Creativity finds its soul when it embraces its shadow. The artist’s block, for instance, is a well-know part of the creative process: inspiration stops and the writer is faced with an intractable empty page. Many souls today must have evaporated, leaving emptiness to take over. If we could see how our blank spots have eroded our souls, we might quickly humble our lives. Given our society’s propensity for physical problem solving, it should come as no surprise that murder and assault offenders generally develop pronounced criminal careers. These individuals tends to possess a proverbial short fuse and are not shy about resorting to physical means to resolve life’s problems. For example, one third of all individuals who face a felony assault charge and 58 percent of all murder defendants are typically found to have at least one prior felony arrest. More than one in five murder defendants have a rap sheet that includes five or more prior felony arrests, while one in five defendants have at least ten prior felony arrest. In a recidivism study which tracked more than 272,000 inmates released from state prison, the data showed that 41 percent of all released murderers and 65.1 percent of all assault releases were charged with another criminal offense within three years of leaving prison. Most of these arrests resulted in a second conviction and follow-up term of incarceration. There is some evidence of escalation and specialization in the career trajectories of homicide and assault offenders. For instance, 22 percent of those who served time for assault were picked up for yet another assault charge withing three years of there release. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

In addition, 12 percent will graduate to murder by the end of that three-year window of time. There plausible explanation for these high levels of recidivism is due to the fact that the average murderer is a confrontational male with a long history of violent rehearsals. Repeated involvement in physical violence tends to produce increasing intensity and severity in one’s actions. While most murderers do not involve themselves exclusively in homicide, an analysis of criminal history data reveals that they have a tendency to concentrate their offending in the area of violent crime. Furthermore, 20 percent of murderer and 35 percent of the assault releases face new violent felony arrests within 3 years. Considering not everyone who goes to jail is actually guilty, and some people may have been acting in self-defense, it seems the goal would be to keep people who have been released from jail away from people and situations that may lead them into recidivism for at least 4 to 5 years. There exists a great deal of conjecture and assumption about what goes on inside the mind of the violent offender. Media outlets are more than willing to produce fictional and nonfictional accounts of the thought processes of homicide or assault offenders. As entertaining as the depictions may be, the public is provided little accurate information about the mindset of the average murderer. For starters, most scholars agree that there is nothing innate or inborn about human violence. Man needs a social system in which he has his place and in which his relations to others are relatively stable and supported by generally accepted values and ideas. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

What has happened in modern industrial society is that traditions, and common values, and genuine social personal ties with others have largely disappeared. The modern mass man is isolated and lonely, even though he is part of a crowd; he has no convictions which he could share with others, only slogans and ideologies he gets from the communications media. He has become an a-tom (the Greek equivalent of “in-dividual” = indivisible), held together only by common, though often simultaneously antagonistic interests, and by the cash nexus. This phenomenon is called anomie, and is the main cause of death by suicide which had been increasing with the growth of industrialization. Anomie is the destruction of all traditional social bonds, due to the fact that all truly collective organization has become secondary to the state and all genuine social life had been annihilated. People living in the modern political state are a disorganized dust of individuals. In modern society, much of the tradition American community in which all genuine social bonds are made have become illegal or disappeared and it is having an impact on the World. Ceasing pledging allegiance to flag of the United States of America in public schools seems to be a problem. Also, removing God and Christ as symbols of America has influenced people to become unpatriotic, have a loss of fear for God, and indulge in sin. Now people are starting to lose respect for the National Anthem and all of this division is ripping America apart from its core. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Others are seeing the nonsense that is going on in California, where they are teaching children to deny their gender, not to follow gender roles, and to have a total disregard for humanity and authority figures, and it is setting a dangerous precedent in countries like China, Japan, and India where people who were once loyal to their government, now riot and protest. It is not population density that is the main cause of the problems, but a lack of social structure, genuine common bonds, and interest in life that is causing human aggression. Long standing U.S.A. violence is also due to our propensity for misunderstanding. Parents allow or even encourage aggressive behavior in children, especially boys; all individuals are exposed to gratuitous levels of violence in the print and television media; and we are exposed to displays of aggression on a daily basis in our work and social lives. These three factors come together to produce a culturally based acceptance of violence. While no one of the above sources actually causes violence in a given individual, they can come together to produce a broad-based tolerance for violent problem solving, especially in pockets of society where frustration and violence is more pervasive. The antecedents of violent crimes that are reported by offenders themselves have always impressed me as extraordinarily petty. Unfortunately, some individuals chose to bestow offensive or threatening meanings to the seemingly innocuous comments, gestures, or actions of another. Too frequently, this flawed assessment is followed by a mental exercise to overcome one’s inhibitions against conflict (id est, a mental stamp of approval) and then an intense physical response. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

The volatility of these situations is exacerbated by the fact that most violent combatants commit their crimes while under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol. Therefore, bragging about being drunk and/or high is not a badge of honor. Surveys of incarcerated persons reveal that more than 50 percent of all murders and assaults occur while the offender is under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol—roughly 40 percent report being impaired by alcohol and roughly 30 percent report being impaired by some other form of illegal drug or controlled substance. It is worth noting that burglary, theft, and robbery are the only index crimes that exhibit higher levels of drug and/or alcohol usage at the time of the offense. These substances can significantly numb an individual’s reasoning and motor skills. In interviews conducted with 268 convicted murderers, drug and/or alcohol impairment was often the determining factor that turned a simple argument or fist fight into a homicide. So, one approach to stopping violence of any kind would be to teach people not to drink and/or use drugs. Murderous and/or assaultive behavior can be supported by both expressive and instrumental motives. Expressive motivation is associated with emotional states in which the individual strikes out spontaneously in a crime of passion. Instrumental motivation is used to describe a more calculated mental state in which the offender is driven by the will to achieve a predetermined goal. Scholars have long belabored the issue of violent motivation. Most stress the emotional and seemingly nonsensical nature of violence. It is particularly popular to interpret gang or “ghetto” violence in this manner. Violence occupies a more central role in the normative culture of inner-city America. All violence is bound to the situation or surroundings within which it occurs and one simply must understand the underlying cultural text of the environment if one wishes to unravel the meanings and intentions behind a given act. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

In the case of “ghetto” violence, street thugs use overt acts of force as a means of enhancing their social status on the streets (somewhat equivalent to accumulating monetary wealth in middle- and upper-class American culture). However, the leads to a somewhat muddled explanation of assaultive and murderous motives. On one hand, the physical outburst represents a situationally bound overflowing of expressive motions. At the same time, this eruption of emotional energy is not mindless, but takes on an instrumental quality as it is generally guided toward solving some tangible problem. In short, the emotions serve as the means of accomplishing what the individual sees as a rational end. We must distinguish between predatory and moralistic murder. The public is most familiar with and intrigued by the predatory variety—those cases that involve a serial or habitually murderous offender stalking victims in a methodical, blood-thirsty manner. This brand of killers is like modern-day gang members. These predatory offenders stalk their impersonal prey and commit what we see as cold, calculated acts of violence. Most murderers do not fit this stereotypical image. Instead, they are moralistic offenders. This brand of killer commits crimes in a loosely structured, sometimes disorientated state of rage. A small minority of murderers chronically commit predatory homicides with instrumental motives, most killers are novices of the moralistic variety who possess expressive motives that are bound to the uncertainty of the movement. We often refer to the moralistic homicides as crimes of passion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

If follows that noticeable levels of criminal planning tend to be observable among predatory murderers, whereas moralistic murders take on a more haphazard quality. Habitual murderers are likely to develop set patterns, rituals, and methods to their madness, whereas the spontaneous and emotional nature of moralistic homicide usually precludes the likelihood of structured planning on the part of the offender. Conversely, planning generally occupies a notoriously small role in a moralistic or assaultive transaction. The spontaneous and emotional nature of these acts leaves little time for conscious aforethought. Although these individuals may plan the dynamics of an aggressive response, their heightened emotional state rules out the possibility for them to ponder or preconceive the volatility of the transaction. Normative neutralizations play an important part in the cognitive dimension of murder and assault. Despite all the cultural messages that supply reinforce violence as an alternative means of problem solving, would-be offenders must still redefine the situation. Individuals quickly overcome existing inhibitions against violence by convincing themselves that violence is an acceptable or appropriate course of action. In the case of a mundane assault, this usually involves a preoccupation with the severity of the victim’s actions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

In other cases, the offender will draw mental parallels to past experiences in which violence served a viable alternative. Homicide offenders are also known to develop and refine stable normative neutralizations. In fact, even the most vicious murderer (id est, mafia hitman)often becomes adept at recasting one’s actions in a positive, self-righteous light. Manhattan Island was one of the most densely populated places in the World fifty years ago, but it was not then, as it is today, characterized by excessive violence. Anyone who has lived in a big apartment building where several hundred families live together knows that there are few places where a person has as much privacy and is as little intruded upon by the presence of next-door neighbors as in a densely populated building. By comparison there is much less privacy in a small village where the houses are much more dispersed and population density is much smaller. Here the people are more aware of each other, watch and gossip about each other’s private lives, and are constantly in each other’s field of vision; the same holds true, although to a much lesser degree, for suburban society. This example tends to show that it is not crowding as such, but the social, psychological, cultural, and economic conditions under which it occurs that are responsible for aggression. It is obvious that overpopulation, id est, population density under conditions of poverty, causes stress and aggression, which can be another reason murders are committed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

The big cities of India, as well as the slums in American cities, are an example of why overpopulation can cause problems. Overpopulation and the resulting population density are malignant, when, due to the lack of decent housing, people lack the most elementary conditions for protection from immediate and constant intrusion by others. Overpopulation means that the number of people in a given society surpasses the economic basis for providing them with adequate food, housing, and meaningful leisure. There is no doubt that overpopulation has evil consequences and that numbers must be reduced to a level which is commensurate with the economic basis. However, in a society which has the economic basis to support a dense population, the density itself does not deprive the citizen of his privacy, and it does not expose him to constant intrusion of others. An adequate standard of living, however, takes care only of the lack of privacy and constant exposure to others. It does not solve the problem of anomie, of the lack of Gemeinschaft, of the individual’s need to live in a World that has human proportions, whose members know each other as persons. The anomie of industrial society can only be removed if the whole social and spiritual structure can only be removed if the whole social and spiritual structure is changed radically: if the individual is not only adequately fed and housed, but the interests of society become identical with the interests of each individual; when the relationship to one’s fellowman and the expression of one’s powers, rather than the consumption of things and antagonism to one’s fellowman, become the principles which govern social and individual life. This is possible under the condition of high population density, but it requires radical rethinking of all our premises and radical social change. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Fantastic technical advances have filled the sky with eyes and ears automating the collection of mass data. Satellites, advanced optics, and other imaging equipment constantly monitor the Earth. Acoustical sensors blanket strategic sea lanes. Listening stations, giant radars, and other electronic devices dot the planet from Australia to Norway. Technological intelligence, or “Techint,” now includes: Signals Intelligence, or “Sigint” (which, in turn, embraces communications, electronics, and telemetry); “Radint” (which sweeps up signals sent by or to radars); and “Imaging intelligence” (which includes photography, infrared, and other detection tools). All use the biggest and most advanced computers on Earth. So vast, costly, and powerful are these systems that they have shoved intelligence gathered by humans, or “Humint,” into a second-class position. William E. Burrows, author of a study of space espionage, has summed up these high-tech systems in the following terms: “The remote sensing systems with which each side monitors the other and most of the rest of the World are so many, so redundant, and so diffuse that no preparation for an all-out attack could take place without triggering multiple alarms…Orders for armies to march, planes to fly, and civilians to hide must be communicated relatively quickly over vast areas, and what is communicated can be intercepted; everything necessary to wage the war must be moved, and what is moved can be photographed.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

The big eavesdroppers in the sky can monitor all military, diplomatic, and commercial messages sent by phone, telex, radio, teletype, or other means via satellites or microwave systems. They have even been able to listen in on Kremlin bigwigs in their limousines and Chinese scientists at the Lop Nor nuclear weapons site. (The Chinese subsequently quit using over-the-air communications and installed secure below-ground lines.) There are serious limits on all this. Despite its vaunted “spy-in-the-sky” capabilities, the United States of America was red-faced to discover that the Soviets, who were supposed to have destroyed 239 SS-23 missiles, had secretly transferred 24 of them to East Germany. There are other failings too. An increasing number of codes can no longer be cracked because of computer advances in coding. Weather still interferes with some photoreconnaissance. Adversaries can use their own electronic countermeasures to blind or deceive the collection systems. Nevertheless, factory-style mass collection of data has been spectacularly achieved. Naturally, not all intelligence involves either high technology or trench-coated snoops. A vast amount is derived from “open sources”—careful reading of the press, monitoring of foreign broadcasts, study of officially released statistics, attendance at scientific and commercial conferences—all of which, when added to the secret materials, becomes raw material for the intelligence mill. To handle all these data, from both human and technical sources, a dizzying bureaucracy has grown up which applies the factory principle of the division of labor, breaking production into a sequence of steps. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The process begins with the identification of client needs, the collection of raw material from both open and secret sources, translation, decoding, and other preparation, followed by analysis and its packaging into reports which are then disseminated to clients. Many corporations today are learning that this form of sequential production is inadequate. As we saw, in the new economy steps are eliminated or made simultaneous. Bureaucratic organization is too slow and cumbersome. Markets change rapidly. Mass production itself is giving way to “flexible production” of more and more customized products. The result for many industries has been a profound crisis. Not surprisingly, intelligence, too, finds itself at a crisis point. The new collection technologies have been so effective, they now vacuum up so much computerized imagery and listen in on so many phone calls, they deluge intelligence agencies with so much information it can no longer be processed adequately. They now increasingly cause “analysis paralysis.” Finding the right piece of information, analyzing it correctly, and getting it to the right customer in time are turning out to be bigger problems than collecting it in the first place. Today, therefore, as the World moves toward a new system of producing wealth, superseding the smokestack system, intelligence operations face a crisis of restructure paralleling that which has overtaken the economy itself. There is a final aspect of control that is essential for effective brinkmanship. The threatened party must be able to reduce the risk sufficiently, often all the way to zero, by agreeing to the brinkman’s terms. Spade must have the assurance that Gutman’s temper will cool down sufficiently quickly once he knows the secret, and Khrushchev must be sure that the United States of America’s forces will withdraw as soon as he complies. Otherwise you are damned if you do and damned if you do not, and there is no incentive to comply. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

The conduct of America’s trade policy illustrates brinkmanship without the control mechanism. The United States of America trade administration tries to compel the Japanese and the Koreans to open their markets to American exports (and also to export less to the United States of America) by pointing out the risk of more serious protectionist actions by the Congress. “If we can’t reach a moderate agreement, the Congress will enact restrictions that will be a lot worse for you.” The so-called voluntary export restraints on automobiles agreed to by Japan in 1981 were the result of just such a process. The problem with the regular use of such tactics in trade negotiations is that they can create risk, but cannot control it within the requisite range. When other issues are occupying the legislations’ attention, the risk of protectionist action by Congress is too low to be an effective threat. On the other hand, when the Congress is exercised about trade deficits, the risk is either too high to be acceptable to our own administration, or simply unresponsive to a modest foreign restraint and therefore an ineffective threat. In other words, the American system of checks and balances can create risk, but cannot control it effectively. With our present technology, which is simpler to build—a car that runs on gasoline, or one that forages for fuel in the forest? A foraging car would be very hard to design, cost more to manufacture, and have more parts to break down. The situation is similar with nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Ralph Merkle of Xerox Palo Alto Research Center discussed this issue at the First Foresight Conference on Nanotechnology. He explains, “It’s both uneconomical and more difficult to design a self-replicating system that manufactures every part it needs from naturally occurring compounds. Bacteria do this, but in the process they have to synthesize all twenty amino acids and many other compounds, using elaborate enzyme systems tailored specifically for the purpose. For bacteria facing a hostile World, the ability to adapt and respond to a changing environment is worth almost any cost, for lacking this ability they would be wiped out. “But in a factory setting, where adequate supplies of all the needed parts are provided, the ability to synthesize parts from scratch is not only unneeded, it consumes extra time and energy, and produces excess waste. Even if we could design artificial self-replicating systems as flexible as existing natural ones, an inflexible and rigid system is better adapted to the controlled factor setting in which it will find itself than a more complex, more adaptable, less efficient design.” What is more, the Desert Rose Industries scenario showed how an expandable factory setup could operate with no self-replicating machines at all: molecular manufacturing does not require them. If they are used for some purpose, they will most likely resemble automobiles in their finicky requirements. A self-replicating molecular machine built for industrial purpose (and made as simple as possible) would float in a container of specially selected chemicals not commonly found in nature, and it would be easy to make that a design rule: Never make a replicator that can use an abundant natural compound as fuel. If we follow this rule, the idea of a replicator “escaping” and replicating in the wild will be as absurd as the notion of an automobile going feral and refueling itself from tree sap. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Whether for replicators or cars, to design a machine that could operate in the wild would not be a matter of a flick of the draftsman’s pen, but an intense, sustained research-and-development effort focused on that objective. Crashes and explosions occur in machinery by accident, but complex new capabilities do not. A simple psychological error frequently occurs when someone first hears about nanotechnology, and hears mention of “molecular machines,” and “replicators,” and “nanocomputers,” and “nanomachines that operate in nature.” The error is this: The person makes a single new mental pigeonhole for “nanotechnology,” throws everything into it, and stirs. After some mental fermentation, the result is the mythical nanomachine that does everything: it is a replicator, it is a supercomputer, it is a BMW X7, it slices, it dices, it makes Julian carrots—and on reflection, this imaginary nanomachine sounds uncontrolled and dangerous. With enough effort, a do-it-all nanomachine could perhaps be built, but it sounds difficult and there is no good reason to try. There are advantages to making systems of molecular machinery that can use inexpensive, abundant chemicals, and devices that can operate in nature, but these machines need not be replicators. A facility like Desert Rose might be designed to use little but electric power from solar panels and molecules from the air, but a setup like this is not going to slip away. Nanomachines built for cleaning up pollutants and other outdoor tasks could be manufactured infacilities run like Desert Rose and then spread or installed where they are needed. Extraordinary accidents deserve attention, but with a little care they can be completely avoided. The incentive to build anything resembling a Star Trek-scenario replicator is negligible, even from a military perspective. Any effort toward building such a thing should be seen not as a use of nanotechnology, but as an abuse. Other abuses seem more likely, however, and are quite bad enough. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

It should be plain that failure of the participants in an engagement to contain their activity can not only lead to a betrayal of one or more of their numbers, but also cause the content and feeling generated in the engagement to flow over into the situation at large. At such times bystanders may become dislodged from their own involvements, making it very difficult for them to continue to extend civil inattention to the uncontained encounter. An instance of this doubly offensive disloyalty is found during what are sometimes called “scenes.” Here, an individua who is supposed to be enclosed in an engagement may make a deeply engrossing appeal to others outside it, even though the appeal bears on a specific issue generated within the original engagement. Thus, one pair of patients I studied would (according to nursing notes) travel on a bus under the guidance of a nurse, start an argument with each other, and soon “open up the encounter” to all the passengers, dragging them in on both sides of the altercation. A woman in a lower-class street who is struck by her male companion may similarly make a direct appeal to others for help, thereby forcibly embroiling them. The disturbed feelings created by such bursting of the bounds of the engagement give us a clear picture of exactly what the rules of public conduct operate to prevent. In the extreme, a scene can break down all conventional closure separating the various engagements and unengaged individuals in the situation, providing an instance of an exhaustive engagement where none had been expected or desired. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

The fact that bystanders may desire or feel obliged to remain out of an accessible encounter allows for a special kind of half-scene, where persons in an encounter talk in a sufficiently loud and pointed fashion to be heard by an outsider, yet modulate their talk enough to give him a slight opportunity to distend. Here the terms “grumbling” or “muttering,” and “stage whisper,” are sometimes used. Thus, two middle-aged ladies sitting at a drugstore counter waiting for their lunch sandwiches may, upon receiving them and finding the filling thin, ostentatiously life up a piece of the bread and complain to each other in a tone of voice that the countergirl is half-meant to hear. (The countermeasure for this, as suggested, is for the person who is grumbled at to attempt directly to ratify the half-spoken comment as a message formally addressed to him, employing some such phrase as “Did you say something?”) In addition to “selling out” an encounter while he is yet a member of it, a participant can also leave it in such a ways as to expose the feelings within the encounter to the situation at large. Those remaining in the encounter may not be given a chance to compose themselves during the leave-taking, and the leave-taker may decline to damp and muffle the particular affect generated in him as a participant of the engagement. Ordinarily, of course, a brief leave-taking ceremony functions to allow leave-taking without exposure. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

One’s expectations that a leave-taker will “cut back” to the tone and temper prevailing in the gathering at large becomes evident when an individual fails to discipline his leave-taking in this way. A special kind of momentary scene can be observed among children, opera stars, mental patients, and others who have the privilege of temperament, when they precipitously take leave of an engagement, stalking or flouncing out of it and often out of the situation, leaving a wave of affect marked materially by slammed doors and overturned chairs. Yet it must also be said that the leave-taker is expected to show in the situation at large at least some marks of his recent participation, some lingering, albeit fading, signs of the animation the encounter inspired in him; should he not do so, he exposes the encounter a one that has failed to move him. It should be apparent that affective disorganization is particularly likely when the leave-taker leaves what was in the first place only a two-person engagement. In such cases the remaining person, having no others to whom to deflect his readied response, and left deeply involved in an encounter that no longer exists, finds himself in a poor position to cut back his own affect to that prevailing in the situation as a whole. This possibility can, of course, be exploited. For example, one patient I studied, who seemed to know exactly how to attack social arrangements at their joints, as it were, would—according to nursing notes—leave with a package from a store after paying the clerk all but one or two cents of the requested amount, thereby leaving him in a position neither to terminate his involvement in the encounter nor to sustain a role in it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Unless people make sufficient efforts from the beginning the system will be useless to them. Efforts must be organized. What does this mean? Unless you understand our work, we shall not be able to help you. You can be helped only if you enter into our work. One must work on three lines. Before one can understand what this means in relation to the work, one must understand three different lines of work in oneself: intellectual work (acquisition of knowledge), emotional work (work on emotions), and work on will (work on one’s action). One has no big will such as man no. 7 has but one has will at certain moments. Will is the resultant of desires. Will can be seen at moments when there is a strong desire to do or not to do something. Only those moments are important. The system can help only those who realize that they cannot control their will. Then the system will either help them to control their will, or they will have to do as they are told. “Is there no such thing as forcing a situation?” It may look like that but really it happened. If it could not happen in that way, then it could not happen. When things happen in a certain way, we are carried by the current but we think that we control the current. “If one feels for a moment that one is able to ‘do,’ say, to put through a particular job in ordinary work what is the explanation of that?” If one is trained to do something one learns to follow a certain kind of happenings, or if you like, to start a certain kind of happenings, and then these develop, and one runs behind although one thinks one is leading. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19