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The Fixed is Better than the Evolutionary

They appeared as though out of nowhere, or so it must have seemed to the countless pedestrians who came across the black-clad missionaries hawking their books and pamphlets on the streets of major U.S. cities. They were members of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. Their message was one of Apocalyptic prophecy infused with an odd theology of Christian/Satanic reconciliation. Of their origins, intentions and activities, there has been much dispute and allegation. One thing, however, remains certain: The Process has left an indelible watermark upon the post-psychedelic era, and have become a part of that era’s urban folklore. The Process is characterized as a cult that never quite got off the ground and which experienced a major theological and organizational schism from the mid-1970s. Some allude that their existence is a sort of modern Thuggee or Satanic underground, in which the Process is a central organizing factor. There used to be and still may be a family residence for The Process house in the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco, California. There was rumored to be a lot of dark goings-on within. The Process was allegedly part of a vast cryptocracy of serial murders who supposedly had links with the police and judicial establishment, thereby evading responsibility for their cultic crimes. However, The Process nor its founders were every personally accused of these crimes—but there is an overall impression that they are guilty nonetheless. The Process is known for having “chant sessions,” “midnight meditations,” and other activities. They at one time and still may have The Process coffee house in Chicago. The Process discusses how soulless technology and bureaucracy has imposed on our lives. Ecology had not yet become the catch slogan yuppie materialists, yahoo politicians and quarterly stockholder reports. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Much like now, people felt constricted under the thumb of a debased age in which advertising slogans supplanted poetry, contractual agreements replaced love, and televangelism masqueraded as spirituality. Unlike the alien and decadent garb of the Guru cults from the East, The Process had a distinctly Westerly, neo-Gothic exterior: Neatly-trimmed shoulder-length hair and equally neat beards, all set-off by tailored magician’s capes with matching black uniforms. My earliest memories of The Process are associated with bitter subzero nights, accompanied by a group of friends as we hurried down deserted back streets on Chicago’s North side, a section of the city where some of the last remaining cobblestones had not yet been covered with asphalt. The glitter of stars could still be seen in the night sky as the mercury vapor lamps had not yet been installed there. Process headquarters was a four-story Victorian house that also doubled as living quarters for the majordomos of the Chicago chapter. We entered that bitter chill Winter night past the yellow exterior porch lights and encountered several young men in black uniforms with black caps who stood talking to a small group of people in conventional clothes. A tall thin man with a neat fringe of beard greeted us cheerfully with the salutation, “As It Is.” I rejoindered, “So Be It.” I asked him about the coffee house some other Processians told me about, and he directed us toward a back room, where we would find a staircase leading to the coffee house in the basement. Were descended the narrow, curving stairs to a room in the basement where some music emanated from. “As It Is,” hailed an attractive, petite woman with an upper-class British accent. “So Be It,” we replied. She seated us at a table and gave us menus. We ordered tea and listened to the recorded folk music of John Renbourn and Pentangle. It seemed the perfect accompaniment to the setting. The coffee house was low ceilinged, with curtains hanging on the ground-level windows. Second-hand tables, chairs and benches comprised the sparse décor. A candle burned in the center of each table. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Several days earlier I had run into a pretty young woman with an English accent dressed in Process garb on Wabash Avenue Downtown Chicago. She handed me a leaflet listing the group’s activities and invited us to the group’s coffee house. Later that day I stopped by at a psychedelic head shop where I was hawking my poster art. One of the workers was familiar with the Process and showed me the Fear issue. The colors and graphics were very eye-catching and impressively put-together, and I pored over its contents. At the coffee house we experienced no hard-sell proselytizing, in fact we were all a bit disappointed until it was announced that the “Sabbath assembly” was to begin in several minutes on the top floor of the house. Anticipating the adventure of it, we climbed the narrow stairs to the unfinished attic of the building, the roof-beams and wooden rafters rising sharply to the roof’s steep peak. A could dozen people were already seated in a semi-circle on floor cushions. At the center of the circle was a low round table upon which a black and red altar cloth hung down to the floor in neat folds. In front of the windows hung a back curtain with a red Goat of Mendes in its center. To its left was a large gong. To one side of the altar was a steel container of water, to the other side a steel container with a burning pyre. Standing in front of the goat’s head symbol was a man wearing a tabard, a ceremonial device such as a Catholic or Anglican priest might wear. In the center of the tabard was a symbol of a sort of omega confirmation. We were to learn later that this man was called the Sacrifist. At the entrance of the room stood another man dressed in an ankle-length black robe underneath a tabard. On the center of it was the Process Symbol of Four P’s, which formed a swastika-like device. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

This celebrant was known as the Evangelist. The Sacrifist carried a red-leather bound book at his side and the Evangelist a similar one of black. By the early 1970s, the decline of the counterculture and the use of hallucinogens led to a waning popular interest in the occult. Spiritual realization and wicca groups lost membership as people once more became fixated on material goals. The “me” generation, forerunners of the yuppies, came into prominence. For a while, groups like the Church of Satan, which exhorted egotism and a pragmatic, selfish brand of ritual magic, thrived, but by 1975, interest in all magical groups dropped as the economy took an upturn and people got what they wanted through more practical means. Around the Zarathustrian doctrine, which it resists it, the question grows and grows, till the West Iranian religion develops the myth of Zurvan, Time Unbonded in reply. We only know it from a later version, but its original content is unmistakable. Zurvan arises out of the primal sleep, as it seems, and sacrifices murmuring (the song of the generation of the gods, of which we know through Herodotus, is presumably meant), for a thousand years, to obtain the son, Ahura Mazdah, who would create Heaven and Earth. It would be beside the point to ask to whom he is sacrificing: similarly without recipient, the primeval Indian gods also sacrifice (or sacrifice themselves) that out of them may arise the World. After all the vain sacrifice, Zurvan is overcome by doubt: “What avails sacrifice? Perhaps being is not?” Then arose two in the womb: the Wise Lord from the sacrifice, from the doubt the Wicked Spirit. But Zurvan is obviously “fluid” deity. Evil arises in him through his Fall. He does not choose, he doubts. Doubt is unchoice, indecision. Out of it arises evil. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

We must note that the Wicked Spirit, Angra Mainyu, the well-known Ahriman, is here not the son of Ahura Mazdah, but his brother; Ahura Mazdah, Ormuzd, is, however, no longer a primal god, he enters at the beginning into being, and now precisely as the Only-good One. Thus here too the twins stand in radical antithesis to one another, but here, in contradistinction to the twin-myth of the Avesta, the antithesis of the one to the other is not explicitly stated, nor is the coming World-process between the two of them announced; we hear nothing of good and evil and their mutual relationship; we merely watch the appearance of the protagonists in the nascent cosmic conflict. Yet by what is recounted of the primal god himself we are led not less deep than there, and perhaps deeper, into the sphere of the question what good and evil are. There is was deception and truth, deception in sense of being deceptive, truth in the sense of being true, which confronted one another; here doubt of being is the evil, the good is “knowledge,” belief in being, against which Zurvan transgresses. Here it is ultimately a question of fidelity and infidelity to being. However, some within the Zurvan community could not tolerate the notion of a divine Fall. Of these, some supposed that the time-god had gone astray as to being at a particular moment, but that from the beginning something bad, either bad thinking or a corruption of the essence, had been admixed into him, and from this evil made its start; these are evidently reverting to the Avestic doctrine, though a modified form. However, others said Zurvan brought forth both, in order to mingle good with evil, from which it is clearly inferred that only through the gradated abundance of such inter-mixtures can the full manifoldness of things arise; here the fundament of the Iranian tradition is abandoned: good and evil are no longer irreconcilable principia, but utilizable qualities, before whose utilisability the question of an absolute worth and worthlessness vanishes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

The fundament of another tradition is adopted, when in the opinion of a third of these sects Ahriman is an outcast angel who was cursed for his disobedience. About that, so end the report in this connection, much can be said. However, there is a fragment of the Avesta which runs: “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deed, I do consciously. All evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds, I do unconsciously.” From here a path leads to the psychological problem of evil, as it first evolved in early Christendom. The character of the experience Socrates represents is important because it is the soul of the university. The rich drama of Socrates, the early philosopher, who came to the attention of the city because he was a philosopher, presents all the questions of freedom of thought from all the angles, without any kind of doctrinairism, and hence provides us with a fresh view of the importance and also of the difficulties of such freedom. From the Republic, which really takes seriously only the demands of knowledge, to the Laws, which gives full attention to the competing demands of political life, Socrates as perfecter and as dissolver of the community reveals all the facets of his activity. The difficulty he and the other philosophers contend with from the law is not to be confounded with society’s prejudice against outsiders, dissenters or nonconformists but is, at least apparently, a result of an essential opposition between the two highest claims of a man’s loyalty—his community and his reason. That opposition can only be overcome if the state is rational, as in Hegel, of if reason is abandoned, as in Nietzsche. However that may be, we have a record, unparalleled in its detail and depth, of this first appearance of philosophy, and we can apprehend the natural, or at least primitive, responses to it, prior to philosophy’s effect on the World. This provides a view of the beginning at a time when we may be witnessing the end, partly because we no longer know that beginning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

The poetry written about Socrates by Plato and Xenophon is already in the defensive mode, a rehabilitation of the condemned man. The first statement of the city’s reaction to Socrates is made by Aristophanes. What luck Socrates had! Not only did he command the pens of Plato and Xenophon; he also was the central figure of the greatest work of the consummate genius of the comedy. The Clouds often arouses indignation in those who care little for Socrates but think serious matters are not laughing matters. Socrates’ fate and Aristophanes’ possible contribution to it trouble them. However, Socrates was probably not of their persuasion. He laughed and joked on the day of his death. He and Aristophanes share a certain levity. Aristophanes does present a ridiculous Socrates and takes the point of view of the vulgar, to whom Socrates does look ridiculous. However, Aristophanes also ridicules the vulgar. Reading him we, indeed, laugh at the wise as do the unwise, but we also laugh at the unwise as to the wise. Above all we laugh at the anger of the unwise against the wise. The Socrates of The Clouds is a man who despises what other people care about and cares about what they despise. He spends his life investigating nature, worrying about gnats and stars, denying the existence of the gods because they are not to be found in nature. His maps have only a tiny dot where Athens looms large to its citizens. Law and convention (nomos) mean nothing to him, because they are not natural but manmade. His companions are pale-faced young men totally devoid of common sense. In this academy, which has established itself in the free atmosphere of Athens, these eccentrics carry on their activities without appearing to be other than harmless cranks. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

They are poor, without any fixed means of support. Socrates receives gifts and apparently countenances minor thefts, literally to keep body and soul together. There is no morality, but they are not vicious people, because their only concern is their studies. Socrates is utterly indifferent to honor or luxury. Aristophanes recaptures for us the absurdity of a grown man who spends his time thinking about gnats’ anuses. We have been too persuaded of the utility of science to perceive how far the scientist’s perspective is from that of a gentleman, how shocking and petty the scientist’s interests appear to a man who is concerned with war and peace, justice, freedom and glory. Aside from the occasional surfacing of an adolescent outlaw group, such as the Black Magic Cult in Northglenn, or a similar cult of high schoolers in Lake County, Illinois, in 1972, and a flurry of rumors of Satanic cattle sacrifices in the Midwest, all was quiet on the Satanic front. As we stood in front of the goat’s head altar at The Process house, slowly our eyes adjusted to the light of white and red candles. After a moment of hushed silence, the two began to chant: “Contact reaching to the stars through the spirit of Christ; knowledge of the Universe, He is the way of life.” Sacrifist: “The Final Reckoning.” Evangelist: “An End a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “Christ and Satan joined!” Evangelist: “The Lamb and the Goat.” Together: “Pure Love, descended from the Pinnacle of Heaven, united with Pure Hatred raised from the Depths of Hell.” Sacrifist: “Repayment of the Debt.” Evangelist: “Fulfillment of the Promise.” Sacrifist: “All Conflicts are Resolved.” Evangelists: “An End and a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “The End of Hell and the Beginning of Heaven.” Evangelists: “The End of Darkness and the Beginning of Light.” Sacrifist: “The End of War and the Beginning of Peace.” Evangelist: “The Hatred and the Beginning of Love.” Sacrifist: “The End is Now. The Beginning is yet to come.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

After the pronouncements, we read a series of positive and up-tempo hymns from books that had been passed around. Another Processian got up and read Process material concerning the Gods Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan and Christ, and their respective roles in the Universe. Another Processian strummed a guitar in accompaniment. At the conclusion, the Sacrifist rung the gong. The Evangelist began reciting and was followed by more singing. The gong sounded again and the Sacrifist spoke: “All those Initiates who wish to rededicate their lives on the service of Christ and the three great Gods of the Universe, come forward and kneel before me.” A woman got up from the circle and knelt before the Sacrifist, and the Sacrifist continued: “In the name of the Lord Christ, and in the name of the Lord Satan, I accept you as an initiate of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. As It Is.” The kneeling initiate countered: “So Be It.” My friends and I discussed our experience at Process headquarters could only agree that it was pleasant, but we had not yet drawn any hard conclusions. In the following months I noticed the presence of biker-types at the coffee hose, who seem to be employed as bodyguards for the headquarters. Little of a theological nature was discussed at the coffee house, and occasionally a Processian would play guitar and sing Process-inspired songs, much of it beautifully melodic. In the Spring the Victorian headquarters on Demming Place was set aside as living quarters for full-time members and was thereafter closed to the general public. Public activities were moved to a newly acquired lost above a store in Chicago’s Old Town District on North Wall Street. Old Town, like Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, was the countercultural headquarters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Focusing on the nation, problems arise when a politician appears to have little chance of reflection. The problem becomes even more acute with a lame duck. From the point of view of the public, a Politian facing an end of career can be dangerous because of the increased temptation to seek private goals rather than maintain a pattern of cooperation with the electorate for the attainment of mutually rewarding goals. Since the turnover of political leaders is a necessary part of democratic control, the problem must be solved another way. Here, political parties are useful because they can be held accountable by the public for the acts of their elected members. The voters and the parties are in a long-term relationship, and this gives the parties an incentive to select candidates who will not abuse their responsibilities. And if a leader is discovered giving in to temptation, the voters can take this into account in evaluating the other candidates of the same party in the next election. The punishment of the Republican party by the electorate after Watergate shows that parties are indeed held responsible for the defections of their leaders, which is something many politicians should keep in mind. In general, the institutional solutions to turnover need to involve accountability beyond the individual’s term in a particular position. In an organizational or business setting, the best way to secure this accountability would be to keep track not only of the person’s success in that position, but also the state in which the position was left to the next occupant. For example, if an executive sought a quick gain by double-crossing a colleague just before transferring to a new plant, this fact should be taken into account in evaluating that executive’s performance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Cooperation Theory has implications for individual choice as well as for the design of institutions. Speaking personally, one of my biggest surprises in working on this project has been the value of provocability. I came to this project believing one should be slow to anger. The results of the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicates that it is actually better to respond quickly to a provocation. It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay. And the more strongly this patterned is established, the harder it will be to break it. The implication is that it is better to be provocable sooner, rather than later. The success of TIT FOR TAT certainly illustrates this point. By responding right away, it gives the quickest possible feedback that a defection will not pay. The response to potential violations of arms control agreements illustrates this point. Russian has occasionally taken step which appear to be designed to probe the limits of its agreement with the United States of America. The sooner the United States of America detects and responds to these Russian probes, the better. Waiting for them to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble. The speed of response depends upon the time required to detect a given choice by the other players. The shorter this time is, the more stable cooperation can be. A rapid detection means that the next move in the interaction comes quickly, thereby increasing the shadow of the future as represented by the parameter. For this reason, the only arms control agreement which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate to such an extent that the victim’s provocability is no longer enough to prevent the challenger from having an incentive to defect. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

The results concerning the value of provocability are complemented by the theoretical analysis of what it takes for a nice rule to be collectively stable. In order for a nice rule to be able to resist invasion, the rule must be provocable by the very first direction of the other individual. Theoretically, the response need not come immediately, and it need not occur with certainty, but it must have a real probability of coming eventually. The important thing is that the other individual does not wind up having an incentive to defect. Of course, provocability has a danger. The danger is that is the other individual does try a defection, retaliation will lead to further retaliation, and the conflict will degenerate into an unending strong of mutual defections. This can certainly be a serious problem. For example, in many cultures blood feuds between clans can continue to undimished for years and even generations (Black-Michaud 1975). This continuation of the conflict is due to the echo effect: each side responds to the other’s last defection with a new defection of its own. One solution is to find a central authority to police both sides, imposing a rule of law. Unfortunately this solution is often not available. And even when there is a rule of law, the costs of using the courts for routine affairs such as enforcement of business contracts can be prohibitive. When the use of a central authority is impossible or too expensive, the best method is to rely on a strategy which will be self-policing. Such a self-policing strategy must be provocable, but the response must not be too great lest it lead to an unending echo of defections. For example, suppose that Russia (then the Soviet Union) in conjunction with the other Warsaw Pact countries undertakes a partial mobilization of its armed forces throughout Eastern Europe. This mobilization would give the Soviets an added advantage if conventional war were to break out. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

A useful response from NATO would be to increase its own state of alter. If additional troops moved from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, NATO should respond with additional troops moved from the United States of America. It is also recommended that this type of response be automatic so that it can be made clear t the Soviets that such increases in NATO readiness are standard procedure and take place only after Soviet mobilizations. It is also recommended that the response be limited, say one American division moved for every three Soviet divisions mobilized. In effect, this would help limit the echo effects. Limited provocability is a useful feature of a strategy designed to achieve stable cooperation. While TIT FOR TAT responds with an amount of defection exactly equal to the other’s defection, in many circumstances the stability of cooperation would be enhanced if the response were slightly less than the provocation. Otherwise, it would be all too easy to get into a rut of unending responses to each other’s last defection. There are several ways for an echo effect to be controlled. One way is for the individual who first defected to realize that the other’s response need not call for yet another defection. For example, the Soviets might realize that NATO’s mobilization was merely a response to their own, and hence need not be regarded as threatening. Of course the Soviets might not see it that way, even if the NATO response was automatic and predictable. Therefore, it is also useful if the NATO response is somewhat less than proportional to the Soviet mobilization. Then if the Soviet response is also somewhat less than the NATO mobilization, the escalation of preparations can become stabilized, and then possibly reversed for a return to normal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

Fortunately, friendship is not necessary for cooperation to evolve. As the trench warfare example demonstrates, even antagonists can learn to develop cooperation based upon reciprocity. The requirement for the relationship is not friendship, but durability. The good thing about international relations is that the major powers can be quite certain they will be interacting with each other year after year. Their relationship may not always be mutually rewarding, but it is durable. Therefore, next year’s interactions should cast a large shadow on this year’s choices, and cooperation has a good chance to evolve eventually. Foresight is not necessary either, as the biological examples demonstrate. However, without foresight, the evolutionary process can take a very long time. Fortunately, humans do have foresight and use it to speed up what would otherwise be a blind process of evolution. The individuals who were able to use the result of the first round in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, including the value of reciprocity, to anticipate what would work well on the second round end up gaining foresight. Foresight pays off with substantially more rewarding results. The result for the second round of negotiations is typically more sophisticated than the first. Cooperation based upon reciprocity was firmly established. The various attempts at exploitation of the unsophisticated entries of the first round all failed in the environment of the second round, demonstrating that the reciprocity of strategies like TIT FOR TAT is extraordinarily robust. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that people can use the surrogate experience of these rules to learn the value of reciprocity for their own Prisoner’s Dilemma interactions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Once the word gets out that reciprocity works, it becomes the thing to do. If you expect others to reciprocate your defections as well as your cooperations, you will be wise to avoid trying to start any trouble. Moreover, you will be wise to defect after someone else defects, showing that you will not be exploited. Thus you too will be wise to use a strategy based upon reciprocity. So will everyone else. In this manner the appreciation of the value of reciprocity becomes self-reinforcing. Once it gets going, it gets stronger and stronger. This is the essence of the ratchet effect which was established in a past reports: once cooperation based upon reciprocity gets established in a population, it cannot be overcome even by a cluster of individuals who try to exploit the others. The establishment of stable cooperation can take a long time if it is based upon blind forces of evolution, or it can happen rather quickly if its operations can be appreciated by intelligent individuals. The empirical and theoretical results of these reports might help people see more clearly the opportunities for reciprocity latent in their World. Knowing the concepts that accounted for the results of the two rounds of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and knowing the reasons and conditions for the success of reciprocity, might provide some additional foresight. We might come to see more clearly that there is a lesson in the fact that TIT FOR TAT succeeds without doing better than anyone with whom it interacts. It succeeds by eliciting cooperation from others, not by defeating them. We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. However, the World is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Today, the most important problems facing humanity are in the arena of international relations, where independent, egoistic nations face each other in a state of near anarchy. Many of these problems take the form of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Examples can include arms races, nuclear proliferation, crisis bargaining, and military escalation. Of course, a realistic understanding of these problems would have to take into account many factors not incorporated into the simple Prisoner’s Dilemma formulation, such as ideology, bureaucratic policies, commitments, coalitions, mediation, and leadership. Nevertheless, we can use all the insights we can get. From the ancient Greeks to contemporary scholarship all political theory addresses one fundamental question: How can the human race, whether for selfish or more cosmopolitan ends, understand and control the seemingly blind forces of history? In the contemporary World this question has become especially acute because of the development of nuclear weapons. The advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: do not be envious, do not be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and do not be too clever. Likewise, techniques we have discussed for promoting cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma might also be useful in promoting cooperation in international politics. The core of the problem of how to achieve rewards from cooperation is that trial and error in learning is slow and painful. The conditions may all be favorable for long-run developments, but we may not have the time to wait for blind processes to move us slowly toward mutually rewarding strategies based upon reciprocity. Perhaps if we understand the process better, we can use our foresight to speed up the evolution of cooperation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Though HAGOTH, with program that could detect if someone over the phone was being dishonest, has virtually disappeared, its idea survives—for example, in the machines called “lie detectors.” In American these are taken very seriously by police officers, lawyers, and corporate executive who ever more frequently insist that their employees be subjected to lie-detector tests. As for intelligence tests, they not only survive but flourish, and have been supplemented by vocational aptitude tests, creativity test, mental-health tests, tests that base attractions on pleasures of the flesh, and even material compatibility tests. One would think that two people who have lived together for a number of years would have noticed for themselves whether they get along or not. However, in Technopoly, these subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” However, in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and the provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with. They tell us that when eight green lights go on someone is speaking the truth. That is all there is to it. They tell us that a score of 136 means more brains than a score of 104. This is Technopoly’s version of magic. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than understanding. In Technopoly, we are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies. In considering here the ideological biases of medical technology, let us begin with a few relevant facts. Although the U.S.A. and England have equivalent life-expectancy rates, American doctors perform six times ad many cardiac bypass operations per capita as English doctors do. American doctors perform more diagnostic tests than doctors do in France, Germany, or England. An American woman has two to three times the chance of having a hysterectomy as her counterpart in Europe; 60 percent of the hysterectomies performed in America are done on women under the age of forty-four. American doctors do more prostate surgery per capita than do doctors anywhere in Europe, and the United States of America leads the industrialized World in the rate of cesarean-section operations—50 to 200 percent higher than in most other countries. When American doctors decide to forgo surgery in favor of treatment by drugs, they give higher dosages than doctors elsewhere. They prescribe about twice as many antibiotics as do doctors in the United Kingdom and commonly prescribe antibiotics when bacteria are likely to be present, whereas European doctors tend to prescribe antibiotics only if they know that the infection is caused by bacteria and is also serious. American doctors use far more X-rays per patient than doctors in other countries. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

In one review of the extent of X-ray use, a radiologist discovered cases in which fifty t one hundred X-rays had been taken of a single patient when five would have been sufficient. Other surveys have shown that, for almost one-third of the patients, the X-ray could have been omitted or deferred on the basis of available clinical data. We have been able to use basic principles to design and build a simple molecule that folds up the way we want it to. This is really the first real example of a design protein structure, designed from scratch, not by taking an already existing structure and tinkering with it. Although scientists do the work, the work itself is really a form of engineering. The process makes this clear: After you have made it, the next step is to find out whether our protein did what you expected it to do. Did it fold? Did it pass ions across bilayers [such as cell membranes]? Does it have a catalytic function [speeding specific chemical reactions]? And that is tested using the appropriate experiment. More than likely, it will not have done what you wanted it to do, so you have to find out why. Now, a good design has in it a contingency plan for failure and helps you learn from mistakes. Rather than designing a structure that would take a year or more to analyze, you design it so that it can be assayed for given function or structure in a matter of days. Many groups are pursuing design today, including academic researchers like Jane and Dave Richardson at the Duke University, Bruce Erickson at the University of North Carolina, and Tom Blundell, Robin Leatherbarrow, and Alan Fersht in Britain. The successes have stated to roll in. Japan, however, is unique in having an organization devoted exclusively to such projects: the Protein Engineering Research Institute (PERI) in Osaka. In 1990, PERI announced the successful designs and construction of de novo protein several times larger than any built before. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Extra-intelligence can squeeze untold billions of fat and waste out of the economy. It potentially represents an enormous leap forward—the substitution of brainpower and imagination not merely for capital, energy, and resources, but for brutalizing labor as well. However, whether extra-intelligence produces a “better” way of life will depend partly on the social and political intelligence that guides its overall development. The more automated and extra-intelligent our networks become, the more human decision-making is hidden from view, and the more dependent we all become on preprogrammed events based on concepts and assumptions that few understand and that are sometimes not even willingly disclosed. Before long the power of computers will leap forward because f parallel processing, artificial intelligence, and other studding innovations. Speech recognition and automatic translation will, no doubt, come into wide use, along with high-definition visual displays ad concert-class sounds. The same networks now routinely carry voice, data, imagines, cable, Internet, and other information in other forms. All this raises profound philosophical questions. Some see in all this the coming monopolization of knowledge. The moment of truth comes when the matter of the ownership and control of the new information banks…[strikes] with a vengeance. This is the specter of a global private monopoly of information. That fear is now far too simple. The issue is not whether one giant global private monopoly will control all information—which seems highly unlikely—but who will control the endless conversations and reconversions of it made possible by extra-intelligence, as data, information, and knowledge flow through the nervous system of the super-symbolic economy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Baffling new issues about the uses and misuses of knowledge will arise to confront business and society as a whole. They will no longer simply reflect Bacon’s truth that knowledge is power, but the higher level of truth that, in the super-symbolic economy, it is knowledge about knowledge that counts most. I.T. and telecommunications, however, are not the only advanced technologies that can contribute to a real war on poverty. India has one of the most successful operational space programs running in the developing World, with capabilities to design, develop, fabricate and launch its own communications and remote sensing satellite. It is also planning to send a scientific payload to go around the moon using its own rocket. Once more, this may seem irrelevant to the less affluent—your land is subject to sudden flooding or you are among the thousands saved from drowning with the help of satellite-based disaster-warning systems and remote sensing technologies. Or if you are among the 100,000 patients of the Regional Cancer Center in Thiruvananthapuram who once had to travel extremely long distance, often more than one, and at high cost, for treatment or follow-up care. The RCC has now set up six peripheral centers. All six are teleclinics linked to the main facility by the Internet—and the number of necessary follow-up visits has fallen by more than 30 percent. The Indian Space Research Organization has also created satellite links between big, multi-specialty hospitals and eight remote healthy centers to allow the exchange of patients’ records, imagines and data from medical instruments, along with live video and audio contact. All this means that doctors in central locations can help guide medics in the remote rural villages. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

In biotechnology, India could generate $5 billion and up to a million new jobs in the coming five years. India’s Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority has agreed to allow insurance firms to put money into biotech, and the government has made it easier for foreign venture capitalist to invest. It is in this sector, as we will see shortly, that some of the most important tools for the reduction of poverty may well be found. And not just in India. Many of the advances we see in India are still either experimental or limited. They are patchy and not yet systemically integrated. However, as more pieces of the knowledge-based wealth system are laid in place and begin to interact and reinforce one another, their payoffs will increase combinatorially, if not exponentially, as happened in the past when different components of the industrial wealth system—social, institutional, political and culture—came together. India faces many of the same social, political and cultural challenges we find in China—corruption, infirmary, massive environmental problems, the need for institutional reinvention and generational conflict, to name a few. Externally, while China worries about Taiwan, India worries about a shaky, nuclear-armed Pakistan and the ever-bloody struggle against Muslim secessionists in Kashmir. What is more, and unlike China ate present, India faces caste conflict and intermittent murderous battles between Hindu and Muslim fanatics. Despite all this, India knows it cannot delay a fresh assault on poverty—and it cannot win that attack with smokestacks alone. It also cannot win so long as most of its population remains doomed to a low-productivity peasant existence, no matter how much small-scale “appropriate technology” is introduced. Neither a Second Wave strategy nor a First Wave strategy is enough. “Believest thou that there is no God? I say unto you, Nay, thou knowest that there is a God, but thou lovest that lucre more than Him,” reports Alma 11.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

Cresleigh Homes

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