” are being put up for sale. However, more things are also being withdrawn from sale. Classic models and their parts, for example. Even as BMW offered more series models into the marketplace, DaimlerChrysler shut down its entire line of Plymouths, and new Prowlers thus disappeared from the marketplace. In every market at any moment, therefore, we find these same two basic processes at work—marketization and de-marketization. Yet little attention is paid to the speeds at which these processes occur. These rates differ from industry to industry and from country to country as though each operates at a different metabolic speed. If these speeds become too disparate, what happens? Conversely, if both these processes slow down or accelerate in sync, what happens? Is there a maximum or optimum rate at which markets can operate? And how do the rates in one country affect other countries? Does anyone know? The idea of molecular nanotechnology, like most ideas, has roots stretching far back in time. In ancient Greece, Democritus suggested that the World was built of durable, invisible particles—atoms, the building blocks of solid objects, liquids, and gases. In the last hundred years, scientists have learned more and more about these building blocks, and chemists have learned more and more way to combine them to make new things. Decades ago, biologists found molecules that do complex things; they termed them “molecular machines.” Physicist Richard Feynman was a visionary of miniaturization who pointed toward something like molecular nanotechnology: of December 29, 1959, in an after-dinner talk at the annual meeting of the American Physical Society, he proposed that large machines could be used to make smaller machines, which could make still smaller ones, working in a top-down fashion from the marcroscale to the microscale. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

At the end of his talk, he painted a vision of moving individual atoms, pointing out, “The principles of physics, as far as I can see, do not speak against the possibility of maneuvering things atom by atom.” He pictured making molecules, pointing clearly in the direction take by the modern concept of nanotechnology: “But it is interesting that it would be, in principle, possible (I think) for a physicist to synthesize any chemical substance the chemist writes down. Give the orders, and the physicist synthesizes it. How? Put the atoms down where the chemist says, and so you make the substance.” Despite this clear signpost pointing to a potentially revolutionary area, no one filed the conceptual gap between miniature machines, no notion of controllable molecular manufacturing. With hindsight, one wonders why the gap took so long to fill. Feynman himself did not follow it up, saying that the ability to maneuver atoms one by one “will really be useless” since chemists would come up with traditional, bulk-process ways to make new chemical substances. For a researcher whose main interest was physics, he had contributed much just by placing the signpost: it was up to others to move forward. Instead, the idea of molecular machines for molecular manufacturing did not appear for decades. From today’s viewpoint, molecular nanotechnology looks more like an extension of chemistry than like an extension of miniaturization. A mechanical engineer, looking at nanotechnology, might ask, “How can machines be made so small?” A chemist, though, would ask, “How can molecules be made so large?” The chemist has the better question. Nanotechnology is not primarily about miniaturizing machines, but about extending precise control of molecular structure to larger and larger scales. Nanotechnology is about making (precise) things big. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Nature gives the most obvious clues to how this can be done, and it was the growing scientific literature on natural molecular machines that led one of the present authors (Drexler) to propose molecular nanotechnology of the sort described here. A strategy to reach the goal was part of the concept: Build increasingly complex molecular machinery from simpler pieces, including molecular machines able to build more molecular machines. And the motivation for studying this, and publishing? Largely the fear of living in a World that might rush into the new technology blindly, with ugly consequences. This concept and initial exploratory work started in early 1977 at MIT; the first technical publication came in 1981 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. For years, MIT remained the center of thinking on nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing: in 1985, the MIT Nanotechnology Study Group was formed; it soon initiated an annual lecture series which grew into a two-day symposium by 1990. The first book on the topic, Engines of Creation, was published in 1986. In 1988, Stanford University became the first to offer a course in molecular nanotechnology, sponsored by the Department of Computer Science. In 1989, this department hosted the first major conference on the subject, cosponsored by the Foresight Institute and Global Business Network. With the upcoming publication of a technical book describing nanotechnology—from molecular mechanical and quantum-mechanical principles up to assembly systems and products—the subject will be easier to teach, and more college courses will become available. In parallel with the development and spread of ideas about nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing—ideas that remain pure theory, however well grounded—scientists and engineers, working in laboratories to build real tools and capabilities, have been pioneering roads to nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Research has come a long way since the mid-1980s, and we will look further into that in the next few days. However, as one might expect with a complex new idea that, if true, disrupts a lot of existing plans and expectations, some objections have been heard. As the twentieth century began, the amount of information available through words and pictures grew exponentially. With telegraphy and photography leading the way, a new definition of information came into being. Here was information that rejected the necessity of interconnectedness, proceeded without context, argued for instancy against historical continuity, and offered fascination in place of complexity and coherence. And then, with Western culture gasping for breath, the fourth stage of the information revolution occurred, broadcasting. And then the fifth, computer technology. Each of these brought with it new forms of information, unprecedented amounts of it, and increased speeds (if virtual instancy can be increased). What is our situation today? In the United States of America, we have 260,000 billboards; 11,520 newspapers; 11,556 periodicals; 27,000 video outlets for renting video tapes; more than 500 million radios; and more than 100 million computers. Ninety-eight percent of American homes have a television set; more than half our homes have more than one. There are 40,000 new book titles published every year (300,000 Worldwide), and every day in America 41 million photographs are taken. And if this is not enough, more than 60 billion pieces of junk mail (thanks to computer technology) find their way into our mailboxes every year. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

From millions of sources all over the globe, through every possible channel and medium—light waves, airwaves, ticker tapes, computer banks, telephone wires, television cables, satellites, printing presses—information pours in. Behind it, in every imaginable form of storage—on paper, on video and audio tape, on discs, film, and silicon chips—is an ever greater volume of information waiting to be retrieved. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we are awash in information. And all the sorcerer has left us is a broom. Information has become a form of garbage, not only incapable of answering the most fundamental human questions but barely useful in providing coherent direction to the solution of even mundane problems. To say it still another way: The milieu in which Technopoly flourishes is one in which the tie between information and human purpose has been served, id est, information appears indiscriminately, directed at no one in particular, in enormous volume and at high speeds, and disconnected from theory, meaning, or purpose. All of this has called into being a new World. It can also be referred to as a peek-a-boo World, where not this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is an improbable World. It is a World in which the idea of human progress, as Bacon expressed it, has been replaced by the idea of technological progress. The aim is not to reduce ignorance, superstition, and suffering but to accommodate ourselves to the requirements of new technologies. We tell ourselves, of course, that such accommodations will lead to a better life, but that is only the rhetorical residue of a vanishing technocracy. We are a culture consuming itself with information, and many of us do not even wonder how to control the process. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

We proceed under the assumption that information is our friend, believing that cultures may suffer grievously from a lack of information, which, of course, they do. It is only now beginning to be understood that cultures may also suffer grievously from information glut, information without meaning, information without control mechanisms. This is why there is a need to improve recognition abilities. The ability to recognize other individuals from past interactions, and to remember the relevant features of those interactions, is necessary to sustain cooperation. Without these abilities, an individual could not use any form of reciprocity and hence could not encourage the other to cooperate. In fact, the scope of sustainable cooperation is dependent upon these abilities. This dependence is most clearly seen in the range of biological illustrations developed in the past few reports. Bacteria, for example, are near the bottom of the evolutionary ladder and have limited ability to recognize other organisms. So they must use a shortcut to recognition: an exclusive relationship with just one other individual (the host) at a time. In this way, any changes in a bacterium’s environment can be attributed to that one individual. Birds are more discriminating—they can distinguish among a number of individual neighbouring birds by their songs. This ability to discriminate allows them to develop cooperative relationships—or at least avoid conflictful ones—with several other birds. And, humans have developed their recognition abilities to the extent of having a part of their brains specialized for the recognition of faces. The expanded ability to recognize individuals with whom one has already interacted allows humans to develop a much richer set of cooperative relationships than birds can. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Yet, even in human affairs, limits on the scope of cooperation are often due to the inability to recognize the identity or the actions of the other players. This problem is especially acute for the achievement of effective international control of nuclear weapons. The difficulty here is verification: knowing with an adequate degree of confidence what move the other individual has actually made. For example, an agreement to ban all testing of nuclear weapons has until recently been prevented by the technical difficulty of distinguishing explosions from earthquakes—a difficulty that has now been largely overcome. The ability to recognize defection when it occurs is not the only requirement for successful cooperation to emerge, but it is certainly an important one. Therefore, the scope of sustainable cooperation can be expanded by any improvements in the individuals’ ability to recognize each other from the past, and to be confident about the prior actions that have actually been taken. Cooperation among people can be promoted by a variety of other techniques as well, which include enlarging the shadow of the future, changing payoffs, teaching people to care about the welfare of others, and teaching the value of reciprocity. Promoting good outcomes is not just a matter of lecturing the players about the fact that there is more to be gained from mutual cooperation than mutual defection. It is also a matter of shaping the characteristic of the interaction so that over the long run there can be a stable evolution of cooperation. Most primal acts can become secondary to their representation. Conditioned self-distancing from real existence has been a goal of art from the beginning. Similarly, the category of audience, of supervised consumption, is nothing new, as art has striven to make life itself an object of contemplation. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

As the Paleolithic Age gave way to the Neolithic arrival of agriculture and civilization—production, private property, written language, government and religion—culture could be seen more fully as spiritual decline via division of labour, through global specialization and a mechanistic technology did not prevail until the late Iron Age. The vivid representation of late hunter-gather art was replaced by a formalistic, geometrical style, reducing pictures of animals and humans to symbolic shapes. This narrow stylization reveals the artist shutting himself off from the wealth of empirical reality and creating the symbolic Universe. The aridity of linear precision is one of the hallmarks of this turning point, calling to mind the Yoruba, who associate line with civilization: “This country has become civilized,” literally means, in Yoruba, “this Earth has lines upon its face.” The inflexible form of truly alienated society are everywhere apparent; Gordon Childe, for example, referring to this spirit, points out that the pots of a Neolithic village are all alike. Relatedly, warfare in the form of combat scenes makes its first appearance in art. The work of art was in no sense autonomous at this time; it served society in a direct sense, an instrument of the needs of the new collectivity. There had been no worship-cults during the Paleolithic, but now religion held sway, and it is worth remembering that for thousands of years art’s function will be to depict the gods. Meanwhile, what Gluck stressed about African tribal architecture was true in all other cultures as well: sacred buildings came to life on the model of those of the secular ruler. And though not even the first signed works show up before late Greek period, it is not inappropriate to turn here to art’s realization, some of its general features. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Art not only creates the symbols of and for a society, it is a basic part of the symbolic matrix of estranged social life. Oscar Wilde said that art does not imitate life, but vice versa; which is to say that life follows symbolism, not forgetting that it is (deformed) life that produces symbolism. Every art form, according to T.S. Eliot, is “an attack upon the inarticulate.” Upon the unsymbolized, he should have said. Both painter and poet have always wanted to reach the silence behind and within art and language, leaving the question of whether the individual, in adopting these modes of expression did not settle for far too little. Though Bergson tried to approach the goal of thought without symbols, such a breakthrough seems impossible outside out active undoing of all the layers of alienation. If briefly, in the extremity of revolutionary situations, immediate communication has bloomed. The primary function of art is to objectify feeling, by which one’s own motivations and identity are transformed into symbol and metaphor. All art, as symbolization, is rooted in the creation of substitutes, surrogates for something else; by its very nature therefore, it is a falsification. Under the guise of “enriching the quality of human experience,” we accept vicarious, symbolic descriptions of how we should feel, trained to need such public images of sentiment that ritual art and myth provide for our psychic security. People can readily accept reductionism in everything except what most concerns them. Neither bourgeois society nor natural science has a place for the nonreproductive aspect of pleasures of the flesh. With the slackening of bourgeois austerity and the concomitant emancipation of the harmless pleasures, a certain tolerance of harmless pleasures of the flesh came into fashion. However, this was not enough, because nobody really wants one’s dearest desires to be put in the same category as itching and scratching. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

In America, especially, there is always a need for moral justification. Life-style—an expression that came out of the same school of thought as sublimation and was actually understood to be the product of sublimation, but had never been associated with it in America because of the division of labour that had Dr. Freud specializing in sublimation and Weber in life-style—turned out to be a godsend. “Life-style” justifies any way of life, as does “value” any opinion. It does away with the natural structure of the World, which is only raw material for the stylist’s artistic hand. The very expression makes all moralisms and naturalisms stop short at the limit of the sacred ground, aware of their limits and respectful creativity. Moreover, with our curious mixture of traditions, life-styles are accorded rights, so defense of them is a moral cause, justifying the sweet passions of indignation at the violators of human rights, against whom these tastes, before they became life-styles, were so politically and psychologically defenseless. Now they can call upon all the lovers of human rights throughout the World to join in their defense, for the threat to any group’s rights is a threat to them all. Sadomasochists and Solidarity are bound together in the common cause of human rights, their fates depending on the success of the crusade in their favour. Pleasures of the flesh is no longer an activity but a case. In the past there was a respectable place for marginality, bohemia. However, it had to justify its unorthodox practices by its intellectual and artistic achievement. Life-style is so much freer, easier, more authentic and democratic. No attention has to be paid to content. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

If regular television programming is hard-pressed to maintain your attention without tricks, advertisers have the problem many times over. In regular programming at least there are stories or news, something of interest. Within television’s limits, regular programming has the option to present relevant content. Advertising content has no inherent interest at all. The content is always the same. The image may be a seascape and the product is pizza. Or it may be a landscape and the product is BMW. Or it may be a Cresleigh Home and the product is coffee. Whatever the setting, the content of advertising is always a sales pitch. There is nothing inherently interesting in this. It is worse than boring; it is annoying. So tricks must be used in every advertisement. Maxwell Arnold, a San Francisco advertising man who is one of the industry’s few outspoken critics, once told a radio interviewer: “Who the hell would choose to watch ads if there wasn’t something going on aside from the content?” In the absence of interesting content, technical style is the name of the game. Advertisers spend staggering amounts of money to achieve their technical success. The average production budget for a minute of advertising is roughly ten times the cost of the average minute of programming. It is not at all unusual for a thirty-second commercial to have a production budget of fifty thousand to five hundred thousand dollars, enough to cover the total costs of many half-hour programs This money is spent in techniques, and research upon techniques, to obtain your interest where there would otherwise be none. The frequently heard comment, “You know, I sometimes think advertising is the most interesting thing on television, is a testament to the success of expenditures. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Advertisement is a lot like divine temptation. Temptations come to us in our social gatherings; they come to us in our political strivings; they come to us in our business relations, on the farm, in the mercantile establishment; in our dealings in all the affairs of life we find these insidious influences working. It is when they manifest themselves to the consciousness of each individual that the defense of truth should exert itself. The Church teaches that life here is probationary. It is man’s duty to become the master, not the slave of nature. His appetities are to be controlled and used for the benefit of his health and the prolongation of his life—his passions mastered and controlled for the happiness and blessing of others. If you have lived true to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, and continue to do so, happiness will fill your soul. If you vary from it and become conscious that you have fallen short of what you know is right, you are going to be unhappy even if you have the wealth of the World. Vulgarity is often the first step down the road to indulgence. To be vulgar is to give offense to good taste or refined feelings. It is only a step from vulgarity to obscenity. It is right, indeed essential, to the happiness of our young people that they meet in social parties, but it is an indication of low morals when for entertainment they must resort to physical stimulation and debasement. Drinking and petting parties form an environment in which the moral sense becomes dulled, and unbridled passion holds sway. It then become easy to take the final step downward in moral disgrace. God now enters into conversation with the man inflamed with wrath, whose countenance has “fallen” or “sunken,” as He did with the first humans after their sin; such dialogues are the great respirations of Biblical narration. The angels are wholly pure and sinless, for they do not know right from wrong, and all the acts of such are blameless. No one can do wrong without knowing how to distinguish between right and wrong. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Knowledge removes all that is divine, all that is angelic, from the angels, and immeasurably degrade them. Moral Sense gives knowledge that power. Degradation is a disaster. Without it one cannot do wrong; with it, one can. Therefore it has but one office, only one—to teach how to do wrong. It can teach no other thing—no other thing whatever. It is the creator of wrong; wrong cannot exist until the Moral Sense brings it into being. Adam and Eve acquired Moral Sense by eating the fruit of the Tree, in the Garden of Eden. The command to refrain from eating from the Tree meant nothing to them, they were but children, and could not understand untried things and verbal abstraction which stand for matters outside of their little World and their narrow experience. This is why, if children and teen’s possess brains that are not fully developed, it does not seem they can be held responsible for their crimes because they may not be aware of right from wrong. In essence, they all have a mental defect and need to be educated as to why the crime they committed is wrong so they can be reformed instead of being punished for something they did. For instance, boys are taught by their parents to defend their sister honor and punished by their family when they do not. However, if a boy is caught by authority figures defending his sister’s honor, he may be arrested and punished. Yet, is it right to let a bully abuse your sister? If that boy was arrested, he would need to go somewhere that would make him understand the error of his ways, how to properly handle that situation, and develop a sense of remorse for his crime or defense, so he will not use the incorrect methods he was taught at home. Then be released from the detention center and going on to become a responsible taxpaying citizen, instead of a harden criminal who never learned his lesson. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Eve reached for an apple!—oh, farewell, Eden, and your sinless joys, come poverty and pain, hunger and cold and heartbreak, be remorse; then desperation and then desperation and the prayer for the release of death, indifferent that the gated of hell yawn beyond it! She tasted—the fruit fell from her hand. It was pitiful. She was like one who wakens slow and confusedly out of a sleep. She gazed half-vacantly at Satan, then at Adam, holding her curtaining fleece of golden hair back with her hand, then her wandering glance fell upon her naked person. The red blood mounted to her cheek, and she sprang behind a bush and stood there crying, and saying—“Oh, my modesty is lost to me—my unoffending form is become a shame to me—my mind was pure and clear; for the first time it is soiled with a filthy thought.” She moaned and muttered in her pain, and drooped her head, saying, “I am degraded—I have fallen, of so low, and I shall never rise again.” Adam’s eyes were fixed upon her in a dreamy amazement, he could not understand what had happened, it being outside his World as yet, and her words having no meaning for one void of the Moral Sense. And now his wonder grew: for, unknown to Eve, her hundred years rose upon her, and faded the Heaven of her eyes and the tints of her young flesh, and touched her hair with gray, and traced faint sprays of wrinkles about her mouth and eyes, and shrunk her form, and dulled the satin lustre of her skin. All this the fair boy saw: then loyally and bravely he took the apple and tasted it, saying nothing. The change came upon him also. Then he gathered boughs for both and clothed their nakedness, and they turned and went their way, hand in hand and bent with age, and so passed from sight. And now Father, I pray unto three for them, and also for all those who shall believe on their words, that they may believe in me, that I may be in them as thou, Father, art in me, that we may be one,” reports Nephi 19.23. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Could that something magical ✨ be your move to our incredible community? 🏠 This room’s only empty until you and your family move in to fill it…and that’s the moment we’re waiting for! https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/move-in-ready-homesite-70/

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