In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subject to manipulation. His work, his consumption, and his leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies, by what Dr. Skinner calls “positive reinforcements.” The individual loses his active, responsible role in the social process; he becomes completely “adjusted” and learns that the behavior, act, thought, or feeling which does not fit into the general scheme puts him at a severe disadvantage; in fact he is what he is supposed to be. If he insists on being himself, he risks, in police states, his freedom or even his life; in some democracies, he risks not being promoted, or more rarely, he risks even his job, and perhaps most importantly, he risks feeling isolated, without communication with anybody. As we have discussed, criminal events take on a transactional (give-and-take) nature. It was argued that the “form” and “content” of these exchanges can vary across different types of crime. Homicide and assault transactions generally take on the form of a one-on-one, heated interaction between acquaintances. The vast majority of homicide incidents that were reported to the police in 2022 were known to involve a long assailant and a lone victim. Only 20 percent were known to involve more than two offenders and 6 percent involved multiple victims. Similarly, victimization report indicate that multiple offenders were present in only 25 percent of the assault cases occurring in 2022. Turning to the nature of relationship, about one half of all murder and/or assault victims are known to be related or acquainted with their attacker. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Moreover, roughly one in ten of these incidents are categorized as cases of intimate violence wherein the combatants are either intimates or are linked via a blood or marital relationship. An analysis of the circumstances surrounding murder reveal that nearly one third of all homicides begin as a simple argument, while less than one in give are committed in conjunction with another felony offense. Homicides and assaults occur disproportionately in loose social settings. Most often, violent exchanges take place at night and on weekends in locations where acquaintances are accustomed to interacting with one another. These types of familiar settings are governed by relaxed social norms that allow individuals to more freely express their emotion. For example, researchers discovered that 55 percent of all homicide cases occur in residences, while 9 percent occur in or near bars. Only 18 percent were found to occur in the more impersonal setting of a street or public park. Most violent predators commit their crimes in close proximity to their residence. The majority of homicide and assault transactions involve individuals of the same age, race, and gender groups. In 2020, the average homicide offender was 28.5 years of age and the average victim was 32.2 years of age. That same year, individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 committed murder at a rate of 28 per 100,000. This figure was more than five times larger than the homicide rate of the 35- to 49-yer-old age group and nearly twenty times higher than for persons over the age of 50. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The same type of trend is observable in the victimization rates. Take for example the crime of assault. In 2020, the reported assault victimization rate for individuals between the ages of 12 and 24 years exceeded forty per 1,000 persons or households. This is almost double the rate in the overall population and more than twenty times the rate reported among persons over the age of 65. A similar trend can be observed with regard to the age of the offender. Most victims of assaultive behavior estimate that at least one of their attackers was under the age of 30—this was the case in 60 percent of the single offender assaults and 95 percent of the multiple offender assaults. Murder is no different. In fact, the CDC ranked homicide as the No. 2 cause of death among 18- to 25-year-olds. Only unintentional injuries accounted for more deaths among members of this age group. It is clear that murder and assault take on an intra-aged transactional form, meaning that offenders and victims come from similar age groups. In the case of assault, nearly three fourths of all victims between the ages of 12 and 20 estimate that their attacker comes from this same age group. Similar patterns are observed in the 30 and above age bracket. Race is another telling indicator in homicide and assault transactions. Assault rates among African Americans (28 per 1,000) were slightly higher than those among European American (22) and Hispanics (25). #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
Race is another telling indicator in homicide and assault transactions. The assault rate among African Americans (27 per 1,000) were somewhat higher than those observed among European Americas (23) and Hispanics (25.6). This trend is further reflected in the arrest data—despite comprising only 12 percent of the overall population, African Americans typically account for 30 percent of the aggravated assault arrests each year. The picture becomes even more grim when we focus solely on murder. An African American person faces a one in forty-four chance of becoming a homicide victim at some point in his or her life. Think about that. If you are in a room with 44 African Americans, it is likely one will be a murder victim. That is compared to a one in 253 chance among European Americans. Makes you want to take stalking and death threats more seriously is one has such a high chance of becoming a murder victim, huh? African Americans represent 52 percent of the known homicide offenders and 48 percent of the known homicide victims. Homicide and assault take form as a markedly intraracial crime (occurring within the same racial group). For example, typically 86 percent of European American victims are killed by European American perpetrators and 94 percent of African Americans were killed by other African Americans. A close examination reveals that most interracial (across races) murder involve younger perpetrators victimizing strangers. Shifting to the crimes of assault, 80 percent of European American assault victims claim that their attackers were of the same race and 83 percent of the African American assault victims claim that they were attacked by a fellow African American. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
It appears that even offenders behave in an intraracial capacity—only one in ten assault victims who was attacked by more than one offender claims that the attackers were of mixed races. Homicide events traditionally involve male participants. For example, generally, 90 percent of the known homicide offenders and 80 percent of the homicide victims. In fact, men are 10 times more likely than females to be a murder offender and more than three times more likely to be a victim. Most homicide events take shape as intragendered (male on male or female on female) transactions, and nearly 70 percent of the known homicides involve all male participants. A slightly different portrait emerges for assault. Here again, males account for the majority of the offender and victim pools. In fact, 80 percent of the individuals who are arrested for aggravated assault, and 58 percent of the pool of the assault victims are men. The fact that men account for only a slight majority of the victim population but a considerably larger majority of the offender pool suggests that many of these assaults manifest themselves as male-on-female or intergendered transactions. In most cases, this male-on-female violence takes its form as intimate partner violence (id est, domestic violence or spousal abuse). A recent survey of representative samples of 8,000 men and women found that 23 percent of women versus 9 percent of the men had been the victim of domestic assault at least once in their lives. It is estimated that a total of 24,546, 840 women who are alive today will at some point be physically assaulted by an intimate partner—at a rate of 1,400,000 per year. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
Murder and assault rates become particularly problematic when the age, gender, and race variables are included in the same equation. The overall reported U.S.A. homicide offending rate is 6.1 and the victimization rate is 5.5 per 100,000 population. For African American males between the ages of 18 and 24 those rates ballooned to 206 and 102, respectively. Conversely, the homicide offending and victimization rates among European American females 25 years or older is 1 and 2.3, respectively. African American males between the ages 18 and 24 make up 1.5 percent of the U.S.A. population but account for a staggering 30 percent of all known homicide offenders and 15 percent of all homicide victims. The process of the homicide and/or assault transaction is typically marked by brevity and intensity. Most murders and/or assaults last only a few seconds. In the case of murder, the short amount of time required of the act can be attributed to the fact that firearms are present in nearly two thirds of all homicide cases. This is well evidenced by the fact that 30 percent of aggravated assault victims claimed their attacker carried a gun, compared to 7 percent of the overall pool of assault victimizations. When asked why they carried guns, one fourth of violent felons claimed that the gun was originally intended as a scare tactic. Murders and assaults take on an undeniably interactive and escalating flavor. Most homicides are disputes and/or potential assaults that have gone terribly wrong. They are situations in which factors such as ego, reputation, and irreversible moments of misinterpretation regrettably come together to produce lethal consequences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
Spies have been busily at work at least since the Egyptian Book of the Dead termed espionage a soul-endangering sin. However, from the Pharaohs to the end of World War II the technologies available for espionage remained primitive, and early spies, like early scientists, were largely untrained amateurs. In the first years of the 20th century, Robert Baden-Powell, later the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, masqueraded as a dotty butterfly collector when he hiked through the Balkans, sketching fortification and hiding their outline in drawings of complicated butterfly wing. (Baden-Powell insisted that enthusiastic amateurs, who regarded spying as sport, would do the best work.) Another self-taught spy was the Japanese Captain Giichi Tanaka. After serving on the staff of the Japanese military attache in Moscow, learning to speak Russian and claiming adherence to the Russian Orthodox church, Tanaka took a leisurely two-month trip back to Tokyo so he could reconnoiter the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railroads, brining back with him intelligence used by Tokyo in planning for the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Much spy literature today still focuses on the derring-do of intrepid individuals pursuing military secrets. The industrial revolution, however, transformed war. The conscripted mass army, the mechanization of transport, the machine gun, mass-produced tanks and airplanes, and the concept of total war were all product of the Second Wave or smokestack era. The potential for mass destruction grew, right along with the rise of mass production, reaching its final point of no return in the U.S.A.-Soviet nuclear stalemate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
The industrialization of intelligence followed that of war. In the early 20th century, spying became more systematic and bureaucratic, with the Tsar’s fearsome Okhrana, forerunner of the KGB, leading the way. Espionage schools were set up. Spies began to be trained as professionals. However, a handful of even well-trained spies could no longer satisfy the growing market for intelligence. Thus, just as individual craft took a back seat to assembly-line production in the factory, attempts were made to mass-manufacture intelligence. By early in the 20th century, the Japanese were no longer relying exclusively on a handful of full-timers like Tanaka but on thousands of foot-soldiers spies, as it were—emigrants settled in China or Siberia, cooks, servants, and factory workers who reported on their host countries. Japanese intelligence, following the factory production model, used unskilled “espionage workers” to mass-produce information, then built a growing bureaucracy to process the “take.” After the 1917 revolution in Russia, Lenin promoted the idea of “rabcors” or “people’s journalists”—thousands of ordinary workers were encouraged to write to the newspaper denouncing supposedly antirevolutionary saboteurs and traitors. The idea of masses of amateur correspondents was applied to foreign intelligence, too, and by 1929 there were three thousand so-called “rabcors” in France, including workers in state arsenals and the defense industries who were told to write to the Communists press to expose their poor working conditions. These contributions, however, provided useful insights into war production, and the most revealing letters were not published, but sent on to Moscow. It was another attempt at mass collection of low-level intelligence by amateurs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
High-level espionage, however, was entrusted to carefully trained professionals. Richard Sorge, born in Baku and raised in Berlin, became one of the most brilliant soviet agents in history. Because of his German boyhood, Sorge was able to penetrate the Nazi Party and get himself sent to Japan posing as the enthusiastically pro-Hitler correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung—a cover that won him access to top German and Japanese officials and diplomats in Tokyo. The Soviets were terrified of a Japanese surprise attack on Siberia. Sorge correctly told them it would never happen, but that the Soviet Union would be attacked by Germany instead. In 1941, Sorge actually sent Moscow advance news of the coming Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R., warning that 150 German divisions were concentrating in preparation. He even pinpointed the date—22 June 1941. However, his information was ignored by Stalin. Sorge was about to tip off Moscow about the coming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—once again naming the exact date—when he was captured and later executed by the Japanese. Sorge was subsequently described by General Douglas MacArthur as “a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage.” Sorge’s career surely underscored the continuing value of the courageous and resourceful individual spy and spymaster. However, World War II also saw remarkable breakthroughs in everything from coding and deciphering equipment to reconnaissance aircraft, radio, and radar—technologies that laid the basis for true mass production of intelligence, some of its high-level stuff indeed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
If you are trying to extract some exclusive information from someone, your threat to kill him unless he reveals the secret will not be credible. He knows that when the time comes, you will realize that the secret dies with him, and will have no incentive to carry out the threat. Hollywood films provide two excellent illustrations of this problem, and how to deal with it. Schelling uses a scene from the film High Wind in Jamacia. “The pirate captain Chavez wants his captive to tell where the money is hidden, and puts his knife to the man’s throat to make him talk. After a moment or two, during which the man keeps his mouth shut, the mate laughs. ‘If you cut his throat he can’t tell you. He knows it. And he knows you know it.’ Chavez puts his knife away and tries something else.” Chavez might have kept the knife out and tried brinkmanship, if only he had seen The Maltese Falcon. There Spade (Humphrey Bogart) has hidden the valuable bird, and Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) is trying to find out where it is. Spade smiled at the Levantine and answered him evenly: “You want the bird. I’ve got it…If you kill me how are you going to get the bird? If I know that you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?” In response, Gutman explains how he intends to make his threat credible. “I see what you mean.” Gutman chuckled. “That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Gutman concedes that he cannot threaten Spade with certain death. Instead, he can expose Spade to a risk, a probability that things might get out of control in the heat of the moment. The outcome is left to chance. It is not that Gutman would actually want to kill Spade, but accidents do occur. And death is irreversible. Gutman cannot commit to killing Spade for sure if Spade refused to talk. However, he can threaten to put Spade in a position in which Gutman cannot guarantee that he will be able to prevent Spade from getting killed. This ability to expose someone to a probability of punishment can be enough to make the threat effective if the punishment is bad enough. The greater the risk of Spade getting killed in this way, the more effective the threat. However, at the same time, the risk becomes less credible. Gutman’s brinkmanship will work if, and only if, there is an intermediate range of probabilities where the risk is large enough to compel Spade to reveal the bird’s location, and yet small enough to be acceptable to Gutman. Such a range exists only if Spade values his own life more than Gutman values the bird, in the sense that the probability of death will frighten Spade into talking is smaller than the risk of losing his information that gives Gutman pause. Brinkmanship is not just the creation of risk, but a careful control of the degree of that risk. Now we have a problem. Many of the mechanisms that generate risk also prevent a sufficiently accurate control of the degree of that risk. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
We saw how Kennedy could use internal politics and standard operating procedures to ensure that the situation would get somewhat outside his control, and therefore not affected by Kennedy’s temptation to back down. However, those very things make it difficult for him to ensure that the risk does not climb to a degree that is intolerable to the Untied States of America. Kennedy’s own estimate of the risk—between one out of three and even—is a wide range of risk, to the point where one worries if the risk is being controlled at all. We have no perfect or generally valid answer to this dilemma. Brinkmanship is often an effective device, but equally often it remains something of an adventure. Now, when it comes to nanotechnology, it is important that we know how to prepare for a big mistake. The so-called Star Trek scenario (named after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that featured runaway “nanites”) is perhaps the most commonly imagined problem. In this scenario, someone first invests considerable engineering effort in designing and building devices that are bacterial-sized, omnivorous, able to survive in a wide range of natural environment, able to build copies of themselves, and made with just a few built-in safeguards—perhaps a clock that shuts them off after a time, perhaps something else. Then, accidentally, the clock fails, or one of these dangerous replicators builds a copy with a defective clock, and away we go with an unprecedented ecological disaster. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
This would be an extraordinary accident indeed. Note well, though, that this accident scenario starts with someone building a highly capable device that is almost disastrously dangerous, but held in check by a few safeguards. This would be like wiring your house with dynamite and relying on a safety-catch to protect the trigger: a subsequent explosion could be called an accident, but the problem is not with the safety mechanism, it is with the dynamite installation. Do we need to build nanotechnological dynamite? It is worth considering just how little practical incentive there is for anything even resembling the dangerous replicator just as described. (Note that our topic here is accidents; deliberate acts of aggression are another matter.) When looking at open collusion, there are some illustrations we need to consider. A few attendants tease a patient in order to laugh at their bizarre reactions—such as a nip on the ear or a slap on the head to bring about a temper tantrum. This teasing sometimes becomes cruel, and does not seem to be restricted to trouble-makers among patients. This may be done to break the monotony, or may be due to psychological quirks in the few attendants who do it. Miss Kurt asked the attendant for a cigarette. The attendant replied, “say pretty please.” Miss Kurt, on saying pretty please, was answered, “now say, ‘hello, Miss Crandall’ twice,” pointing to the other attendant. Miss Kurt did not answer. The attendant held a cigarette aloft and said again, “If you say ‘hello Miss Crandall’ twice you will get his cigarette.” Miss Kurt did as requested. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Similar interactions can be cited from Central Hospital. For example, an attendant would occasionally take a “pet” patient and dance with him or her while winking broadly to the rest of the ward staff. The wink is a classic device for establishing byplay in our society, but at the same time an item in our involvement idiom that seems to be passing into disuse. The fun reached its climax at the point where the patient was released and the attendant turned back to participation with the rest of the now laughing staff. Similarly, a few patients would sometimes encircle a mute fellow patient who had taken the tack of obeying all commands. They would then address the mute patient, ordering one to do a series of increasingly self-profaning acts, until the circle was excited into laughter. The same sort of treatment is often accorded young children in our society: the child is teased or prodded into responding to a question focusing on the child as an unwitting source of amusement or pride for the adults. Some extreme forms of engagement disloyalty are managed without the butt necessarily becoming aware of what is being done to him. The very obligation to the individual in a two-person encounter to tactfully support his fellow-participant in maintaining the illusion that both desire to be engaged together can itself lead to disaffection which I carefully concealed from the other, but sometimes from him alone. Thus, when one participant fees it is beneath one in some way to be publicly joined to the other in a special relationship of any kind, the disgruntled participant may secretly tease the other participant before the assembled company or communicate in other ways to them that the encounter is not one that should be taken seriously. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
At Beijing, China dances I occasionally saw a young lady maintain the right of any man to dance by accepting a request from a someone from the southern region, or an international seaman, but once his arms convey by collusive gestures to the circle of people behind his back that the dance-engagement was a lark and that she was not to be judged by it. Cautionary tales in our own society tell of college or high school dances where a male, who may wish to be unburdened of the girl whom he finds himself dancing, holds up a twenty-dollar bill behind her back as they pass the stag-line, a mute but raucous bribe for someone to “cut in.” Of course, the possibility of this kind of sellout is one factor in social control, leading the individual to forego engagements in which his fellow-participants might not be loyal to him. “I do not understand why one should excuse oneself.” One does not want to give up the idea that one can “do,” so that even if one realizes that things just happen, one finds excuses, such as, “This is an accident but tomorrow it will be different.” That is why we cannot realize this idea. All our lives we see how things happen but we explain them as accidents, as exceptions to the rile that we can “do.” Either we forget, or do not see, or do not pay enough attention. We always think that at every moment we can begin to “do.” This is our ordinary way of thinking about it. If you see in your life a time when you tried to do something and failed, that will be an example, because you will find that you explained your failure as an accident, an exception. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
If things repeat themselves, again you think you will be able to “do,” and if you see this again, again you will explain your failure as just an accident. It is very useful to go though your life from this point of view. You intended one thing and something different happened. If you are really sincere, then you will see; but if not, you will persuade yourself that what happened was exactly what you wanted! You must start with some concrete idea. Try to find what really prevents you from being active in work. It is necessary to be active in work; once can get nothing by being passive. Now we forget the beginning, where and why we started, and most of the time we never even think about aim, but only about small details. No details are of any use without aim. Self-remembering is of no use without remembering the aims of the work and the original fundamental aim. If these ais are not remembered emotionally, years may pass and one will remain in the same state. It is not enough to educate the mind; it is necessary to educate the will. You must understand what our will is. From time to time we have will. Will is the resultant of desires. The moment we have a strong desire, there is will. In that moment we must study our will and see what can be done. We have no will but self-will and willfulness. If one understands that, one must be brave enough to give up one’s will, to pay attention to what was said. You must look for those moments and you must not miss them. I do not mean create them artificially, although in a house [organized according to work principles] special possibilities to give up one’s will are made, so that if you give up your will, later you may have your own will. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
However, even people who are not in the house, if they watch themselves and are careful, can catch themselves at such moments, and ask themselves what they are to do. Everybody must find what is one’s own situation. “How should we think about our inability to ‘do’ in relation to responsibilities?” You are given certain definite tasks, things to do. When you learn to remember yourself, even a little, you will find you are in a better position in relation to all other things. “Does the system put forward any thesis about will-power other than by using it as it grows, and by disuse it fades away?” The system explains that you have many “I”s and that each has its own will. If instead of being many, you become one, then you will have one will. Will, in normal 1, 2, and 3 men, is only the resultant of desires. Certain conflicting desires, or combinations of desires, make you act in a certain way. That is all. “Is the observing ‘I’ the embryo of Permanent ‘I’? Observing “I” is the embryo of Permanent “I,” but it has no real will. Its will is not opposed to self-will. What can be opposed to self-will? There are only two things opposed to one another: work and self-will. Self-will wants to talk, for instance, and there is a rule against talking. A struggle ensues, and the result is according to which of the two conquers. “The making of effort is what you call struggle, but suppose one is not aware of a struggle?” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
That means it happened. Things can happen to us in for ways—by accident, through cause and effect, by fate, and by will. Struggle must be by will, intention. And you must be aware of your intention. You cannot make effort and not be aware of it. Will would be if you wanted something, and decided and acted and achieved what you wanted. That is what is important. “I thought I heard is said that if a man studies groups of “I”s, he will understand how groups of “I”s help each other.” What is important in this case is will-action. At first we were told about three things only—will, fate, and accident. Then we came to the conclusion that there must be a fourth class corresponding to Karma. However, as this word had gained many wrong associations from theosophy, we used the words “case and effect,” meaning by them something that happens in this life and refers to oneself only, because from another point of view the whole World is based on cause and effect. “In those four categories, will is not often used, is it?” Will has to be used. We are never ready for work but we must work all the same. If we are ready, then we are given other work for which we are not ready. “Knowing one’s fate, how can one act along a line to avoid accident?” I do not know what you mean by “knowing fate.” It has nothing to do with avoiding accident. One avoids accidents (in our special sense) by creating causes and increasing effects. This is coming to will. It is not will but it is coming to it. Only a certain number of things can happen in an hour or a day, so if one creates more causes, there is less room for accidents to happen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
We can take fate only in relation to our physical state, to health and so on. Fate has nothing to do with attainment. Cause and effect begins it. However, cause and effect is when the result depends on one’s own action, but unpremeditated action. In work, one must try to use will—as much as we have of it. If one has one inch of will and uses it, then one will have two inches, then three, and so on. “How can I learn to act differently in life so as to avoid the same limited and recurrent emotions which I now feel?” This is our aim; this is the aim of the whole work. This is why work is organized, why we have to study different theories, to remember different rules, and so on. What you speak of is the far aim. We have to work in the system first. By learning how to act in connection with the system and the organization, we learn how to act in life; but we cannot learn to act in life without first going through the system. “If we are all weakness and no strength, from what source do we draw such strength as is needed even to begin work on ourselves?” We must have certain strength. If we are only weakness, then we can do nothing. However, if we had no strength at all, we should not have become interested in that work. If we realize our situation, we already have a certain strength, and new knowledge increases this strength. So we have quite enough to begin. Later, more strength some from new knowledge and new efforts. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Randolph Harris II International 