Heard is Not Understood and Understood is Not Done

Everyone wants a place where they can be alone occasionally, and when they have such a place, it is only common courtesy in anyone else who knows of it to keep one’s knowledge to oneself. Yielding and mastery are two sides of the same command over life. While we are still able-bodied, we tend to feel cheated when mishaps interfere with our strivings. The primary goal of speaking is to allow one to cognitively interact with others. Verbal communication is critical to an individual’s overall health, psychological functioning, and social interactions. When communication breaks down between people, one’s ability to participate meaningfully in life is greatly restricted. Dogs, for instance, love human being, and even see themselves as human beings, but they cannot speak. So, they are to use nonverbal indicators to expression their feelings, desires and emotions. Our talents and abilities are gifts from our Heavenly Father. Almost every person is endowed with the gift of speech. It is essential that we discover and develop our verbal talents. The Apostle Paul said, “Neglect not the gift that is in thee,” reports 1 Timothy 4.14. However, finding and improving our verbal talents will require effort. Human errors are the most common reasons for planes to crash, and of all human errors, communication errors are number one. Evidence suggests the same for adverse outcomes in critical care medicine. However, in contrast to aerospace, most medical curricula focus on factual knowledge and procedural dexterity but rarely address verbal communication during evolving crises. The airline industry felt compelled as lives and profits were at stake. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

With medical errors believed to cause at least 100,000 deaths annually in the United States of America alone, we should be similarly motivated. Efforts to prevent medical errors could have saved the lives of people like Prince and Michael Jackson. Given the importance of communication, specialists in critical care should also be specialist in critical care communication. Our verbal dexterity and factual know-how. Verbal communication is essential to optimize teamwork. However, stress and uncertainty mean tht even experienced professionals can be prone to silence during crisis. In aviation, this is illustrated by the fact that the cockpit black box recorder is often silent for minutes before a crash. Similarly, a common complaint after poorly coordinated resuscitation is tht people failed to speak up. This is why we cannot leave communication to chance. When teaching assertiveness, pilots learn a graded approach using up to 6 strategies from least to most direct. This graded assertiveness includes the “hint,” exempli gratia, “should things look like this?”, a preference exempli gratia, “I think it would be wise to do the following…” a query exempli gratia, “what do you think we should do?”, a shared suggestion exempli gratia “you and I should do the following…” a statement exempli, “I think we need to do the following…” Psychologist talk of the framing effect as a strategy to improve understanding (“heard is not understood”). The framing effect is how different decisions may be made depending upon how similar information is presented. Both the specific words that we speak and how they are understood can change based upon stress, workload, culture, and the relative seniority and profession of those involved. Medical crises can engender strong emotions but overly aggressive (or overly passive) speech is inappropriate. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

There are certain strategies we can use to improve task completion (understood is not done). Flight crash investigators identified cockpit interruptions to be such a major safety concern that they are now addressed in the standard operating procedures. These communication rules promote the “sterile cockpit rule” to minimize distractions, especially when a commercial airliner is flying below ten thousand feet. This is because commercial airliners are only below ten thousand feet during critical phases of flight. These include taxi, take-off, landing, or impending crash. Verbal communication during crisis or every day life is a major determinant of outcome, whether in aviation or critical care medicine or another day in the office. Optimizing daily and crisis communication is of paramount importance for safety and the environment. It is, therefore, a vital topic that deserves immediate attention. Fortunately, many practical strategies already exist. There really is no excuse not to address this missing curriculum, and remember, not everyone is willing to use nonverbal communication because what someone thinks they are conveying may mean something else to another person. Many corporations prefer honest and direct speech, as a way of avoiding law suits and communication errors. As I tell my class all the time, do not assume Billy likes you and that you have a connection with him until you speak directly to him. Because if the police get involved, they are going to what to know what led you to believe that you and Billy are going steady, and just because he looked at you and smiled at you is not tangible evidence that you are in a relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

It is evidence that you used your imagination to conjure up a fake relationship, which may only be real to you. If you are too shy to talk to someone, we now have social media, where you can create a profile using your picture and get to know and message someone else. What is lying? As it is understood in ordinary language, lying means distorting or in some cases hiding the truth, or what people believe is the truth. This lying plays a very important part in life, but there are much worse forms of lying, when people do not know that they lie. We cannot know the truth in our present state, and can only know the truth in the state of objective consciousness. How then can we life? There seems to be a contradiction here, but in reality there is none. We cannot know the truth, but we can pretend that we know. And this is lying. Lying fills all our life. People pretend that they know all sorts of things: about God, about the future life, about the Universe, about the origin of man, about evolution, about everything; but in reality they do not know anything, even about themselves. And every time they speak about something they do not know as though they knew it, they lie. Consequently the study of lying becomes of the first importance in psychology. And it may lead even to the third definition of psychology, which is: the study of lying. Psychology is particularly concerned with the lie a man says and thinks about himself. These lies make the study of man very difficult. Man, as he is, is not a genuine article. He is an imitation of something, and perhaps not the fully evolved imitation. Imagine a scientist on some remote planet who has received from the Earth specimens of artificial flowers, without knowing anything about real flowers. It will be extremely difficult for one to define them—to explain their shape, colour, the material from which they are made, that is, wire, cotton wool, and coloured paper—and to classify them in any way. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Psychology stands in a very similar position in relation to man. It has to study an artificial man, without knowing the real man. Obviously, it cannot be easy to study a being such as a man, who does not himself know what is real and what is imaginary in him. So psychology must begin with a division between the real and the imaginary in man. It is impossible to study man as a whole, because man is divided into two parts: one part which, in some cases, can be almost all real, and the other part which, in some cases, can be almost all imaginary. In the majority of ordinary men these two parts are intermixed, and cannot be easily distinguished, although they are both there, and both have their own particular meaning and effect. In the system we are studying, these two parts are called essence and personality. Essence is what is born in man. Personality is what is acquired. Essence is what is his own. Personality is what is not his own. Essence cannot be lost, cannot be changed or injured as easily as personality. Personality can be changed almost completely with the change of circumstances; it can be lost or easily injured. If I try to describe what essence is, I must, first of all, say that it is the basis of man’s physical and mental makeup. For instance, one man is naturally what is called a good sailor, another is a bad sailor; one has a musical ear, another has not; one has a capacity for languages, another has not. This is essence. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Personality is all that is learned in one or another way, in ordinary language, “consciously” or “unconsciously.” In most cases “unconsciously” means by imitation, which, as a matter of fact, plays a very important part in the building of personality. Even in instinctive functions, which naturally should be free from personality, there are usually many so-called “acquired tastes,” that is, all sorts of artificial likes and dislikes, all of which re acquired by imitation and imagination. These artificial likes and dislikes play a very important and very disastrous part in man’s life. By nature, man should like what is good for him and dislike what is bad for him. However, this is so, only as long as essence dominates personality, as it should dominate it—in other words, when a man is healthy and normal. When personality begins to dominate essence and when man becomes less healthy, he begins to like what is bad for him and to dislike what is good for him. This is connected with the chief thing that can be wrong in the mutual relations of essence and personality. Normally, essence must dominate personality and then personality can be quite useful. However, if personality dominates essence, this produces wrong results of many kinds. It must be understood that personality is also necessary for man; one cannot live without personality and only with essence. However, essence and personality must grow parallel, and the one must not outgrow the other. Cases of essence outgrowing personality may occur among uneducated people. The so-called simple people may be very good, and even cleaver, but they are incapable of development in the same way as people with more developed personality. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Cases of personality outgrowing essence are often to be found among more cultured people, and in such cases, essence remains in a half-grown or half-developed state. This means that with a quick and early growth of personality, growth of essence can practically stop at a very early age, and as a result we see men and women externally quite grown-up, but whose essence remains at the age of ten or twelve. There are many conditions in modern life which greatly favor this underdevelopment of essence. For instance, the infatuation with sport, particularly with games, can very effectively stop the development of essence, and sometimes at such an early age that essence is never fully able to recover later. This shows that essence cannot be regarded as connected only with the physical constitution, in the simple meaning of the idea. To fulfill our promises to ourselves is to prepare to die; tragedy is to die with unlived life still inside us. No one on one’s deathbed, perhaps except for the man who leaves with family with nothing, says “I wish I had spent more time on my business.” In stable societies, the control of human impulses is usually a collective responsibility. The individual is viewed as not having within oneself the controls required to guarantee that one’s impulses will not break out in ways disapproved by the community. However, this matters very little, since the group is always near at hand to stop one or sham one or punish one should one forget oneself and family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

In more, fluid, changing societies we are more apt to find controls that are internalized—that do not depend to so great an extent on control and enforcement by external agents. Why might this perspective and its associated vocabulary be useful for deliberations over action in settings whose consequences are hard to predict? Complexity research deals with systems that are hard to control, and much of it has gone on in fields that seem far from policy or design concerns. (Do the neurons fire in the synchronized waves or incoherently? Are the magnetic poles of particles oriented like those of their near neigbours or are they disarrayed? Do most of the animals in a population continue to exhibit a certain useless trait, or has this type vanished over time?) However, many of the same dynamics are involved in social issues. (Do similar transactions across the economy take place at one price or many? Does animal husbandry improve the agricultural value of a livestock population? Do citizens remain loyal to a single large state, or transfer their loyalties to smaller political units? Does an infection—or an Internet rumor—become endemic in certain subpopulations?) Social systems exhibit dynamic patterns analogous to physical, biological, and computational systems. This is perhaps the fundamental reason we pursue complexity research. Many social interventions are directed toward controlling the interaction among types of agents. For example, segregation (and integration) of races; vias and immigration rules; entry qualifications to religious and social organizations; “cultural revolutions” and “peace corps” that send the highly educated to less developed areas; political redistricting; zoning restriction of commercial, industrial, and residential activities; film, television, and Internet ratings to facilitate matching of audiences and contents; and foster-care systems that place children with adults differing from their parents in race and class. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Many other policies have important or interesting side effects that are related to interactions of types. For example, imprisonment that mixed experienced criminals with rebellious adolescents; public transit patterns that separate urban center residents from suburban jobs; armies of occupation that result in children of intermarriage; computer networks for defense and science that increase communication between parents and college-distant children and facilitate finding of long-lost friends. Complexity research gives us a grounded basis for inquiring where the “leverage points” and significant trade-offs of a complex system may lie. It also suggests what kinds of situations may be resistant to policy intervention, and when small interventions may be likely to have large effects. For guidance in designing actions, such insights into the right questions can be very valuable. They can be valuable even if the theories are too multiple and too preliminary to support any claim that a theory of complexity implies any sharply etched expectation about a future scenario and how a particular action will guarantee it. We are hardly the first to sense the promise of complexity research for guiding action. Books, consulting services, conferences, and journals have been developed to respond to the intuition of many managers and professionals that there is a deep resonance between concepts in complexity research and the problems of designing effective interventions. Regular conference for managers have been organized in recent years. Our contribution lies in our attempt to move the work beyond metaphorical affinities and to distill an explicit method that can be applied in practice. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

At the same time, we want to avoid simplistic lists of four (or nine, or twelve) principles that readers should always follow. As we see it, unqualified nostrums could hardly be less in keeping with scientific work on complexity. Our aim is to build on the resemblance between change processes seen in the systematic study of Complex Adaptive Systems and potential sources of change in social systems. It is our argument that principles derived from working with complexity problems shed valuable light on the issues confronting policy makers and designers. We develop this argument by characterizing a set oof change mechanisms in complex systems. While we cannot hope to provide any sort of exhaustive catalog, we can show that a wide array of examples fall into a few useful clusters. Most of the mechanisms and related principles that have policy relevance center on three central and deeply connected questions: What is the right balance between variety and uniformity? What should interact with what, and when? Which agents or strategies should be copied and which should be destroyed? These are necessarily rather abstract issues. Let us return for a moment to the World of sports. In football, before each snap of the ball the offense chooses between passing and running while the defense organize itself to counter one of these plays. In tennis, the server might go to the forehand or the backhand of the receiver, while the receiver, in turn, can try to return crosscourt or down the line. In these examples, each side has an idea of its own strong points and of its opponent’s weaknesses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

It will have a preference for the choice that exploits these weaknesses, but not exclusively. It is well understood, by players and sports fans alike, that one should mix one’s plays, randomly throwing in the unexpected move. If you do the same thing all the time, the opposition will be able to counter you more effectively by concentrating its resources on the best response to your one strategy. Mixing your plays does not rotating your strategies in a predictable manner. Your opponent can observe and exploit any systematic pattern almost as easily as one can the unchanging repetition of a single strategy. It is unpredictability that is important when mixing. Imagine what would happen if there were some known formula that determined who would be audited by the IRS. Before you submitted a tax return, you could apply the formula to see if you would be audited. If an audit was predicted, but you could see a way to “amend” your return until the formula no longer predicted an audit, you probably would do so. If an audit was unavoidable, you would choose to tell the truth. The result of the IRS being completely predictable is that it would audit exactly the wrong people. All those audited would have anticipated their fate and chosen to act honestly, while those spared an audit would have only their consciences to watch over them. When the IRS audit formula is somewhat fuzzy, everyone stands some risk of an audit; this gives an added incentive for honesty. There are similar phenomena in the business World. Think of competition in the market for razors. Imagine that Gillette runs a coupon promotion on a regular schedule—say, the first Sunday of every other month. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Bic can preempt Gillette by running a competing coupon promotion the week before. Of course, Bic’s move is then predictable and Gillette can preempt the week before. This process leads to cutthroat competition and both makes less profit. However, if each uses an unpredictable or mixed strategy, together they might reduce the fierceness of the competition. The importance of randomized strategies was one of the early insights of game theory. The idea is simple and intuitive but needs refinement if it is to be useful in practice. It is not enough for a tennis player to know that he should mix his shots between the opponent’s forehand and backhand. He needs some idea of whether he should go to the forehand 30 percent or 64 percent of the time and how the answer depends on the relative strengths of the two sides. Parts serve the whole. The organism grows larger and more powerful by virtue of finding better and better ways to exploit its constituents, for example. People who are forced into slavery may be made to man the oars and drive the galley, but it requires the constant attention of a slave master cracking the whip. However, if the enslaved people can be converted to a faith in the ship and its mission, then no slave master will be needed—one will now be free to help with the cannon—while the ship slices forward ever faster, with more power, more dangerous to its enemies. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

There is no alternative to power, no other position—not Christianity nor the Golden Rule nor brotherly love nor nonviolence; not self-sacrifice nor the turning of the other cheek. For all these various abnegations of power by parts of a whole are, unwittingly, in the service of increased power to the whole; and the morality created by such renunications is used by the aggregate to increase the power with which it then pursues more power. In Austria after World War II a deal was struck between the two main political parties assuring that whichever party won the top spot would install a member of the opposition party in the second spot, and so on all the way down to the shop floor. This proparz system has meant that throughout the key posts in state-owned companies, banks, insurance companies, and even in schools and universities, Socialist “reds” altered with Conservative “blacks.” Today we find an adaptation of this in, say, the Japanese bank in California that alternates Japanese and Americans at each level of the hierarchy, thus guaranteeing that Tokyo receives a flow of information seen through Japanese eyes, not simply from the top, but from many levels of the organization. Power at the pinnacle is reinforced by a constant stream of insight originating at many layers at once. As firms go global, many will no doubt try the Austrian and Japanese approach. Soviet Army units have traditionally had not only military commanders but political officers attached to them. While the military officer reported up the military line of command, the political officers also report to the Communist Party. The object was to keep the army subject to the party. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

In business, too, we often see “commissars” chosen from above and planted in subordinate units to keep an eye on things and report to the top through separate channels rather than through the normal hierarchy. Here there are two main information channels, instead of one, violating the strict single-channel character of bureaucracy. It also reflects the deep distrust with which top management regards information flowing up through normal channels. As change speeds up and predictability declines, CEOs will use “commissars” to end-run the bureaucracy in a desperate attempt to maintain control. The United States of America and Europe have very different approaches to the deep fundamental of space as well. Deriving from the industrial belief that bigger is almost always better, the European Union continues to push its spatial boundaries ever eastward by incorporating more and more member countries. The bigger its population, its leaders believe, the richer. However, in pursuing sheer size, Europe sees space through the lens of a previous era. The European Union’s (EU) leaders would be quite justifiably horrified to be compared in any way to Nazis. The E.U.’s peaceful expansion to the east, with the incorporation of additional countries and murmured speculation about someday even brining Russia into the E.U. fold, is opposite of Nazi Germany’s Drang nach Osten—the drive to the east—that sent troops and death legions all the way to the gates of Moscow. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

However, both recall the once popular geopolitical theory that held that whoever controls the “heartland” will command the World. The heartland, originally defined by Halford Mackinder in 1904, was the entire landmass from Eastern Europe across Russia to Siberia. Of course, his theories have been shattered by, among other things, the invention of airplanes, missiles, and global communication. However, some apparently see a “Europe” stretching eastward all the way to the Sea of Japan as, in effect, a new heartland. Also shattered are many of today’s taken-for-granted assumptions. Timothy Garton Ash of St. Antony’s College, Oxford, argues that the European Union is a “transnational organization based on supra-national law” rather than an “old-fashioned…classical nation-state.” However, Ash himself hangs onto the obsolete assumption that scale necessarily translates into economic power. Thus he writes that the European Union’s future is more promising than that of the United States of America because “put very simply, the European Union is getting bigger” while “Haiti cannot hope to follow Hawaii into the American Union.” Hidden here, in addition to the bigger-is-better assumption, is a further spatial premise: That is a group of nations wished to form a “transnational organization,” the countries need to be next door to one another—that contiguity, that is, geographical proximity, is what counts. Yet, we are racing into a World when nearness matters less and less, thanks to speedy transportation, lighter and lighter products and the growing trade in intangible services. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

If, indeed, landmass mattered, Ash might consider that Russia alone is more than four times the size of the expanded European Union. Brazil is more than twice its size. And then there is prosperous Singapore, with not quite seven hundred square kilometers all told. If, indeed, the United States of America wished to create a “transnational organization based on supra-national law,” what would prevent such an organization from including noncontigous South Korea, Singapore or Israel as members? Or, for that matter, Japan? Total GDP of this group is an estimated $25 trillion–$10.5 trillion more than the European Union. A noncontiguous supranational organization consisting of America and Japan alone—we call it Jameria—has a GDP of $29 trillion, which exceeds the EU’s GDP by $14.5. Ironically, while the EU has been busy expanding its scale and territorial limits, its member nations that have advanced the most in the direction of revolutionary wealth are the smaller ones on its periphery. Finland with Nokia and Sweden with Ericsson shine in telecommunications, as Ireland does in software—although much of its output is turned out by American firms such as Microsoft, Oracle, Novell, Symantec and Computer Associates. I am not here making a standard-brand critique of the excesses of capitalism. It is entirely possible to have a market economy that respects the seriousness of words and icons, and which disallows their use in trivial or silly contexts. In fact, during the period of greatest industrial growth in America—from roughly 1830 to the end of the nineteenth century—advertising did not play a major role in the economy, and such advertising as existed used straightforward language, without recourse to the exploitation of important cultural symbols. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

There was no such thing as an “advertising industry” until the early twentieth century, the ground being prepared for it by the Postal Act of March 3, 1879, which gave magazines low-cost mailing privileges. As a consequence, magazine emerged as the best available conduits for national advertising, and merchants used the opportunity to make the names of their companies important symbols of commercial excellence. When George Eastman invented the portable camera in 1888, he spent $25,000 advertising it in magazines. However, there was a lost patten filed by Sarah L. Winchester, who actually was never given credit for some of her inventions. By 1895, “Kodak” and “camera” were synonymous, as to some extent they still are. Companies like Royal Baking Powder, Baker’s Chocolate, Ivory Soap, and Gillette moved into a national market by advertising their products in magazines. Even magazines moved into a national market by advertising themselves in magazines, the most conspicuous example being Ladies’ Home Journal, whose publisher, Cyrus H.K. Curtis, spent half a million dollars between 1883 and 1888 advertising his magazine in other magazines. By 1909, Ladies’ Home Journal had a circulation of more than a million readers. Curtis’ enthusiasm for advertising notwithstanding, the most significant figure in mating advertising to the magazine was Frank Munsey, who upon his death in 1925 was eulogized by William Allen White with the following words: “Frank Munsey contributed to the journalism of his day the talent of a meat packer, the morals of a money changer, and the manners of an undertaker. He and his kind have about succeeded in transforming a once-noble profession into an 8 percent security. May he rest in trust.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

What was the sin of the malevolent Munsey? Simply, he made two discoveries. First, a large circulation could be achieved by selling a magazine for much less than it cost to produce it; second, huge profits could be made from the high volume of advertising that a large circulation would attract. In October 1893, Munsey took out an ad in the New York Sun announcing that Munsey’s Magazine cutting its price from 25 cents to 10 cents, and reducing a year’s subscription from $3 to $1. The first 10-cent issued claimed a circulation of forty thousand; within four months, the circulation rose to two hundred thousand; two months later, it was five hundred thousand. Munsey cannot, however, be blamed for another discovery, which for convenience’s sake we may attribute to Procter and Gamble: that advertising is most effective when it is irrational. By irrational, I do not, of course, mean crazy. I mean that products could best be sold by exploiting the magical and even poetical powers of language and pictures. In 1892, Procter and Gamble invited the public to submit rhymes to advertise Ivory Soap. Four years later, H-O employed, for the first time, a picture of a baby in a high chair, the bowel of H-O cereal before him, his spoon in hand, his face ecstatic. By the turn of the century, advertisers no longer assumed that reason was the best instrument for the communication of commercial products and ideas. Advertising became one part of depth psychology, one part aesthetic theory. In the process, a fundamental principle of capitalist ideology was rejected: namely, that the producer and consumer were engaged in a rational enterprise in which consumers made choices on the basis of a careful consideration of the quality of a product and their own self-interest. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

This, at least, is what Adam Smith had in mind. However, today, the television commercial, for example, is rarely about the character of the products. It is about the character of the consumers of products. Images of movie stars and famous athletes, of serene lakes and macho fishing trips, of elegant dinners and romatic interludes, of happy families packing their station wagons for a picnic in the country—these tell nothing about the products being sold. However, they tell everything about the fears, fancies, and dreams of those who might but them. What the advertiser needs to know is not what is right about the product but what is wrong about the buyer. And so the balance of business expenditures shifts from product research to market research, which means orienting business away from making products of value and toward making consumers feel valuable. The business of business becomes pseudo-therapy; the consumer, a patient reassured by psychodramas. The core of Technopoly is a vast industry with license to use all available symbols to further the interests of commerce, by devouring the psyches of consumers. Although estimates vary, a conservative estimate is that the average American will have seen close to two million television commercials by age sixty-five. If we add to this the number of radio commercials, newspaper and magazine ads, and billboards, the extent of symbol overload and therefore symbol drain is unprecedented in human history. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

As we move into the future, with high inflation, high fuel costs, and supply and land shortages, will we see a cycle of falling costs? Let us say that making one kilogram of product by molecular manufacturing requires one dollar a kilogram of raw materials and four dollars for a generous forty kilowatt-hours of energy. Assume, for the moment, that other costs are small One of the resulting five-dollars-per-kilogram products can be solar-cell paint suitable for applying to paved roads. A layer of paint a few millionths of a meter thick would cost about five cents per square mete to produce, and would generate enough energy to make another square meter of paint in less than a week, even allowing for nighttime and moderate cloud cover. The so-called energy payback time would thus be short. Let us assume that this smart paint costs as much to spread and hook up as it does to make, and that we demand that it pay for itself in a single month, so we charge ten cents per square meter per month. At that rate, the costs of solar energy from resurfaced roads would be roughly $0.004 per kilowatt hour—less than a twentieth the energy cost assumed in the initial production-cost estimate. By itself, this makes the cost of production fall to a fraction of what it was before. Most of that remaining fraction consists of the cost of materials. However, the products of nanotechnology will mostly be made of carbon (if present expectations are any guide), and carbon dioxide is too abundant in the atmosphere these days. With energy so affordable, the atmosphere can be used as a source of carbon (and of hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen). The price of carbon would be a few cents per kilogram—roughly a twentieth the original price assumed for raw materials. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

However, now, both energy and raw materials are a twentieth the original price, and so the products become more inexpensive, including the energy-producing products and the raw-material-producing (atmosphere-cleaning) products. This scenario is simple, but it seems realistic in its basic outlines: lower costs can lead to lower costs. How far this process can go is hard to estimate precisely, but it could go far indeed. Many of the phenomena we have discussed can also be linked to a compulsive American tendency to avoid confrontation of chronic social problems. This avoiding tendency often comes as a surprise to foreigners, who tend to think Americans as pragmatic and down-to-earth. However, while trying to solve long-range social problems with short-run “hardware” solutions produces a lot of hardware—a down-to-earth result, surely—it can hardly be considered practical when it aggravates the problems, as it almost always does. American pragmatism is deeply irrational in this respect, and in our hearts we have always know it. One of the favorite themes of American cartoonists is the man who paints himself into a corner, saws off the limb he is sitting on, or runs out of space on the sign he is printing. The scientists of science-fiction and horror films, whose experimentation leads to disastrously unforeseen consequences, is a more anxious representation of this same awareness that the most future-oriented nation in the World shows a deep incapacity to plan ahead. We are, as a people, perturbed by our inability to anticipate the consequences of our acts, but we still wait optimistically for some magic telegram, informing us that the tangled skein of misery and self-deception into which we have woven ourselves has vanished in the night. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21