Your Honor, there is No Statute of Limitations in Admiralty

We can make war on poverty but shrink from the extensive readjustment required to stop breeding it. Soliloquies and audible internal dialogues are characterized by the individual’s knowing that the person one is talking to is either oneself or is not there in real conversation with one. Reveries have the same character: the individual knows one really is not in the World one is allowing oneself to drift into, or at least one can be easily reminded of the fact. However, there is a kind of awayness where the individual gives others the impression, whether warranted or not, that one is not aware that one is “away.” This is the area of what psychiatry terms “hallucinations” and “delusionary states.” Corresponding to those “unnatural” verbal activities, there are unnatural bodily ones, where the individual’s activity is patently tasklike but not “understandable” or “meaningful.” The unnatural action may even involve the holding or grasping of something, as when an adult mental patient retains a tight hold on a doll or a fetish-like piece of cloth. Here the terms “mannerism,” “ritual act,” or “posturing” are applied, which, like the term “unnatural,” are clear enough in their way but hardly tell us with any specificity what it is that characterizes “natural” acts. I shall refer to these somehow unnatural conversational and bodily activities as “occult involvements.” Occult involvements are characteristically distinguished from aways by the difference in consequence following discovery. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

A person who is in a reverie, and is discovered or discovers oneself in it, typically snaps back to interactional attention and reorients oneself to the situation at large; those with occult involvements characteristically do not. A four-year-old child may tell you not to interrupt him when he is talking roles to himself, but an adult who assumes this right is felt to be involved in an occult way. One of the disturbing and characteristic things about occult involvements, both verbal and bodily, is that the others present cannot “get at” the general intention by which the individual is apparently governed, and cannot credit the offender’s account should he offer one. This suggests that in ordinary life there is an expectation that all situated activity, if not obviously “occasioned,” will have a degree of transparency, a degree of immediate understandability, for all persons present. It is not that the specific actions of the actor must be fully understood—they certainly are not, for example, when the family watches the repairman fix the TV set—but merely that they be given a situational coating through being in a context of known ends or generally recognized techniques. If the others present have no such guarantee that the actor’s mind is in a known and natural place for minds to be, they may sense that one’s mind may be too far away to allow for appropriate concern for the gathering. Occult involvements, of course, are among the classic psychiatric symptoms that lead to commitment proceeding. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

A person who weeps or is acutely apprehensive without apparent cause, or who burns one’s personal belongings, or who tears up one’s postal-savings certificates, or who dips one’s Bible in a bowl of water, gives the impression of not being present in the situation in the sense that one’s coparticipants presumably are. As one female patient suggested in group therapy: “It seems patients are always getting in trouble walking. I walked for two days and the cops picked me up; I was going, I thought, to a little island to get away. I had a loaf of bread and some fishing hooks.” Perhaps it is this quality of not being present and not being readily recallable to the gathering, rather than the specificities of the improper conduct itself, that creates the disturbing impressions. Certainly the tendency to evoke this impression of alienation from activity within the situation is one of the few things that all of these quite diverse behaviours share. Impressions of occult involvement often occur not because of any direct orientation of the individual to something not there but as a by-product of the way one handles something recognized by others to be there. For example, the psychiatric notion of affect that is improper, inappropriate, or shallow can refer to the patient responding in a light-hearted, mirthful way to something that concerns one seriously. It may be felt that, if the patient allocates this kind of involvement of such matters, one has fixed one’s serious concerns upon something that is not natural and is not present. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

A similar impression is given by the patient who is on the grounds when it begins to rain and who, unlike others caught outside, does not walk faster or pull one’s clothes more tightly about one. Since one does not have a fitting concern for one’s own physical welfare, it is an open question as to just what it is one is concerned with. Bordering on this form of occult involvement, incidentally, is the absent-minded professor theme—a person too much immersed in faraway abstruse thought to show proper mindfulness of some of the petty situated details that confront ordinary walkers. However, here, of course, it is just the presence of professorial matters of intellectual interest that gives these figures the claim of natural distraction and the right to be absent-minded professors. Here a wonderfully limiting case was provided by Albert Einstein, whose clothing pattern seemed to provide a unique illustration of the permissibly unconventional. Although one’s attire suggested that one was entirely off in one’s own World, one’s particular exclusive World could be recognized as a real or meaningful one. The one person who could best get away with dressing like an Einstein was Einstein. When an individual is perceived in an occult involvement, observers may not only sense that they are not able to claim one at the moment but also feel that the offender’s complete activity up till then has been falsely taken as a sign of his participation with them, that all along one has been one has been alienated from their World. (This seems to be especially so in those wakeful occult involvements where the offender can supply a lively statement of the object of one’s special engrossment, which, however, persons present cannot possibly credit.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

This retrospective aspect of the offense is often followed by the feeling that all of the offender’s oncoming conduct is suspect. The kind of trust-in-the-other that is necessary if persons are to be in each other’s presence and get on with their separate affairs can then be lost, and the offender ruined as a candidate for social intercourse. In a sense, then, a paranoid person is someone who has acted in such a way as to cause others to be suspicious and watchful of everything that one does; the persecutory feelings that result may be quite justified. While the taboo against occult involvement becomes of special significance for persons who are, or who become, mental patients, it has a controlling diffuse effect throughout our society, and it is here, perhaps, among nonpatients, that its most revealing significance lies. Although an individual may never in fact sustain an occult involvement, one is sure to find oneself, in some situation or other, acting in a way that others might construe, at least for a moment, as occult. In such cases, one must modify one’s act to protect one’s reputation. Thus, when a man goes down on all-fours to find a cufflink in the grass, and a passer-by suddenly obtrudes upon the lonely search, the seeker is likely to break the rule against audibly talking to oneself in order to make it perfectly clear that one’s pursuit is a natural one. Similarly, when one person comes upon another who is waiting at an entrance for a third, the waiting person may glance at his watch and look up and down the street to give a visible familiar shape to one’s intention, ensuring the protection of a proper dominating activity that now requires one to be inactive. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Two qualifications should now be appended to what has been said about occult involvements. First, the fact that others regularly interpret the activity of an individual as “meaningless” or “crazy” is not proof that it is, nor even proof that meaning will have been sought by reverting to the kind of extended symbolic interpretation sometimes attempted in psychoanalysis. Second, the occultness of an act is not intrinsic to it, and, of course, must be related to some group that so defines it. There are societies in which conversation with a spirit not present is acceptable when sustained by properly authorized persons as is conversation over a telephone in American society. And even in American society, those who attend a séance would not consider it inappropriate for the medium to interact with “someone on the other side,” whether they believed this to be a staged or a genuine interaction. And certainly we define praying as acceptable when done at proper occasions. However, in all of these cases, the observers either believe that the actor is in fact communicating to someone or something, or they are tactfully aware that an appreciable number of other participants may believe this. To the degree that such beliefs and tactful concerns are shared, these involvements, of course, cease to be occult in the sociological sense, whatever their scientific status. The view that man has one mind (the intellectual mind) is a mistake. In reality, the nervous system is divided according to the functions of the body, and each division has its own mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

In this context, the word “center” differs from the current scientific meaning because it includes both the particular mind in control and also the nerves and subsidiary collections of nerve cells which connect it with other parts of the body. We must find the reason why we cannot develop more quickly without a long period of school-work. We know that when we learn something we accumulate new material in our memory. However, what is our memory? And what is new material? To understand this we must learn to regard each center as a separate and independent machine, consisting of a sensitive matter which, by its function, is similar to the matter from which gramophone records are made. All that happens to us, all that we see, all that we hear, all that we feel, all that we learn, is registered on these records. This means that all external and internal events leave certain impressions on the records. “Impressions” is a very good word because they actually are impressions or imprints that are left. An impression can be deep, or it can be slight, or it can be simply a glancing impression that disappears very quickly and leaves no trace behind it. However, whether deep or slight it is an impression. And these impression on records are all that we have, all our possessions. Everything that we know, everything that we have learned, everything that we have experienced, is all there on our records. Exactly in the same way our thought-processes, calculations and speculations consist only of comparing our records with each other, listening to them again and again, trying to understand them by putting them together, and so on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

We can think of nothing new, nothing that is not on our records. We can neither say nor do anything that does not correspond to something on the records. We cannot invent a new thought, just as we cannot invent a new animal, because all our ideas of animals are created from our observation of existing animals. The impressions on our records are connected by associations. Associations connect impression received simultaneously or in some way similar to one another. Since memory depends on consciousness and we actually remember only the moments when we had flashes of consciousness, it is quite clear that different simultaneous impressions connected together will remain longer in the memory than unconnected impressions. In the flash of self-consciousness, or even near to it, all the impression of the moment are connected and remain connected in the memory. The same applies to impressions connected by their inner similarity. If we are more conscious at the moment of receiving an impression, we connect the new impression more definitely with similar old impressions and they remain connected in the memory. On the other hand, if we receive impression in a state of sleep, we simply do not notice them and their traces disappear before they can be appreciated associated. The imprints in instinctive center are born with us; they are already there, so are a very few things in the emotional center. The rest come in this life; in moving and intellectual centers everything has to be learnt. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Many people think they are right 100 percent of the time. However, if that is true, why are they not on Wall Street making millions a day? You can tell people they are wrong by a look or an intonation or a gesture just as eloquently as you can in words—and if you tell them they are wrong, do you make them want to agree with you? Never! For you have struck a direct blow at their intelligence, judgment, pride and self-respect. That will make them want to strike back. However, it will never make them want to change their minds. You may then hurl at them all the logic of a Plato or an Immanuel Kant, but you will not alter their opinions, for you have hurt their feelings. Trying to always be correct is not something that you announce, it is more of challenge. It arouses opposition and makes the listener want to battle with you before you ever start. It is already hard to change people’s minds, so why make it more difficult? If you are going to prove anything, do not let anybody know it. Do it so subtly, so adroitly, that no one will feel that you are doing it. If a person makes a statement that you think is wrong, as long as you are on neutral ground or in private, then it may be imprudent to say, “Well, now, look. I thought otherwise, but maybe you can enlighten me. Let us examine the facts.” When you work it sales, it is best to be nice. Because customers may not want to deal with someone who is callous. That will cause flared tempers, loss of business and general unpleasantness. Sometimes it pays to admit to a customer that you made a mistaken, even if you did not, in order to keep their business. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Giving a customer an upgrade, apologizing for mistake, or reversing a fee may be better than letting hundreds, thousands, or millions of dollars walk out the door. By the time the customer releases one’s feelings, one is usually much more reasonable when it comes to settling the matter. In fact, a lot of customers have thanked me for having such an understanding attitude. And three of them have even brought in friends to buy new homes. In this highly competitive market, we need more of this type of customer, and I believe that showing respect for all customers’ opinions and treating them diplomatically and courteously will help beat the competition. You will never get into trouble by admitting that you may be wrong. That will stop all argument and inspire your opponent to be just as fair and open and broadminded as you are. It will make one want to admit that one, too, may be wrong. If you know absolutely that a person is wrong, and you bluntly tell one so, what happens? Some people are no logical. A few people tend to be prejudiced and biased. There are factions of people who are blighted with preconceived notions, with jealousy, suspicion, fear, envy and pride. And most citizens do not want to change their minds about their religion or their haircut or capitalism or their favourite movie start. We sometimes find ourselves changing our minds without any resistance or heavy emotions, but if we are told we are wrong, we resent the imputation and harden our hearts. We are incredibly heedless in the formation of our beliefs, but find ourselves filled with an illicit passion for them when anyone proposes to rob us of their companionship. It is obviously not the ideas themselves that are dear to us but our self-esteem which is threatened. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

We like to continue to believe what we have been accustomed to accept as true, and the resentment aroused when doubt is cast upon any of our assumptions leads us to seek every manner of excuse for clinging to it. The result is that most of our so-called reasoning consists in finding arguments for going on believing we already do. The opinions of others are a slap in the face to a person who happens to differ with them. However, you do not want to become so “correct” that people cannot stand being in your presence or talking to you. Also, when you are not an expert on something, it is good to admit that and refer the person to someone who can actually help them. Another strategy that an agent can use to alter interaction patterns is to follow some detectable signal, moving toward locations that have better value. People and other agents move in space toward desirable signals. They seek homes with clear air and low noise, near well-maintained schools. They frequent restaurants that are population and busy and view movies that are highly rated. They seek jobs with higher pay. Some household robots have been programmed to monitor their batteries and head for electrical outlets when their power is low. All these patterns of moving through space (physical or conceptual) by following a signal. They have the direct effect of brining us into a situation that is more desirable, but also the indirect effect of brining us into the interaction pattern prevailing in the new location. We live in a more attractive neighbourhood, and we are surrounded by people who also find that neighbourhood attractive and have been able to take up residence there. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Occasionally, this latter effect is the predominant one, as in the crowded restaurant example. Artists move to one of the city’s run-down quarters because that is where other artists are densely congregated around inexpensive warehouse space, a recurring urban process. However, more commonly, we move along a gradient for its own sake, to get a quieter apartment or to make more money. Then we experience the indirect effects on our interaction patterns, which may have been only dimly anticipated. A disadvantage of following a signal is that an agent can get stuck on a local maximum, and not find the global maximum. If the signal can be detected only in the immediate neighbourhood where the agent is, this can be a real problem. To compensate for it, the agent might have to make some large exploratory moves to determine whether the signal should be picked up and followed again from some different starting place. You can readily find the best bench in the park, but there could be a better one in some other park. Getting stuck on a local maximum is a common problem in Complex Adaptive Systems. It can happen in abstract spaces as well as physical ones. For example, during the 1980s, rival groupings of computer companies formed to advocate different standards for the Unix operating system. They seem to have developed their coalitions by a logic of considering only small changes in the space of possible coalitions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

When considering credible commitments, there are a few things we need to consider. In most situations, mere verbal promises should not be trusted. A verbal contract is not worth the paper it is written on. An incident in The Maltese Falcon by Dashiell Hammett (filed by Goldwny’s competitor Warner Brothers, with Humphrey Bogart as Sam Spade and Sydney Greenstreet as Gutman) illustrates this point. Gutman gives Sam Spade an envelope containing ten thousand dollars. Spade looked up smiling. He said mildly: “We were talking about more money than this.” “Yes sir, we were,” Gutman agreed, “but, we were talking then. This is actual money, genuine coin of the realm. With a dollar of this, you can buy more than with ten dollars of talk.” Credibility is a problem with all strategic moves. If your unconditional move, or threat or promise, is purely oral, why should you carry it out if it turns out not to be in your interest to do so? However, then others will look forward and reason backward to predict that you have no incentive to follow through, and your strategic move will not have the desired effect. The whole point behind strategies is to change an opponent’s expectations about your responses to one’s actions. This will fail if one believes that you will not carry out the threats or promises you make. Without any effect on one’s expectations, there will be no effect on one’s actions. An action that can be changed loses strategic effect against a rival who thinks strategically. One knows that your utterances may not match your action and so is on the lookout for tactical bluffing. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

A famous example of the reversal was made by Rothschilds following the Battle of Waterloo. The Rothschild supposedly used carrier pigeons and hence were the first to know the battle’s outcome. When they discovered that the English had won, they sold British bonds publicly and thus led others to believe that England had lost. The price of British government bonds plummeted. Before the truth was discovered, the Rothschilds secretly bought an even greater number of bonds at the rock-bottom price. Had the others in the London stock exchange recognized that the Rothschilds might reverse their move in this way, they would have anticipated the tactical bluffing and it would not have worked. A strategically aware opponent will expect you to mislead one and therefore will not be influenced by actions that one perceives as being put on display for one’s benefit. Establishing credibility in the strategic sense means that you are expected to carry out your unconditional moves, keep your promises, and make good on your threats. Unlike the Rothschilds, you cannot count on an ability to fool people. Commitments are unlikely to be taken at face value. Your commitment may be tested. Credibility must be earned. Credibility requires finding a way to prevent going back. If there is no tomorrow, today’s commitment cannot be reversed. The fact that deathbed testimony can never be altered leads the courts to give it tremendous weight. More commonly, there is a tomorrow (and a day after) so that we must explore the problem of how to maintain commitment over the long haul. “Feast today, for tomorrow we fast” is the excuse for putting on today what can be taken off tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Speaking of tomorrow, our health is something we want to take care of today, so we can ensure longevity. Going beyond the superficial treatment involves moving and modifying cells. Let us consider what can be done with this treatment inside the body, but out outside the body’s tissues. The bloodstream carries everything from nutrients to immune-system cells, with chemical signals and infectious organisms besides. Here, it is useful to think in terms of medical nanomachines that resemble small submarines. Each of these is large enough to carry a nanocomputer as powerful as a mid-1980s mainframe, along with a huge database (a billion bytes), a complete set of instruments for identifying biological surfaces, and tools for clobbering viruses, bacteria, and other invaders. Immune cells, as we have seen, travel through the bloodstream checking surfaces for foreignness and—when working properly—attacking and eliminating what should not be there. These immune machines would do both more and less. With their onboard sensors and computers, they will be able to react to the same molecular signals that the immune system does, but with greater discrimination. Before being sent into the body on their search-and-destroy mission, they could be programmed with a set of characteristics that lets them clearly distinguish their targets from everything else. The body’s immune system can respond only to invading organisms that had been encountered by that individual’s body. Immune machines, however, could be programmed to respond to anything that had been encountered by World medicine. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Immune machines can be designed for use in the bloodstream or the digestive tract (the mouthwash described above used these abilities in hunting down harmful bacteria). They could float and circulate, as antibiotics do, while searching for intruders to neutralize. To escape being engulfed by white blood cells making their own patrols, immune machines could display standard molecules on their surface—molecules the body knows and trusts already—like a fellow police officer wearing a familiar uniform. When an invader is identified, it can be punctured, letting its contents spill out and ending its effectiveness. If the contents were known to be hazardous by themselves, then the immune machine could hold on to it long enough to dismantle it more completely. How will these devices know when it is time to depart? If the physician in charge is sure the task will be finished within, say, one day, the devices prescribed could be of a type designed to fall apart after twenty-four hours. If the treatment time needed is variable, the physician could monitor progress and stop action at the appropriate time by sending a specific molecule—aspirin perhaps, or something even safer—as a signal to stop work. The inactivated device would then be cleared out along with other waste eliminated from the body. Health is also a component is tomorrow’s wealth. However, this new wealth system now allows us to put all the pieces together into a single coherent frame. Doing so makes clear how revolutionary this new way of making wealth really is—and how starkly different it is from the ways wealth was produced in the past. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The new accelerated system for wealth creation is increasingly dependent on the exchange of data, information, and knowledge. It is “super-symbolic.” No knowledge exchanged; no new wealth created. The new system goes beyond mass production to flexible, customized, or “de-massified” production. Because of the new information technologies, it is able to turn out short runs of highly varied, even customized products at costs approaching those of mass production. Conventional factors of production—land, labour, raw materials, and capital—become less important as symbolic knowledge is substituted for them. Instead of metal or paper money, electronic information becomes the true medium of exchange. Capital become extremely fluid, so that huge pools of it can be assembled and dispersed overnight. Despite today’s huge concentrations, the number of sources of capital multiply. Goods and services are modularized and configured into systems, which require a multiplication and constant revision of standards. This leads to wars for control of the information on which standards are based. Slow-moving bureaucracies are replaced by small (de-massified) work units, temporary or “ad-hocratic” teams, increasingly complex business alliances and consortia. Hierarchy is flattened or eliminated to speed decision-making. The bureaucratic organization of knowledge is replaced by free-flow information systems. The number and variety of organizational units multiply. The more such units, the more transactions among them, and the more information must be generated and communicated. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Workers become less and less interchangeable. Industrial workers owned few of the tools of production. Today the most powerful wealth-amplifying tools are the symbols inside workers’ heads. Workers, therefore, own a critical, often irreplaceable, share of the “means of production.” The new hero is no longer a blue-collar worker, a financier, or a manager, but the innovator (whether inside or outside a large organization) who combines imaginative knowledge with action. Wealth creation is increasingly recognized to be a circular process, with wastes recycled into inputs for the next cycle of production. This method presupposes computerized monitoring and ever-deeper levels of scientific and environmental knowledge. Producers and consumer, divorced by the industrial revolution, are reunited in the cycle of wealth creation, with the consumer contributing not just money but market and design information vital for the production process. Buyer and supplier share data, information, and knowledge. Someday, customers may also push buttons that activate remote productions processes. Consumer and producers fuse into a “prosumer.” The new wealth creation system is both local and global. Powerful microtechnologies make it possible to do locally what previously could be done economically only on a national scale. Simultaneously, many function spill over national boundaries, integrating activities in many nations into a single productive effort. These twelve elements of the accelerative economy are interrelated, and mutually reinforced the role of data, information, and knowledge throughout the economy. They define the revolutionary new system of high-tech wealth creation. As pieces of this system come together, they undermine power structures designed to support the wealth-making system of the industrial age. This description of the new system of wealth creation helps explain the tremendous upheavals now spreading across the planet—premonitory shudders that herald a collision of wealth creation systems on a scale never before seen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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