There are as many ways to the union with the Overself as there are human beings. The orthodox, the conventional, and the traditional ways can claim exclusiveness or monopoly only by imperiling truth. Involvement refers to the capacity of an individual to give, or withhold from giving, one’s concerted attention to some activity at hand—a solitary task, a conversation, a collaborative work effort. It implies a certain admitted closeness between the individual and the object of involvement, a certain overt engrossment on the part of the one who is involved. Involvement in an activity is taken to express the purpose or aim of the actor. To discuss involvement, we can begin with common-sense distinctions institutionalized in our American society and presumably in others. Men and animals have a capacity to divide their attention into main and side involvements. A main involvement is one that absorbs the major part of an individual’s attention and interest, visibly forming the principal current determinant of one’s actions. A side involvement is an activity that an individual can carry on in an abstracted fashion without threatening or confusing simultaneous maintenance of a main involvement. Whether momentary or continuous, simple or complicated, these side activities appear to constitute a kind of fuguelike dissociation of minor muscular activity from the main line of an individual’s actions. Humming while working and knitting while listening are examples. Along with the distinction between main and side involvements, we must make another that can easily be confused with the first. We must distinguish between dominant and subordinate involvements. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

A dominating involvement is one he is ready to recognize; a subordinate involvement is one he is allowed to sustain only to the degree, and during the time, that his attention is patently not required by the involvement that dominates him. Subordinate involvements are sustained in a muted, modulated, and intermittent fashion, expressing in their style a continuous regard and deference for the official, dominating activity at hand. Thus, while waiting to see an official, an individual may converse with a friend, read a magazine, or doodle with a pencil, sustaining these engrossing claims on attention only until his turn is called, when he is obliged to put aside his time-passing activity even though it is unfinished. Typically, it is expected that a main involvement will be a dominating one and a side involvement a subordinate one, as when a worker smokes a cigarette unthinkingly but only when and where the job allows. This relationship, however, is by no means invariable. Many dominating involvements, such as work tasks, can be sustained automatically and unthinkingly for long periods, allowing the individual to devote his main focus of attention to pursuits and talking about sports or business, which, however involving, will be put aside when the task requires attention. A telegrapher, for example, can tap out messages while sustaining a conversational byplay with a fellow worker. Once we see that an undemanding but socially dominating activity can be sustained while the individual’s main focus of attention is temporarily drawn to another issues, we can go on to see that while thus engaged he can sustain additional side involvements, like praying, which are themselves subordinated to the temporary and unofficial main involvement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

We should also see that claims upon the individual can suddenly change, and that what had been a dominant involvement can suddenly be demoted in status and become subordinated to a new source of involvement now considered properly to be the one of first priority. In our society, it is recognized that certain activities are to be carried on only as main and dominating involvements; many social ceremonies are instances. It is also recognized that certain other activities are to be carried on only as side involvements and subordinate ones, as, for example, chewing gun. (These slight involvements are not to be accorded main attention even when no main involvement is required.) Within these limits, however, what is defined as a dominating involvement at one time be defined as subordinate at another. Thus, on the job, the drinking of a cup of coffee may be a subordinate involvement; during official coffee breaks, it may be the dominating activity. Did you know that you may be about to make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you typically can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you? Yet I know and you know people who blunder through life trying to wigwag other people into becoming interested in them. Of course, it does not work. People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves—morning, noon, and after dinner. The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have guessed it: it is the personal pronoun “I.” “I.” “I.” It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations. “I.” “I.” “I.” I.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

When you see a group photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first? If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friend, are not made that way. Napoleon tried it, and in his last meeting with Josephine he said: “Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man ever was on this Earth; and yet, at this hour, you are the only person in the World on whom I can reply.” And historians doubt whether he could rely even on her. It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. Remember, if you want to be successful in any career, you have to be interested in people. Some of the most successful people even fake emotions. They really put their personality across the footlights. They know human nature. Everything they do, every gesture, every intonation of one’s voice, every lifting of an eyebrow is carefully rehearsed in advance, and their actions are timed to split seconds. However, in addition to that, these individuals have a genuine interest in people. They do not look at others and say, “They are all crazy. They are all trash. They are a bunch of suckers, a bunch of hicks; I will fool them all right.” The method of successful people is much different. Every time they come across another human being, they say: “I am grateful because these people are amongst me. They make it possible for me to make my living in a very agreeable way. I am going to give them the very best I possibly can.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Some successful people tell themselves “I love these people, I love these people,” over and over before they leave the house each day. Ridiculous? Absurd? You are privileged to think anything you like. This just has been a tendency of some of the most successful people. Taking up a hobby is another way to meet people. Do not take up a hobby just to get to know someone. Take up a hobby you like and be truly interested in it, and then expand your area of interest into groups of people who have the same interest. Eventually, by sustaining an interest in other people, you will create a new life for yourself. One can win attention and time and cooperation of even the most sought-after people by becoming genuinely interested in them. If we want to make friends, let us put ourselves out to do things for other people—things that require time, energy, unselfishness and thoughtfulness. For instance, remembering people’s birthday can be a good way to show that you are interested in them. If we want to make friends, let us greet people with animation and enthusiasm. When somebody calls you on the telephone use the same psychology. “Say, “Hello” in tones the bespeak how pleased you are to have the person call. Many companies train their telephone operators to greet all callers in a tone of voice that radiates interest and enthusiasm. The caller feels the company is concerned about them. Let us remember that when we answer the telephone later today. Showing a genuine interest in other not only wins friends for you, but may develop in its customers a loyalty to your company. When tend to be interested in others when they have an altruistic interest in us.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

A show of interest, as with every other principle of human relations, must be sincere. It must pay off not only for the person showing the interest, but for the person receiving the attention. It is a two-way street—both parties benefit. Sometimes when people go above and beyond that call of duty to make a customer comfortable, by having dinner with them and stay after hours to sooth their fears and concerns and talk to them, this may be away to win a new buyer, and they will never forget you. They will always remember the warmth and tenderness of a stranger who made getting through the feelings of fear, frustration and loneliness possible. If you want others to like you, if you want to develop real friendships, if you want to help others at the same time as you help yourself, keep this principle in mind: Become genuinely interested in other people. It is useful to examine a fundamental property of gents, the fact that they are located in space and time. When they interact, they are either co-located, or they interact via technology which is itself located. So interactions also can be said to be located. “I heard about it at the town square.” “Please call me at my daytime phone number.” “He bought it from a mail-order catalog house.” It follows that the movement of agents in physical space and time changes their proximity, and this in turn affects their ease of interaction. (I will be in my office tomorrow morning. Can you drop by then?”) Moreover, actions that alter possibilities for movement in space and time will alter proximity. (“I cannot make the 10 A.M. meeting, because the airline we are required to use does not have an early flight.”) #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

So far, we are considering how interaction patters are affected by physical time and space: the coordinates of latitude, longitude, altitude, and Greenwich mean tie that a precise global positioning device can read out. Indeed, the Information Revolution will bring many more artifacts into our futures designed to “know where they are” in space-time. Already most cars and computers and your telephone can obtain their location by means of global positioning signals from satellites. Your strategies, and theirs, can take their locations into account, thereby changing patterns of interactions. While our discussion began from the idea of physical space, we can use the idea as an analogy and talk about the location of agents and interactions in conceptual spaces as well. For example, an organization chart provides a map of conceptual space. A person may be appointed director of purchasing. This is a definite location in a company’s hierarchy of job responsibilities. It places the occupant of the job “near” the people who do purchasing, in the sense that these people are likely to interact with the director. Their proximity is increased. They may be nearby in organizational space even if the purchasing officers are distributed around the World and do not have offices at the headquarters where the director sits. At the same time, the organizational structure may place the director “far” from someone working in marketing, although that office is just one floor down in the headquarters building. The logic of their two roles in the business may make them less likely to interact. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The weekly senior staff meeting in this purchasing organization is thus a location in conceptual space and time. Moving up the organizational job hierarchy is a movement in conceptual space and corresponds to changes in interaction patterns. The patterns can change even when the promoted people keep their old offices (and hence their locations in physical space). Indeed, one useful way of thinking about organizations is as deliberately designed conceptual spaces that will “organize” the interactions of agents toward some ends. The conceptual spaces of organizations are familiar, and therefore they make good examples. However, there are many other conceptual spaces that locate and organize agent interactions. All that is required is that the concepts convey a sense of multiple categories that can be the “locations,” that agents in the population can be members of different categories (and thus have different “locations”), and that the “locations” convey something about the likelihood that agents will interact. A social system of castes, or classes, or statuses can serve as a conceptual space. It seems poignantly clear that agents labeled “untouchables” may be restricted in their patterns of interacting even with those who are quite nearby in physical space. To give one more example, while nations may be thought of as regions of space-time in which agents are located, nationalities are conceptual categories. Israeli and Arab nationals living in New York City may systematically avoid each other even though they live only a few blocks apart. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We have stressed that interactions are located in both space and time. However, we must reiterate an additional point about time: in Complex Adaptive Systems the sequential ordering of events can have huge effects. A change that increases proximity, that makes two agents more likely to interact, means that on average the interaction will occur sooner. If it takes place before events that it would otherwise have followed, it may change the character of likelihood of those events. The system can have an entirely different history as a result. It is also important to know what a response rule it. One of the things people want in life is an unconditional strategic advantage so they are able to seize the initiative in a business deal and move first. Even when you do not actually move first, you can achieve a similar strategic advantage through a commitment to a response rule. The response rule prescribes your action as a response to the others’ move. Although you act as a follower, the commitment to the response move must be in place before others make their moves. A parent telling a child “No dessert unless you eat your spinach” is establishing such a response rule. Of course this rule must be in place and clearly communicated before the child feeds its spinach to the dog. Response rules fall under two broad categories: threats and promises. A threat is a response rule that punishes others who fail to cooperate with you. There are compellent threats, as when a terrorist hijacks a plane and establishes a response rule that the passengers will be killed if his demands are rejected, and there are deterrent threats, as when the United States of America threatens that it will response with nuclear weapons if it is attacked. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

A compellent threat is designed to prevent someone from taking an action. The two threats share a common feature: both sides will suffer if the threat has to be carried out. The secondary category of response rules is promises. This is an offer to reward someone who cooperates with you. In search of a witness, a prosecutor promises one defendant a more lenient sentence if he turns state’s evidence against his codefendants. Again there can be compellent and deterrent promises. A compellent promise is designed to induce someone to take a favorable action, such as turning state’s evidence. A deterrent promise is designed to prevent someone from taking an unfavorable action, such as when mobsters promise the witness they will take care of him if he keeps his mouth shut. The two promises also share a common feature: once the action is taken (or not taken), there is an incentive to go back on one’s word. Sometimes the distinctions between threats and promises are blurred. A friend was mugged in Sacramento City with the following promise: If you “lend” me one thousand dollars, I promise I won’t hurt you. More relevant was the mugger’s implicit threat tht if our friend did not lend him the money, he would be hurt. As this story suggests, the distinction between a threat and a promise depends only on what you call the status quo. The traditional mugger threatens to hurt you if you do not give him some money. If you do not, he starts hurting you, making that the new status quo, and promises to stop once you give him money. A compellent threat is just like a deterrent promise with a change of status quo; likewise, a deterrent threat and a compellent promise differ only in their status quo. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The same forces help account for today’s surprising population explosion of small business in general, which moves us still further from the economy of monoliths. Small and medium-sized firms have won recognition as the new centers of employment, innovation, and economic dynamism. The small business entrepreneur is the new hero (and often heroine) of the economy. In France, reports the Financial Times business support schemes have been jettisoned for programs more likely to help the small business.” The United Kingdom provides subsidized management consulting services to increase small business organizational efficiency. In the United States of America, Inc. magazine, which measures the activity of the one hundred top small businesses, reports an average five-year growth rate that “approaches the incomprehensible—high enough to astonish (us) and to stagger (the companies that experience it).” In place of an economy dominated by a handful of giant monoliths, therefore, we are creating a super-symbolic economy made up of small operating units, some of which may, for accounting and financial reasons, be encapsuled inside large businesses. An economy built of boutiques, rather than behemoths (though some of the boutiques remain inside the belly of a behemoth). This many-shaped, multi-mosaic economy requires entirely new forms of coordination, which explains the ceaseless split-up and formation of so-called strategic alliances and other new arrangements. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Kenichi Ohmae, brilliant head of the McKinsey office in Tokyo, has called attention to the growth of triangular joint ventures involving companies or parts of companies in all three—Japan, the United States of America, and Europe. Such “trilateral consortia,” he writes, “are being formed in nearly every area of leading edge industry including biotechnology, computers, robots, semiconductors, jet engines, nuclear power, carbon fibers, and other new materials.” These are manufacturing mosaics, and they are redrawing business boundaries in ways that will redefine national boundaries as well. In Germany, BMW speaks of the networking of companies based on alliances, partnerships, agreements, research and technical cooperation. They have entered into hundreds of such arrangements. Competitive position will no longer be dependent solely on internal resources, but on the pattern of relationships with outside units. Like data bases, success is increasingly relational. And, significantly, the new relations of production are not dresses in an old-fashioned data case. They are fluid and freeform as hyper-media. The new mosaic organization of companies and the economy thus begins to reflect (and promote) changes in the organization of knowledge itself. To understand power in the business World of tomorrow, therefore, forget the fantasies of near-total concentration, a World dominated by a few mega-firms. Think, instead, about power-mosaics. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Waxing pessimistic is one of the easiest ways to masquerade as wise. And there is plenty to be pessimistic about. However, permanent pessimism is a substitute for thought. No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new Heaven to the human spirit. Nor has pessimism ever won any battle. As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, the list of potential horrors is seemingly endless: War between China and the United States of America; a 1930-style global crash has already thrown millions into the streets and wiped out decades of economic advance; terrorist attacks unleashing nuclear weapons is a fear, anthrax, chlorine gas or a cyber-assault on critical business and government computer networks; disastrous water shortages from Mexico City and Iran to South Africa; armed batters between rival Non-Governmental Organizations; new diseases at the nano level; the spread of mind-control technologies; the death of privacy; intensified religious fanaticism and violence; human cloning; combinations and convergences of these—and that is before we even get to earthquakes, tsunamis, deforestation and global warming. All of these are worth worrying about. However, much of today’s pessimism is fashionable—exactly as it was when the industrial revolution was sweeping over Europe and horrifying its opponents in the early to mid-1800s. From their fear and rage against modernity, with its growing secularism and rationality, came the romantic pessimism expressed in the poetry of Lord Byron and Heinrich Heine, the music of Richard Wagner and Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimismus. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Not to forget the anarchist philosopher Max Stirner, who translated Adam Smith into German and was, if anyone, an expert on pessimism. Stirner’s mother suffering from an illness. His first wife died giving birth to a stillborn baby. He invested a subsequent wife’s fortune and lost it. At which point, he lost her as well. In many parts of the World, native species have been driven to extinction by rats, pigs, and other imported species, and others are endangered and fighting for their lives. Biological controls—fighting fire with fire—have advantages: organisms are small, selective, and inexpensive. These advantages will eventually be shared by devices made using molecular manufacturing, which avoid the disadvantages of importing and releasing yet more uncontrollable, breeding, spreading species. Alan Liss spoke of using nanotechnological devices to help restore ecosystems at a chemical level. A similar idea can be applied at a biological level. The challenge—and it is huge—would be to develop insect-size or even microbe-size devices that could serve as selective, mobile, mechanical flyswatters or weed pullers. These could do what biological controls do, but would be unable to replicate and spread. Let us call devices of this sort “ecosystem protectors.” They could keep aggressive imported species out, saving native species from extinction. To a human being or an ordinary organism, an ecosystem protector would seem like just one more of the many billions of different kinds of bugs and microbes in the ecosystem—small things going about their business, with no tendency to bite. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

They might be detectable, but only if you sorted through a lot of dirt and looked at it through a microscope, because they would not be very common. They would have just one purpose: to notice when they bumped into a member of an imported species on the “not welcome here” list, and then either to eliminate it or to ensure, at least, that it could not reproduce. Natural organisms are often very finicky about which species they attack. These ecosystem protectors could be equally finicky about which species they approach, and then, before attacking, could do a DNA analysis to be sure. It would be simplest (especially in the beginning while we are still learning) to limit each kind of defender to monitoring only one imported species. Each unit of a particular kind of ecosystem-defender device would be identical, built with precision by a special-purpose molecular-manufacturing setup. Each would last for a certain time, then break down. Each kind can be tested in a terrarium, then a greenhouse, then a trial outdoors ecosystem, keeping an eye on their effects at each stage until one gains the confidence for a larger-scale use. “Larger scale” could still be quite limited, if they are not designed to travel very far. This built-in obsolescence limits both how long each device can operate and how far it can move: getting control of the structure of matter includes making nanomachines work where they are wanted and not work elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The agricultural industry today manufactures and distributes many thousands of tons of poisonous chemicals to be sprayed on the land, typically in an attempt to eliminate one or a few species of insect. Ecosystem protectors could also be used to protect these agricultural monocultures, field by field, with far less harm to the environment than today’s methods. They could likewise be used in the special ecosystems of intensive greenhouse agriculture. Unlike chemicals sprayed into the environment, these ecosystem protectors would be precisely limited in time, space, and effect. They neither contaminate the ground water nor poison bees and ladybugs. In order to weed out imported organisms and bring an ecosystem back to its natural balance, ecosystem protectors would not have to be very common—only common enough for a typical imported organism to encounter one once in a lifetime, before reproducing. Even so, as the ecosystem protectors wear our and stop working, they would present a small-scale problem of solid-waste disposal. With the exercise of some clever design, all the machinery of the ecosystem protectors might be made of reasonably durable yet biodegradable materials or (at worst) material no more harmful than bits of grit and humus in the soil. So their remains would be like the shells of diatoms, or bits of lignin from wood, or like peculiar particles of clay or sand. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Alternatively, we might develop other mobile nanomachines to find and collect or break down their remains. This strategy starts to look like setting up a parallel ecosystem of mobile machines, a process that could be extended to supplement the natural cleansing processes of nature in many ways. Each step in this direction will require caution, but not paranoia: there need be no toxic chemicals here, no new creatures to spread and run wild. Missteps will have the great virtue of being reversible. If we decide that we do not like the effects of some particular variety of ecosystem protector or cleanup machine, we could simply stop manufacturing that kind. We could even retrieve those that had already been made and dispersed in the environment, since their exact number is known, along with which patch of ground each is patrolling. If the making and monitoring of ecosystem protectors seems a lot of trouble to go to just to weed out nonnative species, consider this example of the environmental destruction such species can cause. Sometimes before World War II, a South African species of fire ant was accidentally imported into the United States of America. Today, infested areas can have up to five hundred or these ants per square foot. The National Audubon Society—a strong opponent of irresponsible use of pesticides—had to resort to spraying its refuge islands near Corpus Christi when they found these ants destroying over half the hatchlings of the brown pelican, an endangered species. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

In Texas, it has been shown that the new ants are killing off native ant species—reducing biodiversity. The USDA’s Sanford Porter states that due to them, “Texas may be in the midst of a genuine biological revolution.” The ants are heading west, and have established a beachhead in California. Without ecosystem protectors or something much like them, ecologies around the World will continue to be threatened by unnatural invasion. Our species opened the new invasion routes, and it is our responsibility to protect native species made newly vulnerable by them. Today, most people are far from the land, tied up in turning the wheels of twentieth-century industry. In the years to come, those wheels will be replaced by molecular systems that do most of their turning by themselves. The pressure to destroy the land will be less. Time available to help heal the land will be greater. Surely, more energy will flow in this direction. To mend ruined landscapes will require skill and effort. Ecosystem defenders can do flyswatting and weed-pulling jobs no humans ever could, but there will also be jobs of shaping, planting, and nurturing. The land has been torn by machines guided by hasty hands, almost overnight. It can gradually be restored by patient hands, whether bare, gloved, or guiding machines able to reshape a ravaged mountain without turning the soil. The green wealth that can be brought by nanotechnology has raised high hopes among some environmentalists. It would tend to promote a sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human position within that dynamic and evolving balance. Perhaps people will learn to value nature more deeply when they can see it more clearly, with eyes unclouded by grief and guilt. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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