Your Friends are Sorry for Me, they Watch You Pretend to Adore Me

The sense of doom in us today is not a fear of science; it is a fear of war. No science has not invented war; but it has turned it into a very different thing. To determine that criminal violence and gun ownership and carrying are related is not necessarily to find that the reason (or, at least, the primary reason) juveniles own and carry guns is to commit crimes. Indeed, as noted above, the percentage of inmates who had procured a gun specifically for use in a crime (40 percent) was considerably less than the percentage of inmates who had committed-gun related crimes (63 percent). It is possible then that crimes often were committed with guns that were obtained or carried routinely with other ends in mind. As Democrats press on for gun control, the number of suspected ghost guns recovered by law enforcement agencies and sent to the ATF for tracking increased by 1,083 percent from 2017 (1,629) to 2021 (19,273). This indicates, for one thing, that these ghost guns are increasingly being used to commit crimes. As more restrictions are placed on the type of guns that can be legally sold, and to whom they can be sold to, as technology increases, more people will procure these phantom guns, and the producers will become more sophisticated with the types of guns they produce. The idea is that these phantom guns will not only become substitutes for the guns that have been banned, but that people will totally evade the legal means of buying guns so that the government cannot track them. The outlawing of guns will cause a sharp increase in demand for guns, like Prohibition of liquor did. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

Prohibition was meant to protect individuals and families from the “scourge of drunkenness.” However, it had unintended consequences including: a rise in organized crime associated with the illegal production and sale of alcohol, an increase in smuggling, and a decline in tax revenue. In fact, shortly after prohibition of alcohol was passed, alcohol consumption increased sharply by 70 percent of its pre-Prohibition level. Furthermore, with more phantom guns being produced by individuals, they will get more creative with the designs of the guns and designer guns may become a status symbol. For instance, carrying a yellow Pikachu assault rifle and driving a yellow Ferrari Berlinetta could make someone be perceived as cool. Eventually, individuals will even start manufacturing their own bullets. According to some media reviews of the issue, “respect” is a major element in the decision to carry a gun. In this view, the gun is principally a symbols totem that displays “toughness” or “machismo” and serves primarily to make an impression on one’s peers. Inmate respondents were asked to agree strongly, agree, disagree, or disagree strongly, “I’m my crowd, if you don’t have a gun people don’t respect you.” Eighty-six percent of the inmates rejected this statement, most of them strongly. They were also asked to agree or disagree (strongly or otherwise) that “My friend would look down on me if I did not carry a gun.” Eighty-nine percent of the inmates also disagreed with the statement (most, again, strongly). These findings hold as well for inmates who had carried guns. It thus appears that the “symbolism” or “status” hypothesis may be dismissed with a great deal of confidence, at least for the sample studied here. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

Inmates indicated that there are some “very important” reasons for carrying a weapon during crime. Inmates who routinely carried guns during crime: 80 percent that it was very important to be ready to defend self. Fifty eight percent said it was very important to carrying a gun during the commission of a crime because the victim would be armed. Forty nine percent said they might need a weapon to escape a crime scene. Forty five percent said that they needed to carry a gun so the victim will not put up a fight. Forty two percent said that people do not “mess around” with armed offenders. A similar conclusion is evident from these findings. Inmates who said they carried funs at least occasionally, but not “all of the time,” were asked about the circumstances in which they were most likely to carry a gun. The question is, of course, meaningless for those who never carried and for those who carried all, the time. The least likely circumstance in which inmates would carry gins was when they were “out raising hell,” presumably a peer-linked activity. They were also relatively unlikely to carry guns when they were “hanging out with friends” or when they were with friends who were themselves carrying guns. If it were simply a matter of status of reputation, one would expect these to be the most (not the least) likely circumstances in which they would carry. These findings pertain not only to the larger sample of inmates but to subsamples of those who had committed armed robbery and those who “always” or “usually” were armed when committing a crime. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

Rather than signaling a concern with status, the responses about important reasons for carrying a gun, they were dominated—overwhelmingly—by themes of self-protection and self-preservation. Inmates who carried guns did so most frequently when they were in a strange area (72 percent), when they were out at night (58 percent), and whenever they thought they might face a need for self-protection (75 percent). The same theme emerged in responses by subsamples of robbers and armed offenders. When doing a drug deal 71 percent of inmates were armed. When planning to commit a crime 61 percent of inmates were armed. Likewise, the results indicate that, for any of the three types of guns purchased by inmates, use in crime or to “get someone” was very important for no more than 43 percent of those purchasing guns and no more than 52 percent of gun purchasers who were involved in armed offenses. Here too, the desire for protection and the need to arm oneself against enemies were the primary reasons to obtain a gun, easily outpacing all other motivations. The theme of self-protection is again evident, though less clearly so, in the circumstances in which the inmate respondent had actually fired their guns. In self-defense 87 percent of inmates fired their guns. During a crime 79 percent of inmates fired their guns. During drug deals, 76 percentage of inmates fired their guns. While hanging out with friends 89 percent of inmates fired their guns. While high or drunk 69 percent of inmates fired their guns. While fleeing from the police 53 percent of inmates fired their guns. During a fight with someone 80 percent of inmates fired their guns. To scare someone 76 percent of inmates fired their guns. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

These findings suggest a complex of reasons why the inmates (serious offenders who would be expected to have fire guns during crimes) might shoot a gun. That same complex suggest that these juveniles, both by design and by fate, find themselves in circumstances that, in their judgment, require gunfire. It is likely that, in their view, the distinction between victim and perpetrator is often vague. Most of these inmate respondents had used guns to intimidate others and had had guns used against them. Much of the self-protection they sought, in short, was likely protection against one another. All the evidence reviewed here suggests that, among the juveniles studied, the odds of surviving in a hostile environment were seen as better is one were armed. Exceptional rates of crime, violence, and gun activity appear to characterize the social environments from which these respondents were drawn. Most regularly experienced threats of violence and violence itself. Eighty-four percent reported that they had been threatened with a gun or shot at during their lives. Half had been stabbed with a knife. More than eight in ten (82 percent) had been beaten. Not surprisingly given this climate, significant percentages of respondents felt that shooting another person was justified under circumstances that conventional society would not deem appropriate. Thirty-five percent agreed or strongly agreed that “it is okay to shoot a person if that is what it takes to get something you want.” Twenty-nine percent strongly agreed that it was “okay to shoot some guy who doesn’t belong in your neighborhood.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Elements of insult and injury inevitably increased the perceived acceptance of violent responses. In was considered “okay [agree or strongly agree] to shoot someone who hurts or insults you” by 61 percent of the inmates. If one’s family was the target of the insult or injury, the percentage agreeing rose to 74 percent agreement. Thus, if their enemies and even perfect strangers possessed the weapons and mentality that allowed them to take a life quickly and easily from a distance, the present respondents likely reasoned that arming themselves was necessary. It is difficult to label the juvenile’s use of a gun in crime as peripheral to the possession of a gun, since so many of the inmate respondents had used guns for crime. Instead, it is likely that any gun procured principally for protection (or status) is also viewed as potentially instrumental in committing crimes. Unfortunately, the implications of these results are not encouraging. The perception that one’s very survival depends on being armed makes a weapon a necessity at nearly any cost. Attempts to reduce juvenile gun-related crime through threat of criminal justice sanctions can hardly be expected to produce results if a juvenile “must” have a gun to survive, and crimes are committed with guns because they happen to be in the youth’s possession. Gun-related crime (though not necessarily all weapon-related crime), then, will likely decrease only when juveniles are convinced that they do not have to carry guns for protection. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

The word “deceived” is according to the Scripture, the description of every unregenerate human being, without distinction of person, race, culture, or gender. “We also were…deceived” (Titus 3.3), said Paul the Apostle, although in his “deceived condition he had been a religious man, “walking according to the righteousness of the law, blameless” (Phil. 3.6). Every unregenerate man is first of all deceived by his own deceitful heart (Jer. 17.9; Isa. 44.20) and by sin (Heb. 3.13). Then the god of this World adds the “blinding of the mind,” lest the light of the gospel of Christ should dispel the darkness (2 Cor. 4.4). Nor does the deception of the evil one wholly end when the regenerating life of God reaches the person, for this blinding of the mind is removed only so far as the deceptive lies of Satan are dislodged by the light of truth. Even though the heart is renewed and the will has turned to God, the deeply ingrained disposition to self-deception remains. This power of the deceiver to blind the mind betrays itself in many forms, as the following statements from Scripture show: The man is deceived if he isa hearer but not a doer of the Word of God (Jas. 1.22). He is deceived if he says he has no sin (1 John 1.8). He is deceived when he thinks himself to be “something” when he is nothing (Gal. 6.3). He is deceived when he thinks himself to be wise with the wisdom of this World (1 Cor. 3.18). He is deceived by seeming to be religious when an unbridled tongue reveals his true condition (Jas. 1.26). He is deceived if he thinks he can sow and not rep what he shows (Gal. 6.7). He is deceived if he thinks the unrighteous will inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6.9). He is deceived if he thinks that contact with sin will not have its effect upon him (1 Cor. 15.33). #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

DECIEVED! How the word repels, and how involuntarily every human being resents it as applied to himself—not realizing that the very repulsion is the work of the deceiver for the purpose of keeping the deceived ones from knowing the truth and being set free from deception. If men can be so easily fooled by the deception arising from their own fallen nature, surely the forces of Satan will eagerly seek to add to it and not diminish it by one iota. How keenly will they work to keep men in bondage to the old creation. How multitudinous are thee forms of self-deception, enabling them the more readily to carry on their deceiving work! Their methods of deception are old and new, adapted to suit the nature, state and circumstances of the victim. Impelled by malice and ill-will towards mankind and hatred of all goodness, the emissaries of Satan do not fail to execute their plans, persevering to reach their goal. In order to begin to struggle with negative emotions it is first of all necessary to realize that there is not a single useful negative emotion. Negative emotions are all equally bad and all a sign of weakness. Next we have to realize that we can struggle with them, that they can be conquered and destroyed because there is no real center for them. If there were a real center for them, we should have no chance; we should remain for ever in the power of negative emotions. Luckily for us they exist in an artificial center which can be destroyed and lost, and we shall feel much better if it is. Even the realization that this is possible is very much; but we have so many convictions, prejudices and even principles about it, that it is difficult to get rid of the idea that negative emotions are necessary and obligatory. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

As long as we think that they are necessary, unavoidable, and even useful for self-expression or many other things, we can do nothing. It is necessary to have a certain mental struggle to realize that negative emotions are quite useless, that they have no useful function in our lives and yet, at the same time, that all life is based on them. That is what nobody realized. One of the strongest illusions is to think that negative emotions are produced by circumstances, and we speak of being angry “for some perfectly just reason,” but all negative emotions are in us, inside us. Before we can begin to struggle with them, we must realize that there are no just reason for being angry. We think—and we like to think—that our negative emotions are produced either by the fault of other people or by the fault of circumstances. This is an illusion. My anger is not in the reason, it is in me. Your anger is not the reason, it is in you. The causes of negative emotions are not in external reasons, they are in ourselves. There is absolutely not a single unavoidable reason whereby somebody else’s action or certain circumstances should produce negative emotion in me. It is only my weakness. If you observe yourself, you will see that although the causes outside remain the same, they sometimes produce negative emotion in you and sometimes not. The reason for this is that the real cause of the negative emotion is in you and the external event is only the apparent cause. If you are in a good state, if you are remembering yourself, if you are not identifying, then—relatively speaking and barring catastrophes—nothing that happens outside can produce negative emotion in you. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

If you are in a bd state, identified, immersed in imagination or something like that, then everything just a little unpleasant will produce violent emotion in you. Youth, because they have so little life experience, and their brains are not fully formed do not understand what negative emotions are about. Also, those who are raised in environments where negative emotions and negative reactions are glorified, do not understand that the problem lies inside. Even if people are going out of their way to try to produce negative emotions in you, which can be illegal, one has to find a rational way to stop them, without becoming an offender. In an attempt to show that negative emotions are produced by an outside cause, questions are sometimes asked about such things as grief at the death of a friend and other kinds of suffering. Suffering, in itself, is not negative emotion. It can produce negative emotion only if you identity with it. Suffering can be real; negative emotion is not real. After all, suffering occupies a very small part of life but negative emotions occupy a big part—they occupy the whole of life. And why? Because we justify them. We think that they are produced by some external cause. Certainly, people who are full of negative emotions and identification are likely to produce similar reactions in other people, but one must learn to isolate oneself in such cases by means of self-remembering and not identifying, realizing at the same time that isolation does not mean indifference. When we know that negative emotions cannot be produced by external causes, most of them disappear. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

However, the first condition is that we must realize fully that they cannot be produced by external causes if we do not wish to have them. They are generally there because we permit them explaining their presence as being due to external causes, so that we do not struggle with them. Negative emotions cannot exist without imagination. Simply suffering pain is not a negative emotion, but when imagination and identification enter, then it becomes negative emotion. Emotional pain, like physical pain, is not negative emotion itself, but when we begin to make all kinds of embroidery on it, it becomes emotion. Rather than making solitude an act of discovery many people are so busy manipulating and imposing that they have lost touch with themselves and therefore with the real World. This is often true of teachers and counselors who fail to take the time to be alone and discover what really matters in life. Children sometimes learn quickly in contrast to the prolonged struggles adults experience. In their dances, children portray feelings of loneliness, anger, joy, fear, and problems in the relations with their parents, teachers, and friends. They select their own piece of music and pantomime and dance their own stories. Some children write their stories afterwards and put them in their portfolios of special creation. Children’s forms of art often are therapy they use to depict their suffering an loneliness, and the loss of loved ones. However, some adults tend to act out their problems and project them on to others because they do not have anyone to reprimand them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

Adults need healthy habits, with people who are mentally healthy, to evoke inner feelings when the moment is right. Through church or therapy, many adults are able to share their loneliness, experience a release, and deepen the bond with their Heavenly Father and others. This is what inspires many people to go to church and/or therapy. I want now to re-emphasize that when one thinks in terms of the looseness or tightness of situational orientation, and in terms of the dimensions and idiom through which this is exhibited, one has means of passing a little beyond the rationalistic dicta by which we ordinarily account for our major explicit situational rulings. Take for example, our jumbled attitudes and rationalizations regarding body exposure. Instead of considering the amount or the parts of the body exposed, it might be more profitable to examine the orientational implications of exposure. The relative undress of a bathing suit is part of the whole looseness complex—which includes the way in which one handles one’s voice and eyes as well as one’s body—and it is this whole complex that is tolerated and even encouraged on the beach. (Why this complex should here by approved still remains a question, of course, but a slightly different one.) The relative undress of decolletage at balls may be appropriate for the opposite reason. The exposure of this much of the self would seem in part to be an appreciative acknowledgement that the participants are so tightly in step with the occasion as a whole, and so trustful of the good conduct of their socially homogeneous circle, that they can withstand this much temptation to undue mutual-involvement without giving in to it. (An extreme, here, is perhaps found in the morals-ruling in America, which permits certain members of the LGBTQ community to appear on elementary schools, scantily clad, and perform in front of tender aged children. Presumably the sensitivity of their pose is such a strong mark of devotion and assimilation to the illegal political agenda of grooming and exploitation of minors.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Yet in almost any public situation in our society, expect at a Hollywood awards show, a woman dressed only in an underslip, although completely covered by it, would be greatly out of place; for such attire implies that the wearer has not yet put on her situational constume, whatever it is to be, and is not in a position to honor her situational commitments, whatever they may be. Nudity in a nudist colony or a doctor’s office, or on the posing platform in an art class, is manageable because here it is the garb that shows proper regard for the demands of the occasion. Logic would force one to claim that a woman’s appearance in a slip on these occasions would be a gaffe; and, in fact, arrangements are sometimes made so that those who will properly appear nude will not first appear half clothed and out of role. By the same logic one can understand how a model can appear half-clothed at a fashion show of underclothing, for this is the way she shows appropriate involvement within the situation, albeit in a special performer role. Thus, apparently, the formality of a dress-modeling establishment (and hence its “tone,” the desirability of its street location, and the like) can be indicted by the care that models take not to wander around the floor, after a showing, in the slips they have shown. Exposure of self in situational deshabille may be condoned, of course, in the household, at least within certain limit. Certain close relationships may be defined as ones that give the related person the license to let occasions decay when these persons are alone in each other’s presence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Hence, when a visitor to the house accidentally witnesses a resident of the house in disarray, a minor relation crisis occurs, which is due to the momentary but embarrassing implication that the witness is in a relationship to the observed that would warrant the lapsing of situational niceties between them. Children and adults learn as they make everyday choices and experience the consequences of their choices. Those who keep the commandments of God, work hard, and abide by societal laws have greater opportunities to live productively and successfully. Those who are lazy or disobedient often enter adulthood unprepared of successful living. Ultimately, we all experience the consequences of our actions. The righteous will receive eternal life, while the unrepentant will be cause out (see Matthew 25.46). Parents can apply consequence in ways that help their children learn responsible behavior. Parents who have been successful in acquiring more often have a difficult time saying no to the demands of overindulged children. Their children run the risk of not learning important values like hard work, delayed gratification, honesty, and compassion. The actions of many parents encourage self-centeredness and irresponsibility in their children. These parents attempt to bolster their children’s self-esteem by telling them how terrific they are without requiring anything substantive from them. This unmerited praise often results in lazy, demanding, disrespectful, undisciplined children and teenagers. Permissive parents require very little of their children, providing few or no consequences for disobedience or failure to perform. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

God forbid that there should be any of us so unwisely indulgent, so thoughtless and so shallow in our affection for our children that we dare not check them in a wayward course, in wrong-doing and in their foolish love for the things of the World more than for the things of righteousness, for fear of offending them. Clothing conduct during crises and disaster can be similarly analyzed. At a hotel fire, guests in undress are tolerated, not, perhaps because eyes are turned to more important things, but because participants are allowed to be so deeply immersed in the crisis that their undress of others felt as an insufficient stimulus, under the circumstances, to induce inappropriate mutual-involvement. When the fire is brought under control, and the crisis abates, when in fact the occasion is such that alienation from it is a more possible thing, undress once again becomes a threat to situational orientation, and survivors begin to become sheepish about their lack of clothing. Any state of dress is proper or improper only in terms of what other evidence is available concerning the individual’s allocation of involvement and hence one’s orientation to the social occasion and its gathering. Since dress carries much of the burden of expressing orientation within the situation, we can understand why such apparently petty matters of “mere” etiquette should be of concern. However, given that this is the major reason why dress is important, we can expect and predict much variation in what will be defined as allowable dress. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

A male college student who enters the classroom in need of a shave and in trunks, or a female who enters with her hair in curlers, is nakedly showing a lack of attachment to the behavior setting; but when an exam is being held, and all students in the exam hall are engrossed quite deeply in school work, having studied devotedly for the previous two weeks, then there is already sufficient sign of involvement in schooling, and thus the informalities of appearance I have permitted may well be permitted, no longer being symbols of alienation. Similarly, an accountant or lawyer, with a downtown office, who attended to his clients dressed in an old sweater and no jacket would be considered to be disoriented in business situations and to the business World itself; the same man working overtime on Saturday afternoon can afford such laxness, however, because his mere presence in the office at an off hour is sign enough of regard for the work World. Professional investment may be likened to those newspaper competition in which competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from one hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice must nearly corresponds to the average preference of the competitor as a whole; so that each competitor had to pick, not those faces which one oneself finds prettiest, but those which one think likeliest to catch the fancy o the other competitors, all of which whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. It is not a case of choosing those which, to the best of one’s judgment, are really the prettiest, nor even those which average opinion genuinely thinks the prettiest. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligences to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

It matters not who the prettiest woman is in truth. What you care about is trying to predict who everyone ese will think is the prettiest or who everyone else will think everyone else will think is prettiest. When one hears comparison of the stock market to a beauty contest, it is essential to emphasize the beauty contest is no ordinary pageant. In an ordinary pageant the most beautiful contestant should win; the judges need not behave strategically. Similarly, in a stock market, one imagines that the stock with the highest earnings should have the highest price. This great insight explains how strategic play could outweigh reality in determining winners in the stock market and newspaper beauty contests. In the newspaper contest, readers have to put themselves into all the other readers’ shoes simultaneously. At this point their choice of a winner has much less to do with any trye or absolute standard of beauty than with trying to find some focal point on which expectations coverage. If one contestant is significantly more beautiful than all the others, this could provide the necessary focal point. However, the reader’s job is rarely that easy. Imagine instead that the hundred finalists were practically indistinguishable except for the color of their hair. Of the hundred, only one is a redhead. Would you pick the redhead? The task of the reader is to figure out the realized convention without the benefit of communication. “Pick the most beautiful” might be the stated rue, but that could be significantly more difficult than picking the skinniest or the redhead, or the one with an interesting gap between her two front teeth. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

Anything that distinguishes becomes a focal point and allows people’s expectations to converge. For this reason, we should not be surprised that many of the World’s most beautiful models do not have perfect features; rather, they are almost perfect but have some interesting flaw that gives their look a personality and a focal point. Investing in the stock market has many of the same properties. A stock price raises when the demand at the old price exceeds the supply. (The evening news commentary that the stock market fell owning to heavy selling tends to leave out this condition: remember, for every seller there must be a buyer.) To make money in the market, your goal is to figure out what stocks other people think they are going to appreciate. As always, they are making this calculation by putting themselves into everybody’s shoes all at once. When this happens, anything goes. Stock prices can escalate to absurd levels and then come crashing back to reality. The Crash of September 2001 is only a bump compared to some of the speculative bubble crashes in history. From 1634 to 1638 the prices of tulip bulbs in Holland shot up several thousand percent and then wilted away even more quickly. The episode is known to this day as the tulip blub mania. Equilibrium can easily be determined by whim or fad. There is nothing fundamental that guarantees the most beautiful contestant will be chosen or the best stock will appreciate the fastest. There are some forces that work in the right direction. High forecast earnings are similar to the beauty contestant’s complexion—one of the many necessary but by no means sufficient conditions needed to anchor otherwise arbitrary whims and fads. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

Because of the growing global character of technology, environmental problems, finance, telecommunications, and the media, new cultural feedback system have begun to operate that make one country’s information policies a matter of concern for others. The info-agenda is going global. When Chernobyl sent radioactive clouds over parts of Europe, a great wave of anti-Soviet anger was aroused, because Soviet officials delayed notifying countries in the part of the fallout. These nations insisted that they had a right to know the facts, and to know them immediately. The implication was that no nation, by itself, had the right to withhold the facts, and that an unspoken information ethic transcends national interests. By the time another disaster struck—an earthquake in Armenia-chastened Soviet authorities instantly reported it to the entire World pres. However, by the terms of that implicit principle the Soviet Union was not the only transgressor. Shortly after Chernobyl, Admiral Stansfield Turner, former director of the CIA, publicly criticized the United States of America for failing to divulge sufficient information about the disaster gathered by its “eye-in-the-sky” satellites. Without giving away secrets, Mr. Turner declared, “Our intelligence collection capabilities…give us the opportunity to keep people well-informed Worldwide.” In fact, as new media for dissemination of information encircles the Earth, facilitating the globalization required by the new wealth-creation system, it becomes harder to contain specific information within national borders, or even keep it out. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

This is what the British government forgot during the so-called Spycatcher controversy in Britain. When Peter Wright wrote a book with that tile, in which he made serious accusations against former officials of British counterintelligence, the Thatcher government moved to bar its publication. Mr. Wright thereupon published the book in the United States of America and elsewhere. The British attempt to suppress the book turned it into an international best-seller. Television and newspapers everywhere carried stories about it—thus guaranteeing that information the British government wanted to conceal would find its way back into Britain. Because of this feedback process, the British government was compelled to back down, and Mr. Wright’s book went on to become a best-seller in Britain too. The use of the media outside a country to influence political decisions inside it is also becoming more common. When the Kohl government in Bonn denied that German firms were helping Libya’s strongman, Muammar el-Qaddafi, to build a chemical weapons plant fifty miles outside Tripoli, U.S. intelligence leaked its satellite and aerial reconnaissance evidence to American and European media. This led the German magazine Stern to undertake its own in-depth investigative report, which in turn forced a red-faced government to admit that it had known all along what it claimed not to know. In case after case, then, we find information—who has it, how it was obtained, how it was arrived at—at the heart of both national and international political conflict. The underling reason for the new importance of info-politics is the growing reliance of power, in all it forms, on knowledge. As this historic powershift is more widely understood, info-politics will take on added intensity. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Yet all these are mere skirmishes alongside what could turn out to be the most important info-war of the decades to come. Again our World is a variant of the Ordinary Expectations scenario, but the international environment is in a healthier condition. Despite trade friction, global economic integration has continued. Europe, the United States of America, and Japan all have a large stake in each other’s well-being, and they recognize it. International military cooperation has continued, in part as a conscious counterweight to conflicts over trade. International cooperation in research has grown, spurred in part by the Japanese desire for closer international ties. The end of the Cold War has made secret military research programs less commonplace. It is in this environment that primitive assemblers are developed, and it does not make a great difference who gets there first. As is standard in basic research, groups publish their results in the open literature and compete to impress their colleagues at home and abroad with the brilliance of their achievements. The arrival of the first assemblers spurs serious debate on nanotechnology and its consequences, and that debate is reasonably open and balanced. It covers military, medical, and environmental consequences, with a major emphasis on how clean, efficient manufacturing can rise the level of wealth and spread it Worldwide. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Military analysts consider the impact of molecular manufacturing and its potential products, and concerns are grave, so they undertake classified research programs. However—as usual—secrecy slows communication among researchers: those in the classified programs fall behind their more open colleagues, whose informational information-swapping runs far ahead of the published journals. Some forces push toward rivalry; others push toward cooperation. A healthy pattern emerges: Those decision makers who take nanotechnology most seriousl are precisely those who seethe least reason for future international conflict among democratic nations. They no longer anticipate growing conflict over dwindling resources, inequalities of wealth, and global atmospheric pollution. They see what nanotechnology can do for these problems, without anyone taking anything from anyone else. And so, on all sides, those who take nanotechnology most seriously are those most inclined to look for cooperative solutions to the problems it poses. There are exceptions, but the tide of opinion is against them, and their ideas do not dominate policy. The public debate on nanotechnology grows, and it ranges far and wide. Enthusiasts suggest many wondrous applications for nanotechnology. Some are soon dismissed as being impossible or just plain undesirable. Some are workable improvements on the horrid technologies of the twentieth century; these are developed and applied almost as soon as the become technically possible. The rest are harder to evaluate, but in the course of years of hard work and careful study some of these are developed and adopted, and others are rejected. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

At first, some people proposed that nanotechnology be stopped, but they never proposed a credible way to do it. Realists observing the Worldwide technological ferment look for other option to deal with the dangers. The World’s industrial democracies, taken together, hold the decisive lead. They have developed mechanisms for coordinating and controlling technologies with military potential by regulating technology transfer and trade. These mechanisms have been developed, exercised, and honed through decades of Cold War experience not only with nuclear and missile technologies, but with a host of high-technology products and devices. These mechanisms are not perfect, but they are useful. As concerns about international instability mount, the industrial democracies work to improve their teamwork: they reinforce the tradition of free trade and cooperation within the club, and strengthen regulations that block the flow of critical technologies to the World’s remaining dictators. As a result of these developments, nanotechnology matures in an atmosphere dominated more by economic cooperation than by military competition. The focus of policy is solidly on civilian applications, with due attention to potential military threats. Trust is reinforced by the automatic “mutual inspection” that is a natural part of cooperative research and development. Hard decisions remain, and the shouting and the arguments grow louder throughout the World’s media. However, where the problem is clear, and survival or World well-being are at stake, necessary decisions are made and there is enough international coherence to implement them. Years pass, and technologies mature. Health improves, wealth rises, and the biosphere begins to heal. Despite the turbulence and anguish of change—and despite voices saying, “It was better in the old days,” at least for them and despite real losses—many people of goodwill can look at the World, contemplate the whole, and affirm that this change is, on the whole, a change for the better. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

Cresleigh Homes

Welcome to our Cresleigh Ranch home at Mills Station! Take off your shoes 👟 in the front hall and slip into our kitchen – curl up on a stool at the island and we’ll fix you a cool drink! 🍹