Randolph Harris II International Institute

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To Be Alive is to Face Risks!

Life is often a struggle. The characteristics of humanistic psychology are directly related to our view of human nature. Man’s own best interests, viewed in the light of a full understanding of his nature, are the criteria for the study and application of humanistic psychology. The first thing that interests us in understanding the essential self is what makes us go. By testing and trying himself out with all the limits of the human condition, man comes to some understanding of what he can and cannot do. This enables him to arrive at some acquired pattens of thought, attitude, and action, giving him a sense of safety or security. He has learned how to stand, what falling feels like, what staying up feels like, and, in the healthy child, a preference for the feeling of staying him. Far from being forced to grow up, the child who is growing in healthy terms, who has “made it” in the sense of acquiring a homeostatic balance of needs and tension-reductions, literally jumps at the chance to move up to the next stage. Those who were kept at a level of satisfaction and need-reduction become bored, fatigued, resentful. It is part of the biological nature of the person to seek continuing growth. Homeostasis moves up, then, from the biological drive to a learned need at each level, following a pattern: discover a need, motive or deficit, find a goal or incentive that will meet the need, and enjoy the satisfying tension-reduction for a period of time. Then it is time to move on to another field, for a different “ball game,” of the same kinds of processes. There is a level of care a one is obligated to exert for an accessible encounter past civil inattention to the question of how an when one can present oneself for official participation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Even at social parties, where every encounter is supposed to be conducted in a fashion that makes it joinable by any guest, the entrant is expected to exert tact, and when cues suggest, not exercise one’s rights. When one does enter, one is expected to accept the current topic and tone, thus minimizing the disruption one causes. If a lady and gentleman are conversing together at an evening party, it would be a rudeness in another person to go up and interrupt them by introducing a new topic of observation. If you are sure that there is nothing of a particular and private interest passing between them you may join their conversation and strike into the current of their remarks; yet if you then find that they are so much engaged and entertained by the discussion that they were holding together, as to render the termination or change of its character unwelcome, you should withdraw. If, however, two persons are occupied with one another upon what you guess to be terms peculiarly delicate and particular, you should without yourself from their company. Welcome or not, the entrant today is usually expected to knock at the door of the encounter before one enters, thus giving the encounter advance warning of one’s intention and the participants a moment to straighten their house for the newcomer. One of the most interesting forms of cooperation in the maintenance of conventional closure is what might be called spacing. The term “individual distance” was introduced to describe the tendency of birds on a fence or railing to stay a particular distance from each other, the distance apparently varies with the species. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The term “flight distance” refers to the closeness with which an individual of a given species can be approached before taking flight. However, one should give caution against cross-cultural generalization. In the U.S.A., we distribute ourselves more evenly than many other people. We have strong feelings about touching and being crowded; in a streetcar, bus, or elevator we draw ourselves in. Toward  person who relaxes and lets oneself come into full contact with others in a crowded place we usually feel reactions that could not be printed on this page. It takes years for us to train our children not to crowd in on us, and allow of to have some room to breathe. In Latin America, where touching is more common and the basic units of space seem to be smaller, the wide automobiles make in the U.S.A. pose problems. People do not even know where to sit. In America, the tendency for units of participation in the situation—either face engagements or unengaged individuals—to distribute themselves cooperatively in the available space so as physically to facilitate conventional closure. (Often this seems to involve a maximization of the sum of squares of the physical distance among the various units. Spacing will of course ensure that “talk lines” are open, that is, that persons addressing one another in an encounter will have no physical obstruction to block the free exchange of glances. A bystander finding oneself interposed in such a line (in America society, at least) is likely to offer an apology and quickly shift one’s position. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

While the phenomenon of spacing may be difficult to see because one takes it for granted, a tracing of it in reverse can be obtained by observing children and mental patients—those communication delinquents who sometimes play the game of “attack encounter.” On many wards, for example, a patient will follow a pair of talkers around the room until they have stopped moving, and then sidle right up to the edge of the encounter and lean into it. One adolescent patient I studied would intercept talk lines between two persons by waving her knitting needles in the way, or by swinging her upraised arms, or by thrusting her face into the face of one of the participants, or by sitting in his lap. Along with physical spacing, we also find control of sound so that the various units in the situation can proceed with their business at hand without being jammed out of operation. In many cases this will mean restriction on the volume of sound, although, at rare occasions like social parties, where persons may be crowded close to others not in the same encounter, a general raising of voices may be found; this allows coparticipants to hear each other, but jams the opportunities of eavesdroppers. Here, too, accurately designed delicts can be observed, as when an adolescent mental patient, in a spirit of fun, places her face up against the face of someone engaged in talk with another at a distance, and then shouts so that one can neither hear nor be heard. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

The requirement that visually open talk lines be maintained, and that sound levels not interfere with neighbouring encounters, sets a limit to the distance over which spoken encounters can ordinarily be sustained. For example, should two persons carry on a conversation from one end of a crowded streetcar to the other, all the intervening passengers would have to remain out of the line of talk and modulate their own conversation so as not to jam the one being maintained over a distance. Such a conversation would necessarily also be fully available to everyone between the two speakers, and would therefore be likely to constitute an embarrassment, even were one of the speakers the conductor. Thus, engagements that must be carried on over such a populated distance are likely to be limited to the exchange of silent gestures, for these neither interfere with other encounters nor expose what is being conveyed. As might be expected, therefore, deaf and dumb persons who board a streetcar together and find themselves seated apart need not discontinue their exchange of messages, but are able to carry on conversation as long as sight lines are clear, their “talk” neither jamming the other talkers nor being accessible to them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

While physical spacing and sound control certainly have relevance to occasions such as social parties that are carried on within a relatively small physical region, they are perhaps even more important in public streets and roads and in semipublic regions. In Western society, the development of middle-class dominance is expressed in the rise of a relatively equalitarian use of public places. Even today, however, funerals, weddings, parades, and some other ceremonials are allowed to press their spirit momentarily upon the public at large. Technical units, such as ambulances, police cars, and fire engines cut through public traffic; and guests of a city may be given a motor escort. Some of these prerogatives, however, are but small remnants of practices that were once more general, such as the entourage and train associated with “clientage,” which led a worthy to demonstrate one’s status by the cluster of dependent supporters that accompanied one through a town or a house of parliament, shouldering one’s way for one wherever one went. Nor are these rules uniform within Westerns society, as is suggested by the response of King Edward (of Britain) and his party during a 1906 visit to the Emperor of Germany: The Emperor had a standard attached to his motor and a trumpeter on the box who blew long bugle-calls at every corner. The inhabitants thus had no difficulty in making out where the Emperor was, and all the traffic cleared out of the way when they heard the trumpets blow. The King, however, detested what he called “theatrical methods” and drove about like anybody else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

There can sometimes be a kind of restructuring that can occur when a situation is transformed from one containing many encounters—a multifocused situation—to one that is exhausted by a single all-encompassing engagement. For example, at noontime on award of Central Hospital, when the attendant shouts, “Chow time!” he is addressing the whole place, and wherever the sound level of his voice reaches, the meanings of his words are meant to carry too. Similarly, at a small social party, the arrival of a couple may cause the hostess to interrupt the separateness of all the separate encounters in order to introduce the newcomers to the assembly. So also, at formal dinners, the moment the hostess indicates that the conversation will be “general,” she opens up whatever is being said to all the guests. And, of course, whenever public speeches are given, the speaker’s words, as well as the heat with which one speaks them, are meant to impinge on the situation at large. In all such cases, there is the understanding that the situation at large. In all such cases, there is the content of the words of an appropriate single speaker; one has, as we say, the floor. The transformation of a multifocused situation into one that is exhausted by one face engagement is an interesting process to consider. At social parties we can observe a singer or guitar player make an effort to incorporate more and more of the room’s population into one’s audience, until a point is reached where one’s singing officially exhausts the chamber, and the party is momentarily transformed into a performance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

At the same time, as a particular encounter comes to include a larger and larger number of persons, side involvements increasingly occur in which a subordinate byplay is sustained, sometimes furtively, its volume and character modulated to allow the main show to prevail unchallenged as the dominating one. In mental hospitals there is a special kind of “symptomatic” behaviour that takes recognition of how the situation as a whole can be “talked to.” Many patients talk to someone, present or not, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the situation to hear and be somewhat distracted. However, those on the ward implicitly distinguish this kind of impropriety from that which occurs when a patient “addresses the situation,” haranguing everyone present in a tone and direction of voice that suggest one is purposely breaching the barriers designed to render clusters of talkers and game players safe in their own focused interactions. (Interestingly, although the actual volumes of sound may be greater in the case of a patient insufficiently modulating one’s contribution to a private conversation than in the case of a patient “addressing the situation,” it is the latter that is likely to cause the greater disturbance.) Attacks on the situation should be compared with the attacks on encounters, previously mentioned, which children, mental patients, and other communication delinquents perform. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Many middle-class parents in our society have experienced times when their children, forbidden to interrupt or even to enter a room where adults are talking, stealthily stalks the situation in self-conscious mimicry of stealthiness and stalking, resulting in much more disturbance to the gathering than one’s mere presence might entail. When it comes to constructive criticism, it is best to make a fault seem easy to correct. First off, do not start by discouraging an individual. Be honest, and see the potential they have and use those optimistic characteristics to guide them in the right direction. This will prevent an individual from feeling like a failure and give them the hope that they too can become the highest, the most exalted one. Tell your parents, child, spouse, or employer that one is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you will have destroyed almost every incentive for improvement. However, when being liberal with your encouragement, making the things seem easy to do, letting the other person know that you have faith in one’s ability to do it, that one has an undeveloped flair for it—and one will practice until they are the brightest planet in the sky. Give confidence, inspire others, help one find the courage and strength that they have been endowed with. For instance, there is nothing to preparing for an exam except memory and judgement. Also, if you are going to be a successful student, you have to learn to read, and you have to actually read and gain a great understanding of the English language. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Going to college is great, but one will not succeed unless you start reading in high school. Reading is so important. So much of education can only be mastered by reading the material. If you are not going to read your books, and be prepared for lectures, there is no point in going to school. Many young minds are bright, but they are undisciplined. And, I know you may think TV is the most important thing, but those shows will all be there later. You can even binge watch them over Summer vacation. Take the time to study and get your homework done with a military like focus. Find a quiet room, and get busy. You are a potential genius. Sometimes school systems see surgical scars on students and incorrectly assume that they are injured and cannot function at a normal level. Even if you are a few years being in your age group, find a peer who is willing to help bring you up to speed. Every time you study, you are expanding you mind. You will notice the more you do it, the more understanding of the subject you gain, and eventually it will take you less time to absorb the muscle. It is a lot like cars. They start off cold, but gradually warm up. You can never get into a car, smash on the gas and go at top speed, it will ruin the engine. However, taking breaks it also important. If you are on a long haul in your vehicle, do not just suddenly smash on the gas, that can also mess up the engine. And just like a car, you do not want to overload your brain and burn out. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Naturally, the more you study, the more your grades will increase. No one is stupid. You notice that as early as four weeks old that many babies have the ability to form short sentences, and some even start walking at 7 months old. That is because they are smart. However, some need more practice and education to achieve these milestones, but they all get there. Also, as you learn the enrichment curriculum, you will notice that your other natural talents will develop and others will start to notice them. You can really learn and accomplish things. Do not let income/inequality be an excuse as to why you cannot succeed. I have seen poor kids grow up and become richer than students who had the World handed to them. Most cities have a public library where you can go and read books of interest. Social media is not as important as you think. So many people want to become famous for doing things that may not be in their best interest, but you can use your brain and become an auto science engineer or a tennis player. Maybe one day you will be elected in the national honour society. Once you find learning is easy, you whole life will change. Also, sometimes you make need to read a chapter in a book twice. Once to get a feel for the subject, and a second time to grasp the concepts being discussed. Eventually, reading will become easier and you will be able to read a chapter once. Also, to become an excellent writer, you need to read. Communication is so very important in any field of work you will go into. Just remember, faults are easy to correct. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Some people wonder whether one can do anything by oneself or whether it must be done with the help of others. Testify as to why you are superior and demonstrate it through your actions. When one tells people what should be done, they usually begin to argue, and not only argue but they become negative. That is really why help cannot be given, and why it is necessary to make rule and definite demands. If all that where needed were just to show people what to do, that would be simple, but it is not always easy to explain the chief features of false personality. Sometimes it is seen clearly, at other times it is more hidden and difficult to see, and then it is only possible to think in a general way of false personality. However, there is not a single case where I showed chief feature when people did not start violent arguing. At one meeting somebody said that he was occasionally able to observe oneself in the act of considering or becoming identified. He asked whether in this way he might come to know his false personality, and by observing it to weaken it. Actually, this is the only way and is very good so long as one does not tire of tying to do it. In the beginning, many people start very eagerly but soon get tired and begin to use the word “I” indiscriminately, without asking themselves which “I,” because we have no right to use it really in ordinary conditions. Much later, after long work, we can begin to think of one of the groups of “I”s (like what has been called Deputy Steward) which develop from magnetic center as “I.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

However, in ordinary conditions when you hear yourself saying “I do not like,” you must ask yourself which of your “I”s does not like. In this way you will remind yourself about the plurality which is in all of us. If you forget about it one time it will be easier to forget it next time. There are so many good beginnings in the work and then this is forgotten and people start to slide down, and in the end all that happens is that they become more mechanical than before. When it come to attribution of credit, there can be some common mistakes made. The wrong set of factors is often made in Complex Adaptive Systems for much of the same reasons. Diagnosis of causes in complex, multicausal situations are error prone. We might take as an example the problem of examining customer complaints about product malfunction in order to discover product defects or possible design improvements. Many large consumer product companies have service desks that answer thousands of calls per week about products. They frequently have systems that generate “trouble tickets” associated with each call. It is natural to ask what can be learned from the records of all this work that would contribute to improvement of the products, but closing this loop of organizational learning has often proven quite difficult. Working with a group of such reports, an analyst searches for pattern in the way the features and structure of the product interact with the circumstances of use reported by the customers. The hallmarks of complexity are present. The analyst may develop hypotheses such as: “All these customers reported that sound quality deteriorated when they were driving on country roads. Could it be that the audio unit is disturbed by shocks spaced at a particular frequency?” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Many hypotheses like this one are generated, but not all will be correct. In many organizations, such hypotheses are tested by checking if they are sufficient to reproduce the problem. In a complex World, many of those tests will fail. Someone from product development (not the same division as customer service) will subject the unit to low-frequency jolts and observe that it still performs well. An interesting strategy at such a moment of impasse is to bring into the process some of the frontline customer service agents who took the original calls. They may suggest something like, “These all came in last winter. Does it only happen if the unit is cold?” Of course, this may not turn out to be the answer. However, in an organization having trouble maintaining contact patterns between two divisions, the effort to correct a misattribution provides an occasion for interaction during which other useful information may flow. It functions as an episode of triggered recombination. Product people learn of other patterns noticed in customer service. The frontline agents learn about new product ideas in development and can then be alert to relevant remarks from customers. All of this reasoning makes sense in games like football or baseball or tennis, in which the same situation arises many times in one game, and the same players confront each other from one game to the next. Then there is time and opportunity to observe any systematic behaviour, and respond to it. Correspondingly, it is important to avoid patterns that can be exploited, and stick to the best mix. However, what about games that are played just once? #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Consider the choices of points of attack and defense in a battle. Here the situation is usually so unique that no system from your previous actions can be inferred by the other side. However, a case for random choice arises from the possibility of espionage. If you choose a definite course of action, and the enemy discovers what you are going to do, one will adapt one’s course of action to one’s maximum disadvantage. You want to surprise one; the surest way to do so is to surprise yourself. You may want to consider keeping the options open as long as possible, and at the last moment choose between them by an unpredictable and therefore espionage-proof device. The relative proportions of the device should also be such that if the enemy discovered them, one would not be able to turn the knowledge to one’s advantage. However, that is just the best mix calculated in the description above. Finally, a warning. Even when you are using your best mix, there will be occasions when you have a poor outcome. Even if Paris Hilton is unpredictable, sometimes Britney Spears will still guess right and knock the ball out of the park. In football, in the third down and a yard to go, a run up the middle is the percentage play; but it is important to throw an occasional bomb to keep the defense honest. When such a pass succeeds, fans and sportscasters will marvel at the cunning choice of play, and say the coach is a genius. When it fails, the coach will come in for a lot of criticism: how could one gamble on a pass instead of going for the percentage play? #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

The time to justify the coach’s strategy is before using it on any particular occasion. The coach should publicize the fact that mixing is vital; the run up the middle remains such a good percentage play precisely because some defensive resources must be diverted to guard against the occasional costly bomb. However, we suspect that even if the coach shouts this message in all newspapers and television channels before the game, and then uses a bomb in such a situation and it fails, one will come in for just as much criticism as if one had not tried to educate the public in the elements of game theory. Another game we want to consider is politics. Of course, sports can be just as important and as serious as decisions made in Congress. An unnoticed “first” in politics was marked in 1989. That was the year John Sununu moved into the White House as its chief of staff, making him in all likelihood the World’s most highly placed “computernik.” In a World bristling with microchips, he was the first computer-literate person ever to occupy one of the pinnacles of political power. A mechanical engineer by training, Sununu had done doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was known as a whiz who could spot and correct programming errors and question the mathematical model underlying an environmental impact statement. Whatever one may think of his political views, Sununu undeniably understood the power-potential of computerized information. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Before arriving in Washington, Sununu had served as governor of New Hampshire. When Sununu installed an electronic fiscal and financial control system for the state, members of the legislature demanded access to the data stored in the IBM mainframe. Sununu sidetracked their proposals declaring, “They’ll get what we think they need.” According to Time magazine, Sununu “seemed to be trying to shift the balance of political power” by “holding the state’s computerized financial data close to his chest.” In the end, the governor was forced to give one legislative official a password providing access to some (but not all) of the disputed data. Similarly, though a state court had held that citizens had a right to see and copy public documents, Sununu insisted that this did not apply to computerized data. Sununu, as governor, fully understood the power of knowledge about knowledge. Sununu’s action in New Hampshire was hardly subtle. Stamping something confidential or withholding access is an age-old tactic. New, more potent tools—many of them computer-based—are now available to those who wish to control data, information, and knowledge. In fact, we are witnessing a shift to a higher—and less visible—level of power struggle that reflects the rising level of abstraction and complexity in society generally as the super-symbolic economy spreads. Take, for example, computers. We now use computers to build computers. We are also developing CASE—computer-assisted software engineering. This is based on what might be termed “meta-software”—software designed to produce software. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

One can imagine a future in which CASE is used to produce the meta-software, itself, in a kind of infinite regress, as the process moves to higher and higher levels of abstraction. Similarly, the early 1980s, “spreadsheet software” spread rapidly through the business World. These computer programs permitted hundreds of thousands of users to put numbers into columns and rows, as in a ledger book, and to manipulate them easily. Because they could automatically show how a change in one number or variable would affect all the others, they accustomed a whole generation of users to think in terms of “what if” scenarios. What would happen if we raised the price of a product by 2 percent? What if interest rates fell by half a point? What if we could get the new product to market a month sooner? However, spreadsheets, like traditional ledgers, were two-dimensional, flat as a chessboard. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation, the main spreadsheet supplier, introduced its 1-2-3 Release 3.0. This program can be used to create three-dimensional spreadsheets—the accounting equivalent of moving chess pieces up and down as well as backward and forward on the conventional board. It permits users to simulate change in a business or a process in far more complex and revealing ways. It leads users to ask much smarter what-if questions at a much higher level. The new system of wealth creation requires a symbol-drenched work force. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Constant exposure to the data deluge—to media, computers, paperwork, fax machines, telephones, movies, posters, advertisements, memos, bills, invoiced, and a thousand other symbolic stimuli, with millions spending their time attending meetings, presenting ideas, persuading, negotiating, and otherwise exchanging images—makes for an increasingly “info-savvy” population. Just as Eskimos develop high sensitivity to differences in the properties of snow, and farmers can almost intuitively sense weather and soil changes, mind-workers become attuned to this informational environment. This rising sophistication compels those in power to seek new, higher-level instruments of persuasion and/or social control. Satellites, videocassettes, narrow-casting, niche-identification, cluster-targeting, extra-intelligent networks, instant polling, simulation, mathematical modeling, and other such technologies are becoming a taken-for-granted part of the political environment in the affluent nations. And along with these come new ways of manipulating computerized information that make all the conventional info-tactics of the politician or bureaucrat look crude and klutzy by comparison. Along with changes in the general population, therefore, fed by the shift to the new wealth-creation system, comes a parallel upgrading of the tools of manipulation used by politicians and government officialdom to hold on to their power. That is what meta-tactics are all about. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Nonetheless, even wealth and leisure cause problems. Lester Millbrath, professor of sociology and political science, observes, “Nanotechnologies will create the problem of how to meaningfully and sustainably occupy the time of people who need not perform much work in order to have a sufficiency of life’s goods. Our society has never faced this problem before, and it is not clear what social restructuring will be required to have a good society in those circumstances. We face much deep social learning.” The World has had little experience with what anthropologists’ call “abundance economies.” The Native American tribes of the pacific Northwest were one of those rarities. Their civilization was built upon an ample supply of goods, inexhaustible, and obtained without excessive expenditure of labour. The Kwakiutls became famous for the “potlaches”: contests in which they sought to shame their rivals by heaping more gifts upon them than they could ever return. The potlatches would often be a year in preparation, lasts for days, and occasionally involved destruction of entire buildings. It was certainly a colourful form of keeping up with the Winchesters. What will motivate us, once we have achieved an abundance economy? What will we regard as worthwhile goals to pursue? #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Remember, your sister LOVES YOU!

Will part of the economy of abundance motive of to gain increased knowledge, new art, improved philosophy, eliminate human and planetary ills? Will we find ourselves creating a better, wiser World, or sunk in boredom and jaded now that we have all and want nothing? If boredom gets out of hand, the lively spectacle of wealthy doners seeking to outdo each other to endow the arts, assist the poor, and do other good deeds for the sake of prestige would be welcome. What will happen as life spans continue to lengthen and the time needed to make a living decreases? Even today, there are people who, when confronted with the prospect of significantly longer life span, exclaim that they could not imagine what they would do with all that time. This response can be hard to understand, when it would take a thousand years to walk all the World’s roads, more thousands of years to read all the World’s books, and another ten thousand years to have dinner conversation with each of the World’s people—but tastes differ, and even a few decades of bad television might make anyone long for the peace of the grave. However, perhaps more people will start hibernating. We all could use more sleep. Then wake up to a beautiful World, well rested and ready to enjoy their pleasures of life. Confusing? Of course! Like most truths, when we try to apply them to specific situations in our individual lives, we run the risk of failure. However, let that bit of wisdom sink in: You cannot intentionally set out to create or capture your own personal significance—not as a goal in itself. Human beings strive perpetually toward ultimate humanness, which itself may be anyway a different kind of Becoming and growing. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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You Made Friends at the Bar–You Join them Almost Every Day of the Week

Our individual accomplishments, opinions, and contributions enable us to known our own unique identity and to take pleasure in feeling tht we are a significant member of the human family. However, at times, differences in the way we act, look, dress, or think can separate us from those around us. By definition, an accessible engagement does not exhaust the situation; there is no situational closure, physical or conventional, to cut it off from nonparticipants. What we find instead is some obligation and some effort on the part of both participants and bystanders to act as if the engagement were physically cut off from the rest of the situation. In short, a “conventional engagement closure” is found. Bystanders extend a type of civil inattention, but one that is designed for encounters, not for individuals. Bystanders are obliged to refrain from exploiting the communication position in which they find themselves, and to give visible expression to the participants of the gathering that they are focusing their attention elsewhere—a courtesy of some complexity, since a too studied inattention to what one is in a position to overhear can easily spoil a show of inattention. I do not want to overstress rational intent in situational behaviour. An individual is supposed to be entirely in or entirely out of an encounter. However, even the individual who wants to follow this rule cannot completely control the expressed direction of one’s attention. If one’s attention is attracted to an accessible encounter, then one’s attempt to conceal the fact is likely to be visible both to those with whom one ought to be participating and to those whom one ought to be disattending. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

Since there are many reasons why an individual might want to overhear the content of an engagement of which one is not a member, one may often simulate inattention, giving the impression that conventional closure has been obtained, while in fact one is furtively attending to the talk. How much of this eavesdropping actually goes on, and in what situations, is difficult to assess. The expression of inattention and noninvolvement exhibited by those who are physically close to an encounter in which they are not participants can be observed in an extreme form at times when an individual could join the encounter (as far as its participants are concerned), but finds oneself “psychologically” incapable of doing so. What can then result is a kind of conversational parasitism, often observable on mental hospital wards. For example, one psychotic young woman I observed would sit alongside her mother and look straight ahead while the latter was engaged in conversation with a nurse, maintaining what appeared to be civil inattention in regard to the neighbouring engagement. However, while attempting to keep her face composed like that of an uninvolved, uninterested bystander, she would keep up a running line of derisive comment on what was being said, uttering these loud stage whispers under great verbal pressure, from the side of her mouth. The psychological issue here, presumably, was that of “dissociation.” However, the direction of flow taken by the two dissociated lines of conduct—conversational participation and civil inattention—seemed entirely determined by the social organization of communication that is standard for social situations in our society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

In a social situation, then, an individual may find oneself torn apart, but torn apart on a standard rack that is articulated in a standard way. There are circumstances in which it is difficult for participants to show tactful trust of bystanders and for bystanders to extend civil inattention; in brief, there are times when conventional closure is difficult to manage. For one example of this we can return to small enclosed place like elevators, where individuals may be so closely brought together that no pretense of not hearing can possibly be maintained. At such times, in middle-class America at least, there seems to be a tendency for participants of an encounter. A similar kind of issue seems to arise in near-empty bars, as novelists have pointed out: We were alone in that bar, it was still the middle of the morning and the presence of the barman there was embarrassing. One could not help overhearing. In his white impassive coat he was a figure of reticent authority. However, he probably realized this too, he was nice enough to keep bobbing down behind the bar and shoveling about his glasses and his little trays of ice. So Darke ordered two more as it were from no-one, and soon thee bobbed up. The cabdriver has something of the same kind of problem here as the bar man. So too has the individual who is momentarily left to his own resources while a person to whom he has been talking answers a telephone call; physically close to the engaged other and patently unoccupied, he must yet somehow show civil inattention. Similarly, in a three-person engagement, when a talker interrupts his talk to answers the phone, the two remaining persons may attempt a quiet, and often very limp, conversation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Where civil inattention is physically difficult to manage, the scene is set for a special kind of dominance. In an elevator, for example, those in one of the engagements may continue fully engaged, forcing the others present to accept the role of nonpersons. Similarly, when two unacquainted couples are required to share the same booth in a restaurant, and they elect to forego trying to maintain an inclusive face engagement, one couple may tacitly give way to the louder interaction of the other. In these situations, the submissive couple may attempt to show independence and civil inattention by beginning a talk of their own. However, while it may appear convincing to the other couple, this weaker talk is not likely to convince it own participants, who, in carrying it on, will be admitting to each other not only that they have been upstaged, but that they are willing to try to pretend that they have not. In Britain, it is my impression that where one of the units present is of “good” speech, that is, received pronunciation, then it is this group that is likely to talk openly, as if the other could easily offer civil inattention and could easily stop their own conversation. This is one of the ways in which a visitor to Britain is struck by the startling vulgarity (according to American standards) of the British upper middle class. It may be added that strength in these cases derives not from muscle, but, typically, from social class. Given the fact that participants and bystanders are required to help maintain the integrity of the encounter, and given the complicating fact that bystanders of this encounter may well be participant of another, we may expect some tacit cooperation in maintaining conventional closure. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

First, if bystanders are to deist in some way from exploiting their communication opportunities, then it will fall upon the participants to limit their action and words to one that will not be too hard to disattend. And this keeping down of the excitement level is, in fact, what is generally found. Interestingly enough, this tendency is matched by another that moves in the opposite direction, namely, acting in such a way as to show confidence in the willingness of bystander not to exploit their situation. Thus, as already suggested, whispering or obvious use of code terms will often be thought impolite, in part because it casts a doubt on bystanders’ willingness to be inattentive. One consequence of the combination of these rules of conventional closure may be mentioned. It is a rule of conversation that participants show consideration for one another, by, for example, avoiding facts about which the other might be touchy, or by showing constraint in raising criticism, and so forth. Disparagement of persons not present, on the other hand, is usually quite acceptable, offering a basis of preferential solidarity for those in the encounter. In addition, the conversation may well involve business matters that an absent other cannot safely be made privy to. It follows, therefore, that the run of comments in a conversational encounter may have to be altered strategically when a relevantly excluded person approaches, lest the content of the talk put too much strain upon one’s willingness to offer civil attention; when one approaches with the intention of entering the encounter, even more delicacy is required. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

The well-known example is that of the individual who comes into a room to find that conversation has suddenly stopped and that other present are seeking in a flustered way to find a new and tenable topic. Sometimes, as a relevantly excluded other approaches, a particular physical point is reached where the conversation can be altered without either letting the oncomer hear what would be embarrassing to one (or what would embarrass the speakers for one to hear) or giving one an impression that something embarrassing regarding one has been suppressed. This distance will, of course, vary with the social skill of the participants. Sometimes, too, a given room will have a special “safe region,” from which vantage point any newcomer can be spied in time to safely alter the content to talk without showing that an alteration was necessary. In these circumstances we sometimes find skill-showing, where the talkers daringly and cooly continue their talk up to the very last moment for altering it safely. Many people experience emotional states they cannot understand and identify. They often wonder at the intensity, origin, explanation, and duration of emotions. They also worry about what they might do as a result of these emotions. They may even question whether the emotions are “normal” or not. Of course, this happens to all of us at times. It is one of the risks of being thinking, sensitive people. We begin questioning, analyzing our own experiences. We also categorize them, because that is what our rationalistic, scientific society expects. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

And when we cannot find a neat explanation or pigeonhole for a particular experience, we either bend it to fit another category, deny it, repress it, or project it onto somebody else (“I am not angry; you are!!”). If we cannot do any of these things because we are too honest with ourselves, we may conclude that the feeling is a bad one or a “sick” one. What do you do when a person who has been a good worker begins to turn in shoddy work? You can fire the individual, but that really does not solve the matter. You can berate the worker, but this usually causes resentment. Sometimes, especially when someone has been on the job for a long time, it is best to call the individual into the office and tell the individual that one is a finer employee. Compliment them on the amount of time they have spent on the job, the quality of their typical work and the quantity. Explain to them that they have received a lot of compliments about their great work. Then gently explain that in the present their work has been slipping and is taking too long and not up to standards. And ask them if there is a way to find a resolution to the problem. Many times, an honest employee will say that they not realized that their productivity has been declining, and they will promise to excel in future projects. In fact, the average person can be led readily if you have one’s respect and if you show that you respect that person for some kind of ability. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

If you want to improve a person in a certain respect, act as though that particular trait were already one of the individual’s outstanding characteristics. Assume a virtue, if you have it not. And it might be well to assume and state openly that other people have the virtue you want them to develop. Give them a fine reputation to live up to, and they will make prodigious efforts rather than see you disillusioned. When people are given a standard of behaviour and a reputation that is expected of them, you may find that the individual will find it impossible not to follow through. If you want to excel in that difficult leadership role of changing the attitude or behaviour of others, give the other person a fine reputation to live up to. There can be good example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. [Somebody asked whether “Chief Feature” id est, the prime feature of false personality) was a food for false personality.] Chief feature is not food. Chief feature is false personality. False personality in most cases is based on one feature which enters into everything. Some day we will take some examples of chief feature and you will see how it is really that which makes false personality. “What is the best way to look for one’s chief feature?” someone asked. Simply see yourself. I do not know how to explain it better. It is possible one may find something—chief feature of the moment. It is imaginary personality; this is chief feature for everybody. “Can one alter one’s chief feature?” asked someone else. First it is necessary to know it. If you know it, much will depend on the quality of your knowing. If you know it well, then it is possible to change it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

“When an attitude at the back of a negative emotion is very old and habitual, possibly a feature, how can I attack it?” Begin from the feature. Find the feature, talk about it and so on. It is necessary to think about false personality and in some cases you can see definitely a kind of chief feature coming into everything, like the axis round which everything turns. It can be shown, but the person will say, “Absurd, anything but not that!” Or sometimes it is so obvious that it is impossible to deny it, but with the help of buffers one can forget it again. I have known people who gave me a name to their chief feature several times and remembered it for some time. Then I met them again and they had forgotten, or when they remembered they had one face, and began to speak as though they had never spoken about it at all. You must come near to it yourself. When you feel it yourself, then you will know; if you are only told, you may always forget. “Can I get a clue to false personality by thinking of events in the past?” Sometimes you may. Either in the past or in your friends. However, you must understand that you also have false personality, not only your friends! “Can we see false personality without help?” There is nothing again it theoretically, only I never saw such a case and nobody else I know saw such a case. Even with help people are not generally prepared to see it. It is as if you were to show a man his reflection in a real, actual mirror, and he were to say, “This is not me. This is not a reflection of me.” However, if a man is prepared, it is sometimes possible to recognize a feature of weakness in oneself. If a man knows this feature, if he begins to keep it in mind and to remember it, then there may be a certain moment when he is free from this feature, when his action is not determined by this weakness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Sometimes our features or weaknesses take simple forms like laziness, but in other cases their forms are so well disguised that there are no ordinary words to describe them, and they can only be described by some kind of diagram or drawing. Laziness is for some people 75 percent of their lives or more. Sometimes laziness is very important, sometimes it is the chief feature of false personality. Very often it is chief feature, and all the rest depends on laziness and serves laziness. However, remember that there are different kinds of laziness. It is necessary to find them by observing yourself and observing other people. For instance, there are very busy people who are always doing something and yet their minds may be lazy. That happens more often than anything else. Laziness is not only the desire to sit and do nothing. However, the goal is to prevent others from exploiting any systematic behaviour of yours. If they have a preference for a particular action, that would mean only that they had chosen the worst course from your perspective. The basic idea is that one resorts to chance as the means of keeping the other player from exploiting any systematic behaviour on your part. Turning this idea into practice is more subtle. Many of us do not wish to settle for knowing just a little bit of other people, especially those we care about. So, we mut find ways of opening up avenues of approach. By experimenting, we can invite these people to come out into the sunlight and experience as much of life as possible. Why should we? If a person is happy being a Bluffer or an Expert or a Life of the Party, is it our business to take on the role of disturbing the individual? Well, it is important not to taunt or torment but to dare the other person to become more fully what one is. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

In complex systems, it is difficult to determine what should be rewarded or which choice is appropriate. Measurement of success is often infrequent, and shifting context makes few observations comparable. Deliberation costs for choices can be high, especially if they require the apparatus of formal logic or statistics, or social processes of choice such as scientific peer review—not to speak of court proceedings. Feedback is ambiguous. Circumstances, even goals, are changing. All of this follows from the fundamental premise: we are coping with system that are complex and adaptive, not simple or static. In the short run we are not likely to have a direct approach that “get it completely right.” We will need as well the indirect methods of harnessing complexity. The difficulty of attributing credit in real experience can be reinforced by considering a few examples. The war in Vietnam provides a striking case. Although war usually produces large rewards (and punishments) and, in the end, provides clear feedback on the result, none of the other circumstances for effective learning obtains. For the Americans, the Vietnam War was not a victory. However, exactly what lessons and no obvious way to determine which candidates are most appropriate. Despite these impediments, lessons were learned by the American military. These included the need for decisive force in any future war, the need to avoid slow escalation, and the need to avoid civilian interference in the conduct of the war. These lessons—“strategies,” in our terms—were applied to the planning and conduct of the Gulf War and seemed to be effective in that application. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

On the other hand, for the Soviet Union the Vietnam War was a success. The lessons drawn from the way by the Soviet Union emphasized that their Vietnamese allies won because of their great will and courage, assisted by military aid from Communist nations. These optimistic lessons would not have warned the Soviets about the dangers of their later intervention in Afghanistan. Biological systems also face difficulties in attributing credit. Consider birds, which determine from experience the visual characteristics of dangerous predators. Their situation illustrates one of the many interesting complications of credit attribution in a Complex Adaptive System: exploitation by others. The method is mimicry—as when many species of moths evolve spots on their wings that resemble the eyes of larger predators. This works because the birds develop a “prediction” of danger from appearance and rely on it to avoid predators. One presumes that the birds’ capability to associate certain appearances with danger, which is a mechanism for attributing credit, serves the birds well overall. However, the moths can also exploit the birds’ imperfect credit attribution to avoid being eaten. Once again coevolution increases complexity and inhibit prediction. For a nonbiological example of the limits of credit attribution, consider the person who ends the year with the highest sales volume, receives a significant bonus, and is singled out to be emulated. Years later, more careful cost accounting may show that most of the sales actually lost money for the firm because of eventual refunds or support costs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

The business literature is rife with stories of performance indicators that failed to capture important aspects of a complex setting. These misattributions may occur because of casual connections that no one understands, or because some employees, like the spotted moths, come to mimic features that other employees, like the birds, have come to associate with success or failure. The difficulties of credit attribution are endemic in Complex Adaptive Systems. Our aim is not to escape the, though we recommend that when it is feasible. Instead, our aim is to suggest how the side effects of inevitable mistakes of attribution can be turned to some advantage. Each of these three categories is constructed as a composite of actual cases in which complexity makes some mistakes of attribution inevitable. They illustrate a few different problems of inference that are highly characteristic of credit attribution in complex system: the mistake of crediting or blaming a part when a larger ensemble is responsible, the mistake of attributing credit or blame to a particular ensemble of factors when in fact a different ensemble is responsible, and the mistake of crediting a misconstrued strategy, where the action involved produced success, but the conditions in which the action should be taken have been misunderstood. The first type of mistake, crediting a part when a larger ensemble is responsible, is very common in Complex Adaptive Systems since they so often involve a number of entangled factors. It is easy to notice that a single or strategy is associated with a series of successes (or failures). #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

If you are not positioned to observe the operation of other necessary forces, you reach an incorrect conclusion that it alone causes the results. Consider a manager of a department that uses project teams assembled for specific tasks. If it is the practice in the unit to reward team members whose work contributed to notable success, a manager can almost be sure that there will be some occasions where an individual receives credit for what was produced by the interplay among contributions of several team members—what is sometimes labeled the group’s “chemistry.” We have stressed insufficient exploration in examples throughout this essay because we so often have seen variation being undervalued by managers of Complex Adaptive Systems. However, for this case, let us stipulate that the manager believes the department has a problem of insufficient exploitation. Perhaps “back channel” communication suggests that a project group has done well by ensemble effect rather than the efforts of the most prominent individual. How can the manager get “mileage” out of discovering those attribution mistakes without knowing what caused them? One approach is to make a special effort to reassemble that identical team for a later problem, retaining (and exploiting) the uncredited ensemble that may be there. Doing this has a cost, of course. It reduces the ability to mix and match individuals to the characteristic of the next task. Harnessing complexity does not always come for free. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

Infinite varieties of deception (and self-deception) are found in the masses of data, information, and knowledge that flow through the government’s mind-work mill every day. Space constraints make it impossible to continue illustrating and classifying them here. Instead, we will list just a few more in abbreviated form. THE OMISSION TACTIC. Because politic is so intensely adversarial, political messages are even more consciously selective than most. Typically, they have gaping holes where someone applied the Omission Tactic and ripped relevant or balancing facts out of them. THE GENERALITY TACTIC. Here details that might lead to bureaucratic or political opposition are glossed over with airy abstraction. Diplomatic communiques are rife with examples—which accounts for their frequently brain-numbing style. TIMING TACTICS. Here the most common approach is to delay sending a message until it is too late for the receiver to do anything about it. Thick budget documents are dumped in the laps of legislators who are supposed to respond to them in a few days—well before they can intelligently digest and analyze them. White House speechwriters are known to deliver their drafts of a presidential speech at the latest possible moment, allowing other staffers minimum time to money with the text. THE DRIBBLE TACTIC. Here, data, information, and knowledge are doled out in tiny takes at different times, rathe than compiled into a single document. In this way the pattern of events is broken up and made less visible to the receiver. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

THE TIDAL WAVE TACTIC. When someone complains about being kept uninformed, the shrewd player ships him or her so much paper that the recipient is drowned and cannot find the essential facts in all the froth. THE VAPOR TACTIC. Here a host of vaporous rumors are released, along with some true facts, so that receivers cannot distinguish the latter from the former. THE BLOW-BACK TACTIC. Here a false story is planted overseas so that it will be picked up and reprinted by the domestic press. This tactic is employed by intelligence and propaganda agencies. But sometimes the blow-back is inadvertent—or seems to be. This CIA once planted a story in the Italian press about the terrorist Red Brigade. This account was picked up and incorporated in a book published in the United States of America, the galley proofs of which were read by then-Secretary of State Al Haig. When Haig commented on the story in a press conference, his remark then, in turn, incorporated in the finished version of the book. This self-referential process is more common than imagined. THE BIG LIE TACTIC. Made famous by Hitler’s propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels, it is based on the idea that if a lie is macro enough it will be believed more readily than any number of mere micro-lies. In this category was the 1987 report spread by Moscow claiming that the World AIDS epidemic was launched by agents in Maryland. Widely disseminated around the World, the story is utterly repudiated by Soviet scientists. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

THE REVERAL TACTIC. Few examples of tampering with, or massaging, the facts require as much chutzpah as the Reversal Tactic. This simply turns a given message inside out. An example occurred not long ago in Israel, where no love was lost between Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Foreign Minister Shimon Peres. At one point Shamir instructed the Foreign Ministry to notify its embassies around the World that Peres had no authority to promote an interactional conference aimed at resolving the Arab-Israeli problem. Peres’s staff at the Foreign Ministry received the Prime Minister’s message, but simply scrapped it and sent out cables saying the exact opposite. When a senior official was later asked how that could happen, he replied: “How can you ask me such a question? This is war.” Given this lengthy list of technique widely used for doctoring the messages that flow through government offices, it becomes apparent that few statements, messages, or “facts” in political or governmental life can be taken at face value. Almost nothing is power-neutral. Most data, information, and knowledge circulating in government are so politically processed that even if we ask, Cui bono?—whose interest is served?—and even if we think we have got the answer, we may still not be able to cut through the “spin” to the reality beneath it. And all this occurs before the media further reprocesses reality to fit its own requirements. Media massage merely further denatures the “facts.” The implications of what we have just seen go to the crux of the relationship between democracy and knowledge. An informed public is held to be a precondition for democracy. However, what do we mean by “informed”? #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Restricting government secrecy and gaining public access to documents are necessary in any democracy. However, these are only feeble first steps. For to understand those documents we need to know how they have been doctored along the way as they passed from hand to hand, level to level, and agency to agency in the bureaucratic bowels of government. The full “content” of any message does not appear on the page or the computer screen. In fact, the most important political content of the document may be this history of its processing. At a still deeper level, the ubiquity of these most commonly exploited info-tactics casts doubt on any lingering notion that governing is a “rational” activity or that leaders are capable of “objectively based” decision. Winston Churchill was right when he refused to read “sifted and digested” intelligence analyses, insisting instead on seeing the “authentic documents…in their original form,” so he could draw his own conclusions. However, it is obviously impossible for any decisionmaker to read all the raw data, all the information, and grapple with all the knowledge needed for decision. What we have seen here are just a few of the tricks of the trade exploited by streetwise political in-fighters and savvy staffers in World capitals from Seoul to Stockholm or Bonn to Beijing. Smart politicians and bureaucrats know in their bellies that data, information, and knowledge are adversarial weapons—loaded and ready to be fired—in the power struggles that constitute political life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

What most of them do not yet know, however, is that all these Machiavellian ploys and devices must now be regarded as kindergarten stuff. For the struggle for power changes when knowledge about knowledge becomes the prime source of power. In the era of “meta-tactics” in the mind-work mills we call government, is moving the power game to an even higher level. Over centuries, the trend ha seemed to be toward centralization, beginning with the rise of factories and industrial towns. What drove these developments was the high cost of machinery and plant operations, the need to be near power sources, the impracticality of transportation among many small, dispersed sites, and the need for face-to-face communication. Beginning with the first industrial revolution, factories employed large numbers of people in one place, leading to overcrowding and making local economies dependent on one industry and sometimes on a single company. Costly equipment necessitated central locations for textile production, rather than the cottage industries where a lone woman could earn a livelihood carding wool and creating thread on a spinning wheel (providing the origin of the term spinster). By the 1930s, the belief in the virtues of centralization and central panning—the supposed efficiencies and economies of scale—led to nationwide or continentwide experiments in centralization. However, over the last decade, these large-scale experiments have been dismantled, from Britain’s privatization of nationalized utilities to the beginning of a return to the market system in Eastern European countries. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Because the old limits on transportation, energy sources, and communication have fallen, business is now decentralizing. Between 1981 and 1986, the Forbes 500 companies cut their employees by 1.8 million. However, during those same years, total civilian jobs went up by 9.2 million. Start-up companies created 14 million jobs; small companies created another 4.5 million. Telecommuting is booming, as are new businesses, independent professionals, and cottage industries. We have also seen the resurgence of small, but highly diverse stores: gourmet-food shops, specialty ethnic shops, tea and coffee, purveyors, organic and health-food stores, bakeries, yogurt shops, gourmet ice cream stores, convenience stores offering twenty-four-hour access, shops selling packaged food plus snacks. These stores epitomize something fundamental: At some point, what we want is not a standard good at an ever-cheaper price, but special things customized to meet our own individual tastes or needs. The trend for advanced technologies seems to be leading away from centralization. Will nanotechnology counter or accelerate this trend? By reducing the cost of equipment, by reducing the need for large numbers of people to work on one product, and brining greater ability to produce the customized goods that people want, nanotechnology will probably continue the twentieth-century toward decentralization. The results, though, will be disruptive to existing businesses. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

The computer industry perhaps provides a clue to what might happen as costs are lowered by nanotechnology. The computer-software industry is characterized by the garage-shop start-up. When your equipment is inexpensive—affordable PCs built around lost-cost chips—and your can make a product by throwing in some ingenuity and human labour, it is possible to start a new industry on a shoestring. In 1900, when cars were simple, there were many car manufacturers. By the 1980s, if you were not an industrial giant like General Motors or Ford, BMW or Honda, you had to be John De Lorean to even get a shot at acquiring the capital to play in the business. If molecular manufacturing can slash the capital costs for producing cars or other plant-intensive equipment, we will see the equivalent of garage-shop businesses springing up to offer new products, and hiring workers away from the industrial giants of today just as the personal computer has destroyed the dominance of the mainframe. The American dream is to be an entrepreneur, and the technological trends of the twentieth century point in that direction. Nanotechnology probably continues it. In one area, however, the late twentieth-century trend has been toward uniformity. The nations of Western Europe are in the process of uniting under one set of economic rules, and parts of Eastern Europe are anxious to join them. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

More and more supranational and transnational organizations knit the World together. The growth of trade has motivated economic integration. Molecular manufacturing will work against this trend as well, permitting radical decentralization in economic terms. This will help groups that wish to step aside from the stream of change, enabling them to be more independent of the turbulent outside World, picking and choosing what technologies they use. However, it will also help groups that wish to free themselves from the constraints of the international community. Economic sanctions will have little force against countries that need no imports or exports to maintain a high standard of living. And export restrictions will likewise do little to hamper a military buildup. By weakening the ties of trade, molecular manufacturing threatens to weaken the glue of that holds nations together. We need that glue, though, to deal with the arms-control issues raised by molecular manufacturing itself. This problem, caused by the potential for decentralization, may loom large in the coming years. Therefore, apparently, we have to come to grips with the ongoing conflict in our institutionalized way of viewing ourselves. Since we currently have some patterns of living that view man as a Thinker, they need to be enlarged to recognize man’s need to be a Feeler too. To do so would involved our educational systems, literary and publishing ventures, scientific, technological, and governmental agencies. Similarly, the agencies that view man only as emotional, like the entertainment, recreational, theological, ecclesiastical, and art media, need to be retooled to take into account the important place intellect and reason have in our lives. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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The Hands of the Vanished People

The flambeaux were already alight. The darting flames cast crisscross patterns down through the bare branches of the trees to the cobbled stones beneath. Mrs.  Winchester was in bed, skin alternatively burning and clammy with sweat. She tossed and turned in bed, like flotsam on a storm-wracked sea, plagued by dreams and delusions. Angels and gargoyles, ghostly apparitions, long-since deserted friends waltzed in and out of her head. She oscillated between beauty and horror. The fever broke around two o’clock in the morning. Then a kind of peace fell over the room. In the still and sleeping house, she could hear the whirring and chiming of the clock in the hall downstairs. A ribbon of moonlight made its way between the shutters and painted a line across the floor. She watched the moonbeams dance, slowly shift, as the hours passed and the World continued to turn. Nothing about it gave her a hint of what was going on, darkly and dumbly downstairs. However, her eyes fell for a moment only; then her lids opened again to a monstrous vision. There it was, stamped on her pupils, a part of her forever, an indelible horror burnt into her body and brain. But why into her—just hers? Why had she alone been chosen to see what she had seen? What business was it of hers? Anyone else, thus enlightened, might have exposed the horror and defeat of it; but she, the one weaponless and defenceless spectator, the one whom none of the others would believe or understand if she attempted to reveal what she knew—she alone had been singled out as the victim of this dreadful initiation! #RandolphHarris 1 of 9

Suddenly she sat up, listening; she had heard a step on the stairs. Someone, no doubt, was coming to see how she was—to urge her, if she felt better, to go down and have a cup of tea. Cautiously, Mrs. Winchester opened her door—but no one was there. She reached the opposite end of the lower gallery, and beyond it saw the hall by which she had entered. It was empty. The darkness was deep, and the cold so intense that for an instant it stopped her breathing. The impulse to fly still drove her further, but she began to feel that she was flying from a terror of her own creating, and that the most urgent reason for escape into one of the secret passageways was the need to feel safe. Mrs. Winchester had spent long hours walking through her mansion. The cold and fatigue, the absence of hope and the haunting sense of starved aptitude, all these her brough her to the perilous verge over which, once or twice before, her terrified brain had hung. Feeling sure that she had walked for more than a mile, Mrs. Winchester halted and looked back. She saw the gleam of a lantern right beyond the Hall of Fires. As she moved deeper into the darker part of her mansion, an enormous sepulcher with a horrible stench was seen lurking in the shadows. The smell grew stronger. It seemed to ooze from the walls. Mrs. Winchester turned her face down and vomited a thin stream of glittering blood upon the floor beneath her, which vanished as she moved swiftly one. She was descending lower and lower into the depths of the mansion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 9

Flickering light scrape her bare feet on the stone, cob webs brushing her face. For an instant, Mrs. Winchester saw a grinning skull. Then a ton of them creating a catacomb in the wall. She trudged on in silence for a few minutes, but as the labouring steps carried her nearer to the spot she had been fleeing in her nightmare, the reason for this fear grew more ominous and more insistent. No, she was not ill, she was not distraught and deluded—she was the instrument single out to warn and save; and here she was, irresistibly driven, dragging the victim back to her doom! A trail of darkness lay on everything. Mrs. Winchester looked deep down into the abyss. The room has one narrow window. The walls were dark, and the overhead lighting fixture was so dim it left the corners full of hanging shadows like misplaced scarecrows. Her next vision made its presence felt once again. There was a man standing inside of the abyss. Mrs. Winchester was tongued-tied. She had the sense of being held in one spot. The man was tall, about six feet; he looked to be in his thirties and was clad in a black robe. Mrs. Winchester could see his face clearly. He was stern and very pale, with sharp features—long nose, thin lips, and small, narrowed eyes—and he moved his head from side to side as if peering from one corner of the room to the other. He did not look at Mrs. Winchester—at least, not as far as she could tell. #RandolphHarris 3 of 9

The most significant thing about him, however, was his right arm. She could not see his hand, nor could Mrs. Winchester see his feet. As she began to scream, the figure disappeared. She knew this ghost had to be the soul of a man who had met violent ends. Blood and water gushed forth from the depths of the abyss. The vision continued to reappear. Along with him, there were five other apparitions. They were holding a thin string of smoke. Mrs. Winchester thought it was dust at first, until without warning it grew denser and thicker, as it formed itself into a rope shape. She watched perplexed, as it leisurely uncoiled in their hands and disappeared. Then up from the abyss cam a man’s chest, cut off at the waist with no arms or a head. It was all a pale colour. Mrs. Winchester jumped over the ghastly torso and ran from the basement screaming. That night Mrs. Winchester slept fitfully. Her mind was replaying over and over the horrid basement scene. Sometime close to midnight, she gave up her attempts at sleep; her darkened bedroom, with its shadows and hints of danger, was making her uneasy. She slipped into the Daisy Bedroom. However, about five o’ clock, she found herself wide awake. Light was peering in at the window and she no longer felt sleepy. Mrs. Winchester eased herself out of bed and walked towards the door. However, she had no wish to return to bed, sensing that danger was nearby. All was quiet, save for the door-to-nowhere opening and closing by itself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 9

From the windows in the Daisy Bedroom, dawning sun was gradually filling the hall with a golden, green, and blue light, bringing the mansion’s interior to life. Mrs. Winchester felt as if she was safe. She rested in a chair in the front parlor. The varnish of the floor reflected the light. As she was gazing at the floor, something magical occurred. Without warning, a man’s head popped out of the floor, smiled up at her, and disappeared back into the floor. Mrs. Winchester was not scared—she was intrigued. Moments later, the man reappeared. However, this time he stepped out of the floor and came to stand near her chair. Then when Mrs. Winchester looked again, she saw a gaping hole opened in the floor, and it was filled with beautiful rays of colorful light. Then the man jumped into the lights, and all of the beauty disappeared. Mrs. Winchester was saddened by this paranormal departure. This ghost made her feel safe and brought such magical colours along with him. Later that day, Mrs. Winchester was surprised by what could be nothing else but a fairy. A shower of gold mist appeared, and the tiny woman hovered for a moment or two, then vanished. There was nothing evil about these two ghosts. Manifestations typically appear at significant times—for instance, on the anniversary of the death or deaths of those involved. #RandolphHarris 5 of 9

Mrs. Winchester’s ghost tended to hover a few inches off the ground, and walk through walls; it might be conjected, then, that they were also the ones supplying the floor plans for the vast mansion. There were also entities that were dangerous and evil, but they had been disbursed for awhile by these beings of light. Ouija boards, horoscopes, séances, tarot cards, fortune-telling, witchcraft, and so on—can sometime server as a portal for spirits to enter an individual’s life. People can make contact with the dead. However, doors have opened in the Winchester Mansion onto many of the regions of paranormal existence. On several occasion, the light would be on in the room of Mrs. Winchester. She often said that something dark would visit her and press down on her chest. And she was always having strange experiences. One several occasion she had awoken in the early morning hours to find a young woman standing by the foot of her bed. She was dressed in clothes from ancient times and was badly disfigured down one side of her face. She was a lost soul. The aspect of Satanism has grown in occultism, especially among young people, so that Worldwide there are dozens of active and well-organized satanic groups. While the mainstream and “official cults deny the charges of sacrificial ritual and blood-lust, there are many less formal covens of worshippers and pseudo-satanic sects, some resorting to a kind of ritual. #RandolphHarris 6 of 9

The witches of the World and the occult fraternity at large regard themselves as inheritors of traditions based on the pre-Christian beliefs of the ancient pagans and Eastern mysticism and magic, and satanists are basically the creation of the Bible; they originally acknowledged the Christian God, even if they do challenge His existence in biblical terms. They are united only in their contemptuous regard for Gardnerian and Alexandrian witchcraft. Furthermore, it was the Christians themselves who were originally accused for killing babies for sacrificial rites—a charge which has been renewed in the twenty-first century against the satanists. One lovely autumn evening, all blue and silver, Mrs. Winchester had been painting. As the sunset the sky turned crimsoned and the densest night enveloped the Winchester Mansion. There was a wet blackness impenetrable to the glimmer of any lamp. But now and then the pall lifted or its fold divided and passersby could catch a glimpse of the mysterious mansion. However, after each of these projections the darkness grew three times as thick. Night and fog were now one, and the darkness as thick as a blanket. Increased by her sense of irritated helplessness, Mrs. Winchester was groping clumsily about the hall among the angles of unseen furniture when a light slanted along the rough-cast wall of the stairs. She followed it direction, and on the landing standing above her she saw a figure in white shading a candle with one hand and looking down. A chill ran along her spine, for the figure bore a strange resemblance to that of her Husband William Wirt Winchester. #RandolphHarris 7 of 9

“Oh, it’s you my love!” she exclaimed in the cracked twittering voice which was at one moment like an delicate woman’s quaver, at another like a falsetto. Mrs. Winchester’s husband came shuffling down in his white garments; but she noticed that his steps on the mahogany stairs were soundless. Well—they would be, naturally! She stood without a word, gazing up at the strange vision above her, and saying to her herself: “Darling, I have been longing for your return. Your eyes, they are so beautiful.” However, there was the candle, at any rate; and as it drew nearer, and lit up the place about her, she turned and caught hold of the doorlatch. For, Mrs. Winchester had seen the candle. “Why, what’s the matter? I assure you, you do not disturb me!” her apparition of a husband twittered; adding, with a faint laugh: “I do not have so many visitors nowadays.”  She thought to herself, “Some flash of Heaven in the very pit of hell in his innocent expression, as if the devil still retained the face and form of the angel after the fall.” But something was very wrong. And she realized he was not her husband, but an entombed soul from the abyss—only the others were screaming, screaming for flesh, and screaming for forgiveness and release. Screaming even for the fires of hell. The sound was as unbearable as the stench. In the early days of Christianity, when worshippers gathered in secret for fear of reprisal by the pagan communities, Christian groups were rumoured to be performing horrendous and licentious cannibalistic ceremonies. In Rome, when the early Christians met in secret, their churches were said to be filled with the aroma of blood from sacrificed animals and babies. #RandolphHarris 8 of 9

There was apparently no evidence for these accusations, yet very soon after Christianity had become established exactly the same allegations reappeared—this time against the heretics, pagans and so-called devil worshippers. This has been the pattern throughout history, down to the present day when it exploded once again with the unusual vehemence. O thou great powerful governor Amaimon, who reigneth exalted in the power of the only El above all spirits in the kingdoms of the East, (South, West, North), I invoke and move thee in the name of the true God, and in God who thou worshippest: and in the seal of thy creation: and in the mighty names of God, Iehevohe Tetragrammaton, who cast down from Heaven, thou and the spirits of darkness, and in all the names of the mighty God who is the creator of Heaven and Earth, and the dwelling of darkness, and all things and in their power and brightness; and in the name Primeumaton who reigns over the palaces of Heaven. Bring forth, I say, the spirits of William and Sarah Winchester; bring them forth in the 24th of a moment let their dwelling be empty until they visit us in peace, speaking the secrets of truth; I invoke thee. Through the gateway of blood, smoke, and Blackened Fire receive life from the deepest depths of Arezura, in the name of Zohak, and by the power of Angra Mainyu it is done! Awaken to empower the circle in the Winchester Mansion in the 24th of a moment in the likeness of, respectively, a man and a woman, not unto the terror of the sons of men the creatures or all things on the face of the Earth. Obey my power like reasoning beings; obey the living breath, the law which I speak. #RandolphHarris 9 of 9

Winchester Mystery House

Bringing a little sunshine to this gloomy San Jose afternoon☀️ Will we be seeing you this week for tours? Some tickets still available!

🎟 link in bio. https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

The Human Dilemma

An individual has to compete with millions of others, and since there are so many of them, one solitary individual often feels that one just does not make much difference! There is a feeling that individually and as a people we are fighting a losing battle to maintain our own uniqueness and that there appears to be no end in sight. When a face engagement exhausts the situation—all persons present being accredited participants in the encounter—the problem of maintaining orderly activity will be largely internal to the encounter: the allocation of talking time (if the engagement is a spoken one); the maintenance of something innocuous to talk or act upon (this being describable as the problem of “safe supplies”); the inhibition of hostility; and so forth. When there are persons present who are not participants in the engagement, we know that inevitably they will be in a position to learn something about the encounter as a whole is conducted. When a face engagement must be carried on in a situation containing bystanders, I will refer to it as accessible. Whenever a face engagement is accessible to nonparticipants there is a fully shared and unshared participation. All persons in the gathering at large will be immersed in a common pool of unfocused interaction, each person, by one’s mere presence, manner, and appearance, transmitting some information about oneself to everyone in the situation, and each person present receiving like information from all the others present, at least in so far as one is willing to make use of one’s receiving opportunities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

It is this possibility of widely available communication, and the regulations arising to control this communication, that transforms a mere physical region into the locus of a sociologically relevant entity, the situation. However, above and beyond this fully common participation, the ratified members of a particular engagement will in addition be participating in interaction of the focused kind, where a message conveyed by one person is meant to make a specific contribution to a matter at hand, and is usually addressed to a particular recipient, while the other members of the encounter, and only these others, are meant to receive it too. Thus, there will be a fully shared basis of unfocused interaction underlying one or more partially shared bases of focused interaction. The difference between participation in the unfocused interaction in the situation at large and participation in the focused interaction in a face engagement is easy to sense but difficult to follow out in detail. Questions such as choice of participants for the encounter or sound level of voices have relevance for the situation as a while, because anyone in the situation will be (and will be considered to be) in a position to witness these aspects of the face engagement, which are the unfocused part of the communication flowing from it. However, the specific meanings of particular statements appropriately conveyed within a face engagement will not be available to the situation at large, although, if a special effort at secrecy be made, this furtiveness, as a general aspect of what is going on, may in fact become quite widely perceivable and an important item in the unfocused interaction that is occurring. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

That part of the communication occurring in a face engagement that could not be conveyed through mediating channels is situational; but this situational aspect of the encounter becomes part of the unfocused communication in the situation at large only when some of the grosser improprieties, such as shouting, whispering, and broad physical gestures, occur. In considering accessible engagements, it is convenient to take a vantage point within such an encounter, and to describe the issues from this point of view. The persons present in the gathering at large can then be divided up into participants and bystanders, depending on whether or not they are official members of the engagement in question; and the issues to be considered can be divided up into obligations owned the encounter and obligations owed the gathering at large (and behind the gathering, the social occasion of which is an expression). In order for the engagement to maintain its boundaries and integrity, and to avoid being engulfed by the gathering, both participant and bystander will have to regulate their conduct appropriately. And yet even while cooperating to maintain the privacy of the given encounter, both participant and bystander will be obligated to protect the gathering at large, demonstrating that in certain ways all those within the situation stand together, undivided by their differentiating participation. Man is man because he is capable of reflective thought. Among the animal kingdom man alone has yet been able to demonstrate that he can cognitively consider his own existence, his own ending, his own limitations, and his own strengths. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Perhaps the limitations of man’s communicative abilities keep him from knowing any more than he does about the talents of other members of the animal kingdom; nevertheless, what he is sure of is that man can perform these and other, higher acts. With man being so superior, why is it that when we are trying to change people, we do not use meat, instead of a whip? Why do we not use praise instead of condemnation? Let us praise even the slightest improvement. That inspires the other person to keep on improving. Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise. When you have a hard day or make a mistake, you might feel discouraged or bad about yourself. However, anyone can look back on their own lives and see where a few words of praise have sharply changed their future. If something goes wrong and you are feeling bad, try writing yourself an encouraging note! What happened: I did not do well on a test. Encouraging words: I can keep trying and learning. I will not give up. Keep trying. Keep loving. Keep trusting. Keep believing. Keep growing. History is replete with striking illustrations of the sheer witchery of praise. For example, many years ago a boy of ten was working in a factory in Naples. He longed to be a singer, but his first teacher discouraged him. “You can’t sing,” he said. “You haven’t any voice at all. It sounds like the wind in the shutters.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

However, his mother, a poor peasant woman, put her arms about him and praised him and told him she knew he could sing, she could already see an improvement, and she went barefoot in order to save money to pay for his music lessons. That peasant mother’s praise and encouragement changed that boy’s life. His name was Enrico Caruso, and he became the greatest and most famous opera singer of his age. Many of you may not know this, but a lot of you and your parents are successful because your grandparents and great grandparents did things like go without shoes and worked hard so they could ensure their descendants would not have to miss a meal or go without a roof over their heads. So be proud of who you are and be thankful that someone had the opportunity to help you succeed. And next time you think about blowing money, even say, $30, think about how many hours it took you to make that money, and perhaps save it or put it in a Roth IRA so you have more money for retirement, or for your child’s college fund. You do not want your offspring to grow up and know the pangs of hunger. The praise, the recognition that one receives through an accomplishment can change one’s whole life. For if one does not get encouragement, one might spend one’s life never knowing what he or she could have accomplished. Use praise instead of criticism. When criticism is minimized and praise emphasized, the good things people do will be reinforced and the poorer things will atrophy for lack of attention. Many people who are praised for the good things they do end up going out of their way to do things right. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

And even better, when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good. Remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it. However, nobody wants insincerity. Nobody wants flattery. If you and I will inspire the people with whom we come in contact to a realization of the hidden treasures they possess, we can do far more than change people. We can literally transform them. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within one’s limits. One possesses powers of various sorts which one habitually fails to use. Everyone possess powers of various sorts which one habitually fails to use; and one of these powers you are probably not using to the fullest extent is your magic ability to praise people and inspire them with a realization of their latent possibilities. Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement. To become a more effective leader of people, be hearty and sincere in your approbation and lavish in your praise. Promoting a sense of individual worth is basic to effective psychotherapy and counseling, to effective public education, to marriages, and other love relationships, and certainly to child-rearing. People who are accepted and loved and treated as worthwhile have a greater tendency to develop more fully in their selfhood, to engage themselves more fully in their tasks and chores, and, if production is any kind of measure, to turn out more of whatever we might like from them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

“Is a bored man free from identification?” Boredom is identification with oneself, with false personality, with something in oneself. Identification is an almost permanent state for us. It is the chief manifestation of false personality, and because of this we cannot get out of the false personality. You must be able to see this state apart from yourself, separated from yourself, and that can only be done by trying to become more conscious, trying to remember yourself, trying to be aware of yourself. Only when you become more aware of yourself are you able to struggle with manifestations like identification and lying, and with false personality itself. All work has to be on false personality. If you do any other work and leave this, it is useless work and you will fail very soon. As with negative emotions, lying and all imagination, false personality cannot exist without identification. You must understand that false personality is a combination of all lies, features and “I”s which can never be useful in any sense or in any way, either in life or in the work—like negative emotions. “If false personality entirely based on negative emotions?” There are many things besides negative emotions in false personality. For instance, in false personality there are always bad mental habits—wrong thinking. False personality, or parts of false personality, is always based on wrong thinking. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

At the same time, if you were to take negative emotions away from false personality it would collapse; it could not exist without them. “So all negative emotions spring from false personality?” Yes certainly. How could it be otherwise? False personality is to speak a special organ for negative emotions, producing negative emotions. You remember that I said that there is no real center for negative emotions. False personality acts as a center for negative emotions. “How can one deal with the conceit of false personality?” You must know all its features first and then you must think rightly. When you think rightly you will find ways to deal with it. You must not justify it; it lives on justification, even glorification of all its features. At almost every moment of out life, even in quiet moments, we are always justifying it, considering it legitimate and finding all possible excuses for it. This is what is meant by wrong thinking. So first of all you must know false personality, and then you must think rightly about it. You must know what it is—place it so to speak—this is the first step. And, as I have said, you must realize that all identification, all considering, all lies to oneself, all weaknesses, all personality. In addition, all forms of self-will belong to false personality, so sooner or later you have to sacrifice them. “Did you say that all our likes and dislikes are in false personality?” Most of them are. And even those which did not belong to it originally, which have real roots, all pass through false personality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

[Somebody asked if one had to know the whole of false personality in order to struggle against it because it seemed to one that one could only know little bits of it.] One most know it. It is like a special breed of bird. If you do not know it you cannot speak about it. If you have seen it you can speak about it. To see only bits, as you say, is quite enough. Every small part of it is the same colour. If you see this bird once, you will always know it. It sings in a special way; it walks in a special way. Humans are capable of understanding many of the things that happen to us, and unable to comprehend many others though we can still experience them. The lacks of comprehension are due partly to our attitudes or mind-sets, which limit our understanding to things that our word symbols can define or point toward. Partly the limitations are due to a lack of development of our fullest functioning. As self-aware beings, able to look objectively at our own experiences, we find ourselves confused and anxious at times, overjoyed and ecstatic at others. We can search for many things: happiness, wisdom, perfection, enlightenment, identity, meaning. We can be effective in dealing wholly with the life we live, and we can attain some measures of significance. In the “search for significance,” it is often a struggle, for life certainly is not a bed of roses. So, just being alive is a blessing, but also a “struggle” and full of ordinary everyday risks. However, to seek the difficult, to search for the challenging, to demonstrate human effectiveness, in short, to be significant, is the biggest struggle of all. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

One of the first strategic lessons in tennis is not to commit to a direction until the last possible fraction of a second. Otherwise, the opponent can exploit your guess and hit the ball the other way. However, even when one cannot observe the opponent’s move, there is a great advantage to predicting it. If the server always aims to the receiver’s backhand, the receiver will prepare his or her grip and start to move toward that side in anticipation, and consequently will be more effective in the return of serve. The server, therefore, attempts to be unpredictable in order to prevent the receiver from successfully second-guessing one’s aim. Conversely, the receiver must not exclusively favour one side or the other in making one’s initial move. Unlike matching fingers, players should not equate unpredictability with even odds. Players can improve their performance by systematically favouring one side, although in an unpredictable way. For correctness, let us think of a pair of players with particular skills. The receiver’s forehand is somewhat stronger. If one anticipates correctly, one’s forehand return will be successful 90 percent of the time, while an anticipated backhand return will be successfully only 60 percent of the time. Of course, the returner fares worse if one starts to move to one side and the service goes to the other. If one goes to the backhand side while the service is to one’s forehand, one can shift and return successfully only 30 percent of the time. The other way around, one’s chances are 20 percent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

The server wants to keep the successful return percentage as low as possible; the returner has exactly the opposite interest. Before the match, the two players choose their game plans. What is the best strategy for each side? If the server always aims one’s serves toward the forehand, the receiver will anticipate the move to one’s forehand and successfully return the serves 90 percent of the time. If the server always aims one’s serves to the backhand, the receiver will anticipate the move toward one’s backhand and will return 60 percent of the serves successfully. Only by mixing one’s aim can the server reduce the receiver’s effectiveness. One keeps the receiver guessing and therefore unable to take full advantage of anticipating the correct position. Suppose the server tosses an imaginary coin just before each serve, and aims to the forehand or backhand according to whether the coin shows heads or tails. Now look what happens when the receiver moves to the forehand position. This guess will be correct only half the time. When correct, the forehand return is successful 90 percent of the time, and when the move to the forehead is an incorrect guess, the receiver’s successful return tale falls to 20 percent. One’s overall success rate is (1/2)90% + (1/2)20% = 55%. By a similar argument, a move toward the backhand leads to successful returns (1/2)60% + (1/2)30% = 45% of the time. Given the 50:50 mixing rule of the server, the receiver chooses the options best from one’s perspective. One should move toward one’s forehand, and the percentage of successful returns will be 55 percent. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

For the server, this is already an improvement over the outcome when one aims one’s serve the same way all the time. For comparison, the receiver’s success rate is 90 percent or 60 percent if the server aims exclusively toward the forehand or backhand serves, respectively. Predicting business success is a lot like the example of the tennis match. All messages move through channels. However, some channels are more equal than others. All executives know that the “routing slip” which determines who gets to see a memo is a tool of power. Keeping someone “out of the loop” is a way of clipping one’s wings. Sometimes the person kept out of the loop is the person on top. When John H. Kelly was the U.S.A. ambassador in Beirut, he sent messages direct to the White House National Security Council, using the facilities of the CIA, rather than through the normal State Department chain of command. This meant he was end-running his own boss, Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Kelly, while in Washington, also met numerous times with Oliver North and other NSC officials in connection with their plan to trade arms to Iran in return for hostages—a plan Shultz had advised against. Shultz was so furious when he learned about the Beirut incident that he blasted Kelly publicly, and formally prohibited State Department personnel from communicating outside departmental channels without express instructions from either oneself of from the President. It is unlikely, however, that any such order will ever wipe out the practice- Back-channels are too useful to power-shifters. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

One hearing of this case, Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence committee, blurted, “I don’t think I have ever heard of that happening before—totally bypassing an American Secretary of State.” Irritation may have fogged his memory. A precisely parallel case of back-channeling took place when the American ambassador to Pakistan communicated secretly with the White House National Security Council, again bypassing a Secretary of State. In this earlier case, the back channel was set up by Henry Kissinger, then serving as head of the NSC. Kissinger used it in arranging President Nixon’s secret mission to China, which resulted in restoring relations between the two countries. Kissinger was an enthusiastic back-channeler, eager to keep information out of the official bureaucratic system and in his own hands. Claiming he had the President’s approval, he once invited William J. Porter, the U.S.A. ambassador to South Korea, to communicate directly with him without going through Porter’s boss, William Rogers, then Secretary of State. Porter’s diary notes his reaction: “Here’s the Nixon-Kissinger secret diplomatic service shaping up, secret codes and all…If the President agreed to create a super-net of ambassadors under his security adviser without the knowledge of the Secretary of State something new was happening in American history…I concluded that I was just a country boy and I would keep my head down.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

When the SALT treaty was being negotiated with the Soviets, the America team in Geneva was headed by Gerard C. Smith. However, Kissinger and the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff set up a private channel so that certain staff people could communicate with the directly without Smith’s knowledge. Kissinger also maintained a back-channel to Moscow, again bypassing the State Department, sending messages to the Politburo through Anatoli Dobrynin, rather than through the appropriate State Department specialists or their counterparts in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Only a few people in Moscow—in the Politburo, the secretariat, and the Soviet diplomatic corps—were ever aware that messages were being passed back and forth this way. The most celebrated—and perhaps most fateful—use of the Back-Channel Tactic helped prevent World War III. This occurred during the Cuban missile standoff. Formal messages ricocheted back and forth like a tennis match between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev while the World held its breath. Russian missiles in Cuba were pointed at American soil. Kennedy orders a naval blockade. It was at that moment of high tension that Khrushchev sent Aleksandr Fomin, his KGB chief in Washington, to call on an American newsman, John Scali, whom Fomin had earlier met. On the furth day of the crisis, with danger escalating by the moment, Fomin asked Scali whether he thought the United States of America would agree not to invade Cuba if Soviets pulled out their missiles and bombers. That message, relayed by the journalist to the White Hose, proved to be a key turning point in the crisis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

However, even such uses of Back-Channel Tactic are simple by comparison with the more sophisticated method that might be called the Double-Channel Tactic—the sending of alternative or contradictory messages through two different channels to test reactions or to sow confusion and conflict among the recipients. Twice during negotiations over the antiballistic missile system, Kissinger and Soviet Foreign Minister Alexei Gromyko each relied on a back-channel to bypass their own normal chain of command. During these talks, in May 1971 and April 1972, Kissinger had reason to suspect that the Russians were using the Double-Channel Tactic against him. Years later Arkady Shevchenko, former Gromyko assistant defected to the United States of America and wrote in his autobiography that Kissinger’s suspicion had been unwarranted. It was not a deliberate ploy but confusion, arising because one of the Soviets had been “operating on outdated instructions from Moscow, knowing no better.” Whether or not this is correct is irrelevant here. What is clear is that Back- and Double-channeling are much-used techniques to shift power. There is also a dazzling variety of games played at the receiving end of the communication process. The most familiar of these is the Access Tactic—meaning the attempt to control access to one’s superior, and thereby to control the information one receives. Top executives and lowly secretaries alike know this game well. Access conflicts are so common they hardly merit further comment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Then there is the Need-to-Know Tactic, much favoured by intelligence agencies, terrorists, and underground political movements, by means of which data, information, and knowledge are compartmentalized and carefully kept away from all but specified receivers with a validated “need to know.” The exact converse of this is the Need-Not-to-Know Tactic. A former Cabinet Secretary in the White House explains it this way: “Should I, as a White House official, know something? Does knowing it mean I have to take action? Cn the person telling me then go to someone else and say, ‘I’ve already discussed this with the White House’? That could put me in a pissing contest between two other players I don’t know anything about and have nothing to do with…There was a lot I didn’t want to know about.” The Need-Not-to-Know Tactic is also used by subordinate to protect a superior, leaving the leader in a position to claim ignorance if things go sour. During the Irangate investigation a joke that went the rounds in Washington made the point. QUESTION: How many White House aides does it take to screw in  light bulb? ANSWER: None. They like to keep Reagan in the dark. By the same token, there is also a Forced-to-know Tactic, more popularly knowns as the CYA, or “cover your assets,” memo. Here the power player makes sure that another player has been notified of something, so that if things fall apart, a recipient can share the blame. Variations are numerous, but for every game played with sources, channels, and receivers, there is a multitude of ploys and stratagems directed at the message itself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Credit attribution, though difficult and necessarily imperfect, can nonetheless be designed to help harness complexity. As we have already discussed, context preservation could be advantageous if the cause of apparent success is not fully understood. This indicates a general problem. Since Complex Adaptive Systems are inherently difficult to understand or predict, it follows that attribution of credit in selection will often be difficult and prone to mistakes. If it were feasible, the best response would be not to make mistakes in credit attribution. Because such mistakes can be very costly, vast bodies of academic knowledge and expensive social apparatus have been created to reduce them. Systems of logic, methods of statistics, and philosophies of science are all aimed at improving the extent to which our conclusions follow from our premises and evidence. There re public debates, professional review boards, and courts of law. All contribute to limiting the mistakes in attribution of credit that may drive selection processes. Where these tools for improving inference are cost-effective, we certainly believe they should be used, and we applaud the work that maintains and extends them. However, despite all the effort put into these valuable resources, totally accurate attribution of credit is often infeasible. Factors that make it easy to learn appropriate lessons from the experience accumulated in making a series of choices: clear rewards for the appropriate choices, repeated opportunities for observation or for practice, small deliberation costs at each choice so that frequent choices are easier, good feedback on the results of choices, unchanging circumstances that keep inferences valid, and a simple context that can be effectively analyzed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

As you know, changing causes problems. Molecular manufacturing offers the possibility of drastic change, a change in the means of production more fundamental than the introduction of industry, or of agriculture. Our economic and social structures have evolved around assumptions that will no longer be valid. How will we handle the changes in the way we work and live? Nanotechnology will have wide-ranging impact in many areas, including economic, industrial, and social patterns. What do historical patterns in similar circumstances tell us about the future? Any powerful technology with broad applications revolutionizes lives, and nanotechnology will be no exception. Depending on one’s point of view, this may sound exciting or it may sound disturbing, but it most certainly does not sound comfortable. In comparison to many projections of the twenty-first century, though, nanotechnology may lead to comparatively comfortable change. The changes most often projected—for a future not including nanotechnology—have been ecological disaster, resource shortages, economic collapses, and a slide back into misery. The rise of nanotechnology will offer an alternative—green wealth—but that alternative will bring great changes from the patterns of recent decades. Times of rapid technological change are disconcerting. For most of humanity’s existence, people lived in a stable pattern. They learned to live as their parents had lived—by hunting and gathering, later by farming—and changes were small and gradual. A knowledge of the past was a reliable guide to the future. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Sudden changes, when they did occur, were apt to be ruinous: invasions of natural disasters. These sudden changes were fought or repaired or survived as best one could. Making major changes by choice was rare, and radical innovations were generally or the worse: the old ways at least ensured the ancestors’ survival, the new might not. This made cultures conservative. It is only natural that there be efforts to resist change, but before undertaking such an effort, it makes sense to examine the record of what works and what does not. The only examples of successful change fighters have been communities that have created and maintained barricades to isolate themselves from the outside World socially, culturally, and technologically. For the two centuries before 1854, Japan turned its back on the outside World, following a deliberate policy of seclusion. The leaders of Albania restricted contacts for many years; only recently have they started to open up. Isolation attempts have worked better on a smaller scale, when participation is voluntary rather than decreed by government. Today, within the Hawaiian island chain, the tiny private owned island of Niihau, sixteen miles long and six miles wide, is deliberately kept as a preserve of the nineteenth-century Hawaiian lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Over two hundred full-blooded Hawaiians there speak the Hawaiian language and use no telephones, plumbing, television, and no electricity (except in school). The Amish Pennsylvania have no surrounding ocean to help maintain their isolation, but rely instead on tight social, religious, and technological rules aimed at keeping external technology and culture out, and themselves grouped in; those who leave the fold are excluded. Rumspringa is a bad idea because you are letting teenagers go out into the English World alone and there are many evils out there that they are unaware of. And people can see they are different—innocent and pure—and will prey on them. On a national scale, attempts to take only one part of the package—whether social or technological—have not done well at all. For decades, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations welcomed Western Technology but attempted tight restrictions on the passage of people, ideas, and goods. Yet illegal music, thoughts, literature, and other knowledge still crept in—as they do into the Islamic countries. Fighting technological change in society at large has had little success, where that change gave some large group what it wanted. The most famous fighters of technological change—the Luddites—were unsuccessful. They smashed “automated” textile machinery that was replacing old hand looms during the early industrial revolution in England, but people wanted affordable clothing, and smashing equipment in one place just moved the business elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Change has sometimes been postponed, as when a later group, under the banner of “Captain Swing,” smashed hundreds of threshing machines in a wide area of southern England in 1830. They succeeded keeping the old, labour-intensive ways of harvesting for over a generation. In previous centuries, when the World was less tightly connected by international trade, communications and transportation, delays of years and even decades could be enforced through violence or legal maneuvers such as tariffs, trade barriers, regulations, or outright banning. Attempting to stop or postpone change is less successful today, when technology moves internationally almost as easily as people do—and human travel is so easy that 25 million people cross the Atlantic each year. Change fighters find that the problems they create mount with time. Products made using the old, high-cost techniques are uncompetitive. There is no way to bring back the “old jobs”; they no longer make sense. However, the old habits die hard, and these same responses to the prospect of technological change continue today—ignoring it, denying it, and opposing it. Societies that have fought change, as Britain did, have fallen behind in a cloud of coal smoke. Why did the Luddites respond violently? Perhaps their response can be attributed to three factors: First, the change in their lives was sudden and radical; second, it affected a large group of people at one time, in one area; and third, in a World unprepared for rapid technological change, there was no safety net to be unemployed. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

While local economies might have been able to absorb a trickle of hungry laid-off workers, they lacked the size and diversity needed to offer other employment options quickly to large numbers of unemployed. In the twenty-first century, however, societies have of necessity become somewhat better adapted to change. This has been a matter of necessity, because sluggish communities soon fall behind. In the ancient days of peasant stability, there was no need for institutions like Consumer Reports to study and rate new products, or regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency to watch over new hazards. We developed the needs, and we developed the institutions. These mechanisms represent important adaptations, not so much to the technologies of the twenty-first century, but to the increasing change in technology during the twenty-first century. There is great room for improvement, but they can perhaps provide a basis for adapting to the next century as well. Even with the best of institutions to cushion shocks and discourage abuse, there will be problems. They very act of solving problems of production—of increasing wealth—will created problems of economic change. Perhaps Darwin was right to emphasize the importance played in nature by competition. Darwin told us that those species survived best which could adapt to their environment, and he let loose a phrase which he later regretted: “the survival of the fittest,” and when applied to social interactions of man—this philosophy is already seen to be true. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22


Cresleigh Homes

Let’s imagine a day in the life at your #PlumasRanch home at #CresleighMeadows Residence 2…https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/quick-move-homesite-48/

The sun shines in the windows while you tidy up the living room, then lights up your lunch meal prep at the spacious island. 😎

Finally, you enjoy a great night’s sleep in the cozy bedroom. This could be your life, too; picture yourself at #CresleighHomes!

The Party Wall

America is among the most violent of the so-called civilized nations; our homicide rate is three to ten times higher than that of the nations of Europe. An important cause of this is the influence of that frontier brutality which we are the heirs of. We need a new kind of physical courage that will neither run rampant in violence nor require our assertion of egocentric power over other people. Whether an individual is allowed to enter a region, such as a room, or is excluded from it, one will often be required to show moral courage, which generally abhorrers violence and some kind of regard for the physical boundary around it, when there is one. Of course, theoretically it is possible for boundaries like thick walls to close the region off physically from outside communication; almost always, however, some communication across the boundary is physically possible. Social arrangements are therefore recognized that restrict such communication to a special part of the boundary, such as doors, and that lead persons inside and outside the region to act as if the barriers had cut off more communication than it does. The work walls do, they do in part because they are honoured or socially recognized as communication barriers, giving rise, among properly conducted members of the community, to the possibility of “conventional situational closure” in the absence of actual physical closure. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

A glimpse of these conventions can be obtained by noting a fact about socialization: children in our middle-class society are firmly taught that, while it is possible to address a friend by shouting through the walls, or to get one’s attention by tapping on the window, it is none the less not permissible, and that a desire to engage anyone in the region must be ratified by first knocking at the door as the formal means of making entry. Windows themselves may provide an opportunity for partial participation in a situation and are typically associated with an understanding that such a possibility will not be exploited. Deviations from this rule can, of course, be found. In Sacramento, California, visiting seamen, described by some in the community as “of the lowest type,” would sometimes walk around cottages, and peer directly into the windows. After dinner we went down to the railroad again, and took our seats in the cars for Cosumnes River College. Being rather early, those men were curious in foreigners, came (according to custom) round the carriage in which I sat; let down all the windows; thrust their heads and shoulders; hooked themselves on conveniently by their elbows; and fell to comparing notes on the subject to my personal appearance, which as much indifference as if I were a stuffed figure. I never gained so much uncompromising information with reference to my own nose and eyes, the various impressions wrought by my mouth and chin on different minds, and how my head looks when it is viewed from behind, as on these occasions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

A chief characteristic of courage is that it requires a centeredness within our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be a vacuum. The “emptiness” within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. That is why we must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic. In the many mental hospitals where the nurses’ station is a glass-enclosed observation post, patients must be trained to keep from lingering around the windows and looking in on the life inside. (Interestingly enough, no hospital rule prohibits staff from looking out at a patient through these windows, thus maintaining an official form of eavesdropping.) The fashion of using “picture windows” for walls has, of course, introduced its own social strains, requiring great morale on both sides of window to ensure conventional closure; there are many cartoon illustrations of consequent problems. It may be added that failure to recognize a region boundary is often associated with according to those who are improperly observed the status of nonpersons. Where walls between two regions are known to be very thin, problems of reticence become pronounced. Sometimes open recognition will be given to the communication possibilities, with person talking through the wall almost as though they were all in the same social situation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

An analysis of an American semidetached housing development a suggests: “Developing our picture of neighbour linkage by ear from the comments of residents, we find that it is possible in these houses to entertain a neighbour’s wife by playing her favourite records with the gramophone or an iPhone turned to loud, or to mind her children or invite her to tea, all through the party wall.” Here, of course, we see some of the special functions of sight: those on the other wise of the party wall may not be present, or, if present, may not be attending, but it will be impossible to see that in this case. We are living at a time when one age is dying and the new age is not yet born. We cannot doubt this as we look about us to see the radical changes in mores involving pleasures of the flesh, in gender roles, marriage styles, in family structures, in education, in religion, technology, and almost every other aspect of modern life. And behind it all is the threat of the atom bomb, which recedes into the distance but never disappears. To live with sensitivity in this age of limbo requires courage. A choice confronts us. Shall we, as we feel our foundations shaking, withdraw in anxiety and panic? Frightened by the loss of our familiar mooring places, shall we become paralyzed and cover our inaction with apathy? If we do these things, we will have surrendered our chance to participate in the forming of the future. We will have forfeited the distinctive characteristic of human beings—namely, to influence our evolution through our awareness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Years ago the General Electric Company was faced with the delicate task of removing Charles Steinmetz from the head of a department. Mr. Steinmetz, a genius of the first magnitude when it came to electricity, was a failure as the head of the calculating department. Yet the company did not dare offend this man. He was indispensable—and highly sensitive. So they gave him a new title. They made him Consulting Engineer of the General Electric Company—a new title for work he was already doing—and let someone else head up the department. Mr. Steinmetz was happy. So were the officers of G.E. They had gently maneuvered their most temperamental star, and they had done it without a storm—by letting hm save face. When one “saves face,” they retain respect and avoid humiliation. Letting one save face! How important, how vitally important that is! And how few of us ever stop to think of it! We ride roughshod over the feelings of others, getting our own way, finding fault, issuing threats, criticizing a child or an employee in front of others, without even considering the hurt to be the other person’s pride. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it. It is a truth, recognizable in all of us, that when we do not want to become involved, when we do not want to confront the issue of whether or not we will come to the assistance of someone who is unjustly treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to the other’s suffering, we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

 Hence the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement, “I did not want to become involved.” Whereas a few minutes’ thought, a considerate word or two, a genuine understanding of the other person’s attitude, would go so far toward alleviating the sting! Let us remember that the next time we are faced with the distasteful necessity of discharging or reprimanding an employee. Even if we are right and the other person is definitely wrong, we only destroy ego by causing someone to lose face. Hurting a person’s dignity is a real crime. Man lives under a great many laws—physical, physiological, biological, laws created by man himself and so on, until we come to the laws of personal life and finally to imaginary “I.” This is the most important law which governs our life and makes us live in the non-existing seventh dimension. A great many forces or influences act on a man at any given moment, though people are chiefly controlled by imagination. We imagine ourselves to be different from what we are and that creates illusions. However, there are necessary laws. We are limited to certain food and to certain air, to a certain temperature and so on. We are so conditioned by influences that we have very little possibility of freedom. It is necessary for us to change our inner attitude. People who live exclusively under A influences and who take B influences, if they meet them, on the same level as A influences, usually die in this life. They may be physically alive but that does not mean that their essence can develop. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

“Do dead people look like everyone else? Do they live as we live?” Quite, yes. Because they have soul and the remains of essence. They can insure themselves!” “You spoke previously of creating a permanent ‘I.’ What do you mean by that?” I mean that when you say “I” you can be sure that it is the same “I” each time. Now you say, “I want this” and half an hour later you say, “I want that.” The “I” is quite different. There is one thing—you—and there are many imaginary “I”s. You is that really is, and you must learn to distinguish it. It may be very small, very elementary, but you can find something definite and permanent and sufficiently solid in yourself. If you remembered all that has been said, you would remember yourself at the end of ten weeks. For instance, take the study of false personality. This is one of the quickest methods. The more you understand false personality the more you will remember yourself. What prevents self-remembering is, first of all, false personality. False personality cannot and does not wish to remember itself, and it does not wish to let any other personality remember. It just tries to stop self-remembering; takes some form of sleep and calls that self-remembering. Then it is quite happy. False personality is something special; you are opposed to it. False personality must be made to disappear or, at any rate, it must not enter into this work. This applies to everybody and everybody must begin in this way. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Firs of all you must know your false personality and you must not trust it in any way—its ideas, its words, its actions. You cannot destroy it but you can make it passive for some time, and then little by little you can make it weaker. False personality does not really exist but we imagine that it exists. It exists by its manifestations but not as part of ourselves. Do not try to define it or you will lose your way in words, but it is necessary to deal with facts. Negative emotions exist but at the same time they do not exist; there is no real center for them. This is one of the misfortunes of our state. We are all full of non-existent things. [Someone said that he sometimes doubted the genuineness of this interest in the work; he might by lying to himself.] Only you can answer that, and only if you do not forget the fundamental principles by saying “I” about something when it is only one “I.” You must get to know other “I”s and remember about them. If you forget this you forget everything. So long a you remember this you may remember everything. Forgetting about this is the great danger, and one slight change in something is sufficient to make everything wrong. Some groups of “I”s are useful, some are artificial and some are pathological. All people play roles; each person has about five or six roles which one plays in one’s life. One plays them unconsciously, or if one tries to play them consciously, one identifies with them very soon and continues to play them unconsciously. These roles together make the imaginary “I.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

False personality is imaginary “I.” [Somebody asked where higher states of consciousness could produce more thoroughly bad people or more thoroughly good people equally.] No, that is wrong. Bad people can be produced only by increase of mechanicalness. Self-remembering cannot produce wrong results provided the connection is kept between it and other ideas of the system, but if one omits one thing and takes another thing from the system—for instance, if one seriously works on self-remembering without knowing about the idea of division of “I”s, so that one takes oneself as one (as unity), from the beginning—then self-remembering will give wrong results and may even produce wrong crystallization and make development impossible. There are schools for instance or systems which, although they do not formulate it in this way, are actually based on false personality and on struggle against conscience. Such work must certainly produce wrong results. First it will create a kind of strength, but it will make the development of higher consciousness an impossibility. False personality either destroys or distorts memory. Self-remembering is a thing which must be based on right function. At the same time you must work on the weakening of false personality. Several lines of work are suggested and explained from the beginning and all must go together. You cannot just do one thing and not do the another. All are necessary for creating this right combination, but first must come the understanding of and struggle with false personality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Suppose one tries to remember oneself and does not want to make efforts against false personality, then all its features will come into play, saying, “I dislike these people; I do not want this, I do not want that,” and so one. Then it will not be work but quite the opposite. If one tries to work in this wrong way it can make one stronger than one was before but in such a case the stronger one becomes, the less is the possibility of development. Fixing before development—that is the danger. We are thus not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on the weekend. The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity is part of self-remembering and is the process of making, of bringing into being. Now this intensity of awareness is not necessarily connected with conscious purpose or willing. It may begin in dreams or at an unconscious level. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

The makes source—any data, information, or knowledge that is communicated requires a source or sender; a set of channels or media through which the message flows; a receiver; and of course a message. Power players intervene at each of these points. Take the sender. When a letter arrives in the mail, the first thing we usually wan to know is who sent it. The identity of the Sender is, in fact, a crucial part of any message. Among other things, it helps us decide how much credence to give the message. This is why the “Masked Source Tactic” is so frequently used. An ostensibly nonpartisan citizen group that sends out millions of fund-raising letters may actually be financed and controlled covertly by a political party. A political action committee with a fine-sounding name may be run by the lobbyist for a rapacious industry.  A patriotic-sounding organization may be controlled by another nation. Both the KGB and he CIA covertly channel funds into publications, labour unions, and other institutions in targeted countries and help set up friendly organizations. The “Masked Source Tactic” is the basis for front groups of all political stripes. However, masking the message-sender can take many forms, in many different settings, from business boardrooms to prison cells. An imprisoned murderer once described how she could bring power to bear on a jail guard who was harassing her. She could, she said, write a letter of complaint to the prison warden. However, if the guard found out, life would be made even more miserable for her. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

She could also, she said, go over the warden’s head and write to a politician complaining of brutal treatment, and pleading with him to put pressure on the warden to call off his guard. However, this was even more risky. “Fortunately,” she observed in a memorable phrase, “prisons are filled with idealist. And so,” she said, “I could get another inmate to write to the politician for me,” thus concealing the real source of the message. Officials throughout business and government play variations of this fame. When an underling “pulls rank,” using a superior’s name (often without authorization) to gain an advantage, he or she is using the Masked Source Tactic. A classic twist on the Masked Source Tactic influenced U.S.A. policy during the Vietnam War. It was used in 1963, when a report prepared by Robert McNamara and General Maxwell Taylor advised the President and the nation that “it should be possible to withdraw the bulk of U.S. personnel” by the end of 1965. This forecast was bolstered by data supposedly originating in Saigon. What readers of the report were not told is that much of what was datelined Saigon had been prepared in Washington, the transmitted to Saigon so it could be sent back to Washington looking as though the data actually came from the field. The source was disguised to lend the data greater authenticity. A special class of Masked Source messages are outright forgeries. Seldom used in everyday bureaucratic warfare, it is well known in international affairs where strange forgeries have on occasion changed history—like the Zimmerman Telegram that helped propel the United States of America into World War I. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

In 1986, the U.S.A. State Department publicly exposed as forged a document that described a “confidential” meeting at the Pentagon. It quoted then Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger as saying that SDI, the Strategic Defense Initiative, would “give the United States…the ability to threaten the Soviet Union with a knockout blow.” If true, the quotation would have bolstered Soviet arguments against the SDI program. However, the document was a fake circulated in West Germany (presumably by the Soviets) as part of the public campaign drumming up sentiments against SDI. Another forged document about SDI turned up in the Nigerian press. More recently an anti-Japanese forgery turned up in Washington Congressman Tom McMillen rose in the House of Representatives to read what he called an “internal, high-level Japanese government memo.” Ostensibly addressed to the Prime Minister from his “Special Assistant for Policy Coordination,” the memo called for Japanese investments in the United States of American to be planted in congressional districts where they could be used to influence the U.S.A. politics. Nothing could have been better calculated to intensify Japan-bashing in the United States of America. However, rather than a Japanese government document, it turned out to be an embarrassing fiction traced to Ronald A. Morse, an official of the Asian program of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars. Morse said that he had written it merely to illustrate, in a dramatic way, what he believed to be current Japanese attitudes. He claimed he had told its recipients the document was bogus. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Markets and demonstrations illustrate how strategies can be selected very quickly. Typically, selection at the strategy level is faster and less costly than selection at the agent level. Nevertheless, these differences are tendencies rather than inevitable consequences. So, by way of counterexample, large corporations are often faced with new products from start-up competitors. They sometimes find it quicker to create new divisions or small spin-off firms to make a comparable product rather than modifying existing lines of activity to produce it. In effect, this is a case where agent creation may be faster than strategy copying. Although the differences we have mentioned are only tendencies, they are rooted in the added difficulty that is typical for creating full agents. Hence it is often important to compare possibilities for selection at the agent and strategy levels. A further difference between selection at the two levels involves problems that commonly occur in inferring exactly what is to be copied. There are myriad ways that selection can go awry and incorrectly reward an agent or strategy that was not responsible for a success. Such failures plague selection at both levels. However, one important difference does occur. Agents are collections of strategies. Successful agents generally use strategies that are mutually compatible. The interaction among those strategies does not have to be understood if selection is at the level of the agent, copying all its strategies. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Biological selection of whole agents capitalizes mightily on this fact, but so can identical replication of franchised business units. Selection at the strategy level generally demands higher quality of inference. How many of the agent’s action patterns must be copied to replicate the success? Which ones? To obtain the same low defect rate as a rival firm, which of their quality control procedures should be emulated? Selection at the agent level, on average, is more context preserving than at the strategy level. In Complex Adaptive systems, where many results derive from effects that multiply other effects, context preservation can work to retain and spread synergies that are not fully understood. We made a related point in a past reports when we observed that the longer time horizons of those in authority create a common context for coordinating the faster actions of those they supervise. There we were examining agents’ activities. Here we are examining the selection that follows from their success or failure. We have argued that there are tendencies for selection at the agent level to be more costly, slower in elapsed time, and more context preserving. The first two effects are often not wanted, while the last one frequently is. This can set up a tension in which a designer or policy maker who has some freedom to influence the level of selection may have to trade off the various factors. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

To take an example: Supposed that you want to discourage a dangerous behaviour such as violating crucial safety regulation. We have usually considered selection for positive traits, but here we can look at negative selection. At the level of strategy, selection may correspond to punishing the action pattern. Each detected instance of rule breaking could be heavily fined, for example. On the other hand, agents could be negatively selected in response to their violations. An offering employee could be suspended, transferred, or even fired. These forms of removal will make the agent less likely to be copied. Taking the agent out of circulation and making the effort of replacement typically costs more and takes longer than simply changing an agent’s strategy. If the safety violation is integrated with other strategies—for example if the agent’s entire work style used a set of methods now considered unsafe—simply punishing the violations may not discourage the behaviour, so removal may be worthwhile. If the violations are more a matter of “fashion”—for example, not wearing a hard hat in order to look fearless—pushing the action itself may be the preferred approach. Schemes to amplify success are nearly always imperfect. Selection at the level of agent and selection at the level of strategy are families of mechanisms that have somewhat complementary strengths. Agent selection often works on longer time scales—faster is not always better—and preserves variation and context. Strategy selection isolates key patterns that can be more easily and rapidly copied. #RandolphHarrs 16 of 21

Thus it is not surprising that there are many hybrid systems, where selection is found to be operating at both level in a single population of agents. Many species of birds and mammals seem to select at both the agent level, by conventional natural selection, and at the strategy level, by processes of cultural diffusion, which operates at a much faster times scale. In the human case, cultural evolution is so rapid and effective that we tend to ignore the continuing operation of natural selection. At the other extreme, we often do not notice cultural aspects of an animal population. However, close observation relevels striking cases, such as the English birds that discovered how to peck through foil milk bottle caps. Their discovery spread across the entire country within a few years. Hybrid systems such as this have tremendous advantages. Herbert Simon has argued that they are so beneficial that we could expect biological evolution to create individuals with increased susceptibility to following strategies suggested by others. Even though this “docile” quality makes it possible to take advantage of individuals who possess it, that can be outweighed by the tremendous gains of adding cultural selection of strategies to natural selection of agents. These observations on complementary strengths and hybrid selection systems have a cumulative implication. When there is room to alter selection process, it can be wise to look for changes to the system that could diversify it, adding fast elements if its selection processes are slow. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

If the past processes are not succeeding, it can pay to add slower elements that sustain  new context. As an example of adding fast elements, organization that rely heavily on change through personnel turnover are often ripe for improved trading of employee “war stories.” A series of failures in piecemeal importing of “best practices” might suggest brining in a new supervisor experienced in how the various routines form an interlocking system. As with many other interventions we discuss, hybridizing selection processes is not guaranteed to be better, but it is often a beneficial focus of attention. Natural law imposes limits, but so does the nature of human beings. These will continue as long as people do. Reproduction is a deeply ingrained instinct enforced by the march of time, which ruthlessly discards the genetic material of all who neglect it. Many would argue that the Earth is already overpopulated and that is why land prices and housing is so expensive. While nanotechnology could enable the current population, and even a great increased one, to live more lightly on Earth, there will still be limits to Earth’s capacity. The norms of human life are shaped by ancient patterns: high rates of infant or childhood mortality have been facts of life for millennia, and having many, many children has been a way to ensure that one or two will survive to work on the farm, and to care for you in your old age. Of course, many parents tend to use and abuse their adult children these day. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Large families naturally become traditional. And that is why generational housing is being built, where in some large homes they also have an apartment added on inside of the house, so adult children or parents can be part of the family home, without feeling like a guest or being a burden on the home owner. And also, it gives the homeowner a chance to have a true office at home. When modern medicine and reliable food supplies change those conditions—as they have, in cultural terms, virtually overnight—behaviour does not shift as quickly. The result is the Third World population boom. In Western countries, where there has been time for behaviour to adapt, a huge family is the exception. It might seem that our problem is solved. Molecular manufacturing can make everyone wealthy, and wealthy populations today have stable or shrinking populations. The Earth can support more people with advanced technologies, and these will also open up the vast room and resources of the World beyond Earth. Would that this were true. If 99 percent of the people in a population respond to wealth by reducing childbearing, the population will indeed stabilize or shrink, for a whole. However, populations are not uniform. What of the 1 percent, say, who are member of a minority group with different values? If that minority group has a growth rate of 5 percent per year, then in ninety-five years they will be the majority, and in one thousand years their population will have grown by a factor of 1,500,000,000,000,000,000,000, if resource limits or genocide have not intervened. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Not that the Hutterites of North America, a reasonably wealthy religious group viewing fertility control as a sin and high fertility as a blessing, have managed an average of ten children per woman. Given enough time, exponential growth of even the smallest population can consume all the resources in reach. The right to reproduce is often regarded as basic, as illustrated by the outage at reports of forced abortion in the People’s Republic of China. The Hutterites and many others regard it as part of their freedom of religion. However, what happens when parents have more children than they can support—does redistribution solve the problem? Of course, in America, some women sell babies to get new cars and stuff like that. However, if reproduction is not forcibly suppressed, and if resources are forcibly and repeatedly redistributed so that each human beings has a roughly equal share, then each person’s share will steadily shrink. Even given the most optimistic assumptions regarding available resources, with a policy of resources redistribution and unlimited reproduction, the amount per person would eventually be insufficient to sustain life. This policy must be avoided, because if it is followed, it will kill everyone. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

As soon as we grant that any entity is entitled to certain rights—whether that entity be a human child, an animal, or some future artificial intelligence—the question arises of who is responsible for providing resources to support it when it cannot do so for itself. The above argument indicates that a policy of coercion by some central power to compel the entire population to support an exponentially exploding population of these individuals would lead directly to disaster. Ultimately, this responsibility must rest with the entities’ initiator: the designer of the artificial intelligence, the owner of the pet, the parents of the child. No new technology can magically remove the limits imposed by natural law, and thereby lift the burden of human responsibility. Every time a technology solves a problem, it creates new problems. This does not mean that the change is neutral, or for the worse, of course. The Salk and Sabin Vaccines for polio virtually destroyed the iron-lung industry, and the pocket calculator virtually destroyed the slide-rule industry, but these advances were worth the price of some economic adjustment. Molecular manufacturing and nanotechnology will bring far greater changes, placing far greater strains on our ability to adapt. We should not be surprised when basically beneficial applications make someone miserable. Our lives are largely centered around problems. If we can solve many of these problems, the centers of our lives will shift, creating fresh problems. We have sketched some of the issues of change and adaptation more to raise questions than to offer solutions. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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A Kind Heart Will Extend this List Even Further

Psychoanalysis serves many functions. It can assist in promoting psychic growth and self-realization. I am sorry to say that only a small minority seem to be interested in psychic growth these days. Most people have an entirely different goal, which is to own more and consume more. It has been suggested that persons are kept from improperly approaching others by self-applied rules and by legal sanctions. However, in addition to these means of social control there are other kinds, designed not so much to alter the offender’s pattern of misbehaviour as to allow a particular victim to escape from the deprivation inflicted by the offense. I want to mention some of these techniques here, even though they, and some of the issues which follow, occur in regard to the acquainted as well as the unacquainted. If one is approached on the street by someone in need and does not wish to give the individual money, any one of three courses may be followed: One may spare the individual in need the embarrassment of a refusal by pretending not to notice the person’s appeal; or one may refuse, saying, “No, I’m sorry”; or one may stop and offer help by suggesting a charitable organization to which the unfortunate can apply. A kind heart may extent this list even further, but the essential point is that if one is asked for charity, an apology must accompany a refusal. Quite apart from other considerations, any sign of anger or impatience is brutally ill-mannered. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Another strategy is what might be called the “terminal squirm.” Here, the unwilling recipient of the overture grudgingly turns his attention to the speaker, gives a noncommittal reply, and then as quickly as possible turns away, taking for granted that the other will take this answer as a “signing out” cue. In our society, this technique is often employed by parents with their importuning patients. Given the fact that importuned persons attempt to avoid the importuners, we can expect that there will be an attempt on the part of importuners to counter this counter (and, in turn, an attempt on the part of the importuned to counter this counter to a counter). A counter to the strategy of acting as if no overturn has been received is to inveigle an individual into an explosive demonstration that one is not in fact as little involved and affected by the entreaties as one appears to show. In everyday terms, this is sometimes called “getting a rise.” Thus, children often play games of making funny faces at one another to see who will win the contest between “straight face” and laugh-provoking gesture. The phenomenon of getting a rise, or reciprocally, rising, also occurs when the butt is already involved in a face engagement with the stimulator, in which case getting a rise will consist in forcing the butt suddenly to “flood out” and sharply increase one’s level of manifest seriousness, mirth, and the like. Sometimes the teaser employs a passing remark calculated to make the butt become suddenly affronted, only to perceive at the next moment the unserious intent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Sometimes the teasing or goading is continuous and mounting until successful, as in the game of “the dozens.” In mental hospitals rise-getting seems to be a common pursuit, practiced by junior staff and by patients upon patients who insist on being mute, and by still other patients who make wonderfully humorous efforts to entice staff into communicative contact. On a hospital ward, a middle-aged woman patient employed some expert techniques for getting others, against their wishes, into a state of talk. She would come progressively closer to the unwilling participant, increasing the loudness of her comments and the impropriety of their references, as well as the grotesqueness of her facial grimaces, until a point was reached where the participants could no longer maintain the fiction of not being engaged, and would, in some way, respond. In addition to this technique of progressive profanation, she would employ antics, dancing, prancing, and jumping in the immediate presence of the recalcitrant participant, stopping only when she succeeded in getting the other involved. If these antics failed, she would sometimes employ the strategy of stopping abruptly and then looking into the eyes of the other in secret collusive derision of the self that had just behaved in a peculiar way. The other would then frequently find himself entering into this collusion, establishing communion with an individual who, apparently, had suddenly become sane. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

If this, too, failed, she would sometimes make offensive, abusive, or mimicking gestures at one individual, in a way that could barely be defined as behind his back, and then quickly turn to a second individual with a knowing, “I am-just-trying-to-kid-this-fool” look; the person receiving this collusive look often allowed himself to be trapped momentarily into a byplay, and thereby lost the game. Interestingly enough, she was able to combat the lack of civil inattention that nurses in the glassed-in nursing station accorded her—either by their pointed not-seeing of her or by their staring at her—by getting a rise from them even through the glass partition designed to protect them, and even at a time when they were working every effort to demonstrate that they would not be drawn into communication unless properly approached by a proper person. Underlying principles of respect that were once commonplace in society have increasingly given way to unkind behaviour. To help our children and youth set aside the many negative examples that bombard them, we must first understand respect and reasons we sometimes act disrespectfully. There are people in the community who merit respect through honourable living. We admire their commitment or standards. For example, we might respect a sailor who gave up winning a boat race to save a man overboard. On the other hand, we do not respect one who embezzles or another who treats a child hardly in the supermarket. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Yet if we were to interact with these people, we would likely treat them with respectful or polite manners, regardless of our feelings about their transgression. Ultimately, we can treat people respectfully because they are human even if we do not honour or admire their acts. We are taught to be respectful toward others without qualification, sometimes we may find ourselves falling into rationalizations about being disrespectful based on their behaviour. A person who causes a problem is often seen as warranting disrespectful treatment. However, we can not live our lives with the philosophy: if others would behave differently, we would not have to behave badly. This kind of thinking shifts responsibility for our behaviour to others. It makes us think that our disrespectful acts are someone else’s fault. Respect is an expression of our sense of universal brotherhood or sisterhood—a testimony of our membership in the human family. It acknowledges our common humanity and shows our reverence for being alive. However, it is also important to keep in mind that no one likes to take orders. Resentment caused by a brash order may last a long time—even if the order was given to correct an obviously bad situation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Dan Santarelli, a teacher at a school in Wyoming, Pennsylvania, told one of our classes how one of his students had blocked the entrance way to one of the school’s shops by illegally parking his car in it. One of the other instructors stormed into the classroom and asked in an arrogant tone, “Whose Toyota is blocking the driveway?” When the student who owned the car responded, the instructor screamed: “Move that car and move it right now, or I will wrap a chain around it and drag it out of there.” Now that student was wrong. The car should have not been parked there. However, from that day on, not only did that student resent the instructor’s action, but all the students in the class did everything they could to give the instructor a hard time and make his job unpleasant. How could he have handled it differently? If he had asked in a friendly way, “Whose Toyota is that in the driveway?” and then suggested that if it were not moved, other cars could get in and out, the student would have gladly moved it and neither he nor his classmates would have been upset and resentful. Also, instead of pushing people to accelerate their work and rush through projects, call everybody together, explain the situation to them that it is crucial that they do their best work and as fast as they can so the business can succeed. And then ask, “Is there anything we can do to help in this situation?” “Can anyone think of different ways to process it through the corporation that will make it possible to handle the project?” #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

“Is there any way to adjust our hours or personnel assignments that would help?” The employees will often times come up with many ideas and will feel confident handling the project. They will approach it with a “We can do it” attitude, and that is how effective leaders become and stay successful. Ask questions instead of giving direct orders. A human with a passion for absolute control will try to circumvent, to overstep the limits inherent in human existence, for it is part of the human condition that we are not omnipotent. And if a man should gain much too much power, death will show him how powerless he is in the face of nature. Therefore, this leads many to ask the question, “Is essence always good?” Not at all. Essence is mechanical, it does not live by itself, it has no special thinking apparatus; it has to think through personality. Essence, type and fate are practically the same, but facts connected with fate are very difficult to find, expect perhaps just almost physical facts such as kind of health, capacities or similar things. There are many other things but they are hard to distinguish because in our state essence seldom works separately from personality. Many things that we have the inclination to ascribe to fate really belong to personality. So it is dangerous to draw conclusions. However, there are some things we can see, for instance that certain types of people attract certain types of people. They have the same kinds of friends, the same kinds of troubles, the same kinds of difficulties, but, of course, never without personality taking some part. So you cannot call it pure fate; it is more like cause and effect. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

“Must one work harder to alter one’s type than to alter acquire personality?” If it is necessary, but perhaps the type is quite all right. In most cases it is personality that must be changed; uncontrolled personality cannot be right. Only very few people can work on essence. It is not exactly an advantage to the people who can, because it is very difficult for them. Generally we work on personality, and this is the only work we can do, and if we work it will bring us somewhere. “When we try to change our being is essence as much as affected as personality?” We have to work on personality but essence is affected if we really change something. “Did you say that personality is all lies?” No, I said that personality was almost all artificial, just as essence is almost all real. “Are our ‘I’s part of personality of essence?” Both. There are “I”s belonging to essence and “I”s belonging to personality. “Are they connected with different centers?” continued the same questioner. Certainly, there are intellectual “I”s, moving “I”s and instinctive “I”s. An “I” is just one desire, one wish. However, this distinction is only for convenience. You may forget it if you like, although it is like that. Just take it that “I”s are small and personality is already more complicated desires. “Is the instinctive center closely connected with one’s essence?” Yes, it controls the necessities of essence. “Is intelligence part of essence?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Generally speaking, yes. However, I would like to know what you mean by intelligence. If I say “yes” you cannot apply it; it will remain dead capital. “Can intelligence grow or increase by certain treatment?” asked the same questioner. That is what I said. If we speak about ourselves, we shall see that intelligence belongs to essence and personality in a very mixed way; though, in a cosmic way, a certain amount of intelligence is given to every essence. I believe the human being is fully himself only when he expresses himself, when he makes use of the powers within him. If he cannot do that, if his life consists only of possessing and using rather than being, then he degenerates; he becomes a thing; his life becomes pointless. It becomes a form of suffering. Real joy comes with real activity, and real activity involves the utilization and cultivation of human powers. We should not forget that exerting our minds encourages the growth of brains cells. That is a fact supported by physiological evidence. An alternative to selecting entire agents as the basis for the amplification of success is to make copies or recombinations at the level of particular strategies. If success can be assessed at the strategy level rather than the agent level, one difference that often occurs is a lowered cost of copying. To assemble or acquire a whole new agent (a new person, a new business, a new governmental unit) is typically more costly than to copy a strategy employed by a successful agent. It takes years to grow several Pacific yew trees for bark that provides cancer-fighting compounds for a single patient. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

An owner of a baseball team can try to buy a star pitcher from another team. If the reason for success is that the pitcher is winning by throwing the forkball, it might be more advantageous to tech the other pitchers that strategy during the off-season. Whether this will be promising or not depends on how easily the forkball can be copied. Is there a pitching coach for hire with success in teaching it? Or perhaps success depends on the uncanny similarity of the star’s forkball and fastball motions. Then it may be necessary to pay the cost of acquiring the whole agent, with the entire complement of strategies, or of searching for another pitcher with a comparable package of skills. A second difference that often occurs between the strategy and agents levels is waiting time. One could just think of this as a special case of higher costs, but it deserves a brief discussion of its own. Because assembling copies of agents is generally a larger task involving more resources, it typically takes more time than copying or recombining strategies. Even if the direct costs of agent copying were affordable, the indirect costs of delay might not be. For example, another company may have a propriety process for manufacturing a part that does into a product you are developing. It might be quite valuable to invent your own process for making the needed component, and plausible to create a division within your company to do it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

It would lower your costs and let you tailor the part to your particular needs. However, competitors are racing to the market for your own product. The delay while you create a capacity to make the part means falling behind in competition with them. So you license the existing process from its owner, copying the strategy not because of lower monetary costs but because of the value of elapsed time. To highlight the speed at which strategies can change, consider a stock market. Agents watch changes in prices for information about what other agents believe. Thus the market has recursive nature in which agents’ expectations are formed on the basis of their anticipation of other agents’ expectations. The result can be rapid bubbles and crashes. Simulations of markets as Complex Adaptive Systems demonstrate how high rates of exploration can generate these bandwagon effects and “market psychology.” Social mobilization is another arena in which agents’ expectations are formed by watching each other’s behaviour. Again, the result can be very rapid change once a bandwagon begins. The fall of the Berlin Wall occurred with amazing speed once the initial demonstrations showed what was possible. As in a market, people formed their expectations on the basis of their anticipation of others’ expectations. Once begun, a series of demonstrations set off a cascade of revised beliefs leading to irresistible levels of protest. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

On July 4, 1967, in the White House, President Lyndon Johnson signed a measure called the Freedom of Information Act. At the signing ceremony he declared, “Freedom of information is so vital that only the national security, not the desire of public officials or private citizens, should determine when it must be restricted.” No sooner had Johnson spoken than a reporter asked if he could obtain a copy of the original draft of these remarks. It was the first request made in the full radiant flush of the new freedoms guaranteed by the act. Johnson turned him down cold. The “Secrecy Tactic” is the first, probably oldest, and most pervasive info-tactic. Today the U.S.A. government classifies as secret some 20 million documents a year. Most of these pertain either to military diplomatic affairs—or to mattes that might embarrass officialdom. However, if that seems undemocratic and even hypocritical, most other countries are far more secretive, defining everything from alfalfa yields to population statistics as state secrets. Some governments are positively paranoid. Virtually everything they do is secret unless specifically declared otherwise. Secrecy is one of the familiar tools of repressive power and corruption. However, it also has its virtues. In a World filled with bizarre generalissimos, narco-politicians, and killer-theologians, secrets are necessary to protect military security. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Moreover, secrecy makes it possible for officials to say things they would not utter in front of a TV camera—including things that need saying. They can criticize their bosses’ policies without embarrassing them publicly. They can compromise with adversaries. Knowing how and when to use a secret is a cardinal skill of politician and bureaucrat. Secrets give rise to the second most common info-tactic, another classic tool of power: the “Guided Leak Tactic.” Some secrets are kept; others leak. When the leak is inadvertent it is merely an ineffectually kept secret. Such leaks drive officials into deep dementia. “Why,” one CIA official is supposed to have asked, “do we have to sent the China estimate to U.S military commands overseas just because that’s where the action is? That’s where the leaking is, too.” In short, better to keep information secret than to send it to those who need it. By contrast, “guided leaks” are informational missiles, consciously launched and precision-targeted. In Japan targeted leaks have produced spectacular effects. The Recruit-Cosmos financial scandal, which led to the ouster of Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita in 1989, offered a field day for leakers mainlining inside information from the office of the chief prosecutor, Yusuke Yoshinaga, to the daily press. “Without these press leaks,” says Takashi Kakuma, author of books on corruption in Japan, “I’m sure their investigation would have been stopped.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Reporters received carefully timed spurts of information, which were moves in an exquisite power ballet. By releasing details to the press, the prosecutors prevented higher-ups in the Ministry of Justice from emasculating the investigation and protecting the upper reaches of the Takeshita government and the Liberal Democratic Party. Without these guided leaks, the government might have survived. In France, too, leaks have historically played a major political role. Recounting France’s difficulties in disentangling from the Indochina War, a White House document states: “Leak and counter leak was [sic] an accepted domestic political tactic…Even highly classified reports or orders pertaining to the war were often published verbatim in the pages of political journals.” So prevalent are leaks in London that they have created a pall of suspicion inimical to innovation. Officials hesitate to voice a new idea, he charges, for fear it will be leaked instantly and its author made to look ridiculous before the idea has had a chance to be considered. However, unless someone things, which sooner rather than later entails thinking aloud, no new thinking will be done and no old thinking will be brought up to date. In Washington, where guided leaks from a still unidentified source called Deep Throat forced Richard Nixon to resign the presidency, and where guided leaks are still a daily phenomenon, leak-phobia is rampant. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Thirty five years ago, presidential assistants felt free to write candid memos and have serious, far-reaching disagreements with each other—and the President. Watergate put a stop to that. One quickly learned never to write anything on paper that you would be unhappy to see on the page of The Oakland Tribune…Never say anything controversial in conversation where more than one person was present. The ironic consequence when the really inconsequential issues come along, an army of bureaucrats moves in to consider it [sic]. However, the more important the issues, the fewer the numbers involved—almost solely because of the fear of leaks. Of course, the same officials who excoriate leakers are themselves very often the best source of guided leaks. While serving in the White House as national security adviser, Henry Kissinger once wanted the telephones of his staffers wiretapped to find out whether they were leaking embarrassing information to the press and Congress. However, Kissinger himself was—and remains—a “leak-master.” Secrets and guided leaks, however, are only the two most familiar info-tactics used in political and bureaucratic war. They may not be the most important. Many of you will remember a game from elementary school called “one-two-three shoot” or “matching fingers.” In this contest, one of the players chooses “evens” and the other player gets “odds.” On the count of three, each of the two players simultaneously casts out either one or two fingers. If the total number of fingers is even, the “even” player wins, while if the sum is odd, the “odds” players wins. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Supposed the loser pays the winner a dollar. We can compute the usual table of wins and losses in relation to the choices of strategies. There is no equilibrium to this game if the two players do not act randomly. Imagine that “Odds” were to play 1 finger with certainty. “Evens” would always choose to play 1 finger as well. Now the logic turns on itself. Since “Odds” is certain that his opponent will display 1 finger, he will choose to show 2 fingers. This leads “Evens” to respond with 2 fingers. In which case, “Odds” will play 1 finger. We are back where we started, and there is no end in sight to the circular reasoning. An easy way to check if randomness is needed is to consider whether there is any harm in letting the other player see your move before he responds. When unpredictability is needed, it would be disadvantageous to move first. Think what would happen in “one-two-three shoot” if you moved first: you would always lose. Not just any randomness will do. Suppose Odds chooses 1 finger 75 percent of the time and 2 fingers 25 percent of the time. Then Evens, by choosing 1, can, win 75 percent of the time, and on average get .75 X 1 + .25 X (-1) = .5 dollars per play. Similarly, the choice of 2 would lose Evens fifty cents per play on average. So Evens would choose 1. However, then Odds should be choosing 2, not the 75:25 mixture. The mixture would not survive the successive rounds of thinking about each other’s strategy. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

In other words, there is an equilibrium pattern of randomness and it has to be calculated. In this example, the whole situation is so symmetric that the equilibrium mix has to be 50:50 for each player. Let us try that out. If Odds chooses 1 and 2 equally often, then Evens wins .5 X 1 + .5 X (-1) = 0 per play on average, whether he plays 1 or 2. Therefore he also wins 0 on average, whether he plays 1 or 2. Therefore he also wins 0 on average when he plays his 50:50 mixes are best responses to each other, that is, an equilibrium. The name for this solution is a “mixed-strategy” equilibrium, reflecting the necessity for the individuals to randomly mix their moves. The equilibrium mix in more general situations is not so evident from symmetry, but there are some simple rules for calculating it. People have often been wrong about physical limits, confusing the limits of their technology with the limits of the possible. As a result, learned men first dismissed the idea of heavier-than air flight, and then dismissed the idea of flying to the Moon. Yet physical limits are real, and all technology—past, present, and future—will stay within those limits. There is even reason to suspect that some of those limits are where the learned now believe them to be. Nanotechnology will make it possible to push closer to the real limits set by natural law, but it will not change those laws of the limits they set. It will not affect the law of gravity, the gravitational constant, the speed of light, the charge of the electron, the radius of the hydrogen atom, the value of Planck’s constant, the effects of the uncertainty principle, the principle of least action, the mass of the proton, the laws of thermodynamics, or the boiling point of water. Nanotechnology will not make energy or matter from nothing. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

It seems a good bet that no one will build a faster-than-light spacecraft, or an antigravity machine, or a cable twice as strong as a diamond. There are limits. Science today may be wrong about some limits, but scientific knowledge is practically defined to be our best information about how the World works, so it is not wise to bet against it. There will be claims that nanotechnology will be able to do things that it cannot, or that capabilities are around the corner when they are not. Sometimes these will be innocent errors, sometimes they will be culpably stupid errors, and sometimes they will be what amounts to fraud. Among the problems that nanotechnology cannot solve is that of misguided claims, by people calling themselves “scientists,” “engineers,” or “businesspeople,” that they have a big technical breakthrough worth a fortune. Every interesting new technology, parcharlatans. For every Thomas Edison inventing useful products such as light bulbs or the precursor of movie projectors, there were people promoting electric hairbrushes to cure baldness, and electric shoes, electric belts, electric hats—the list goes on—that authoritatively claims cures for infertility, overweight, underweight, and all the ills and discomforts of mankind. Today, we are thankful that our forefather paved the way for us, and that we do not have to suffer the same credulity that they did. The more deprivation a person has to put up with, the more obedient one has to be so that one will not rebel against the deprivation imposed on one.  #RandolphHarris 18 of 18


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Their Goal is to Break All Human Trust in America

Millions of people have become sensitive to the destruction of life on so many fronts, to inhumane wars in which there is not even a pretense of self-defense. We see a new morality of love taking shape, too, in opposition to the consumer society. The new morality may have its flaws, but it remains impressive in its protest against empty forms and words. Given the gains that can be obtained through the improper initiation of encounters, and given the penalty attached to engaging in these improprieties, it can be expected that persons will employ ruses to evade the rules and safely accomplish forbidden ends. Perhaps the gentlest of these designs is seen when an individual intentionally places oneself in a position to facilitate overturns being made to him. The classic instance, of course, is that of the lady who drops her handkerchief so that a particular man will have a proper excuse for talking to her. Your problem is to force the man to talk to you first; that is the way he wants it. I can think of no better way than for you to drag off the bus with a heavy package almost as big as you are! It does not matter what—several dozen bricks in a large box, well wrapped, will do. Our hero’s chivalrous instincts will not permit him to resist the picture of a maiden in distress. He will be at your side asking to assist you. If he is not, try dropping the package and/or twisting your ankle. When you get to your house, let him carry the package in, offer him refreshments and thank him. (Only if you trust him.) #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Mental patients provide instances of more resolute manipulation of the rules. One patient I observed over a three-month period did not so much break the rules as flagrantly misemploy available excuses for breaking them. She would ask persons—both ones she knew and ones she did not—for minor favours, such as the time, in such a manner that the person approached would sometimes gradually realize that the favour was merely an excuse, and that in a certain way the asker was merely toying with the conventional conditions of contact. Or she would sometimes pester the kitchen staff for extra food, again with the implication of merely exploiting the bonds among persons that support the exchange of minor favours. Guards and attendants were also favourite targets of her engaging tendencies. One of the most significant infractions of communication rule has to do with street accosting. There are, of course, some legal restrictions placed upon its varieties, upon begging, peddling, and pestering in public streets. However, in the main, the force that keeps people in their communication place in our middle-class society seems to be the fear of being thought forward and pushy, or odd, the fear of forcing a relationship where none is desired—the fear, in the last analysis, of being rather patently rejected and even cut. However, we know that there are many ways in which an individual can accept the fact that one is liable to this kind of disregard and is subject to this kind of risk, and go on from there to capitalize on the liberty one’s fall from grace brings to one. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The liberties taken by the inebriated and the costumed are mild instances of one’s fall from grace. There are other examples we excuse less readily. Perhaps the classic type of improper opening person is one who makes a steady economic and psychic living from this role. There seems to be a growing tendency in Western societies to restrict these kinds of openings, if not in the city at large, then in all but a few streets. Here we find the street stemmer, the stall operator, and the panhandler, who accept the resentment of the community in order to buttonhole it into buying or giving something. The lady of the evening is a special example; the eyes and smiles and sallies with which she approaches a man tells us precisely how all other women must be careful not to conduct themselves, lest it be assumed that liberties can be taken with them. I think there is something to be learned from considering another type of communication exploiter, those who are not part of the mainstream gender role. It is felt that some of these individuals, when “cruising” for pickups, will utilize casual contacts involving innocuous requests or innocuous sociable comments as a cover. The special significance of this kind of exploitation of public solidarity has to do with its power to spoil causal contact between those with a prefers for dominant gender roles. When the person who is part of the dominant gender role and is approached by an unacquainted male on what prove to be sexually improper grounds, he may suffer concern that his appearance has elicited this and that others present, identifying the accoster, will wrongly impute homosexuality to the accosted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

More importantly, when he is innocently approached by a member of his own gender he may not be sure of the innocence, just as, when he innocently approaches another male, he may be unsure of the other’s view of him. Hence casual solidarity among unacquainted males is threatened. A novelist provides an extreme example, namely, the predicament of a homosexual in a homosexual bar sincerely desiring a match: “It was when I sat down by the entrance and took out my cigarettes that I realized I had no matches on me. There were no less than ten people, maybe fifteen, smoking around me, but in a place like this it was out of the question to ask for a light unless one knew somebody. The legitimate phrase, “Could you please give me a light?” was, in these surroundings, a recognized approach and a too obvious one at that. I walked up to the counter and bought a box of matches. Homosexuality, then, tends to do to the all-male (and to a degree to the all-female) World what has already been done to communication contacts between the two genders, except that, in the latter case, to be thought a desirable object may not in itself constitute much of an affront—indeed, it may constitute an expected compliment. Just as some homosexuals abuse the contact system in the society, so also do “sexual perverts,” who rely on the right of adults to engage unknown youths and children, and exploit the contact thus made in a way which is considered unsportsmanlike. The unsettling of public trust, of mutual claims linking strangers, can also occur in other contexts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

In times of internecine armed conflict, a very high level of distrust and anxiety may sometimes be found in public places. Take, for example, the period of 1953-58 troubles in Cyprus. “But the evil genius of terrorism is suspicion—the man who stops and asks for a light, a cart with a broken axle signaling for help, a forester standing alone among trees, three youths walking back to a village after sundown, a shepherd shouting something indistinctly heard by moonlight, the sudden pealing of a doorbell in the night. The slender chain of trust upon which all human relations are based is broken—and this the terrorists knows and sharpens his claws precisely here.” This is precisely what is happening in America. Terrorists want to break all trust, not only do they want to destroy families, but they want to destroy the concept of authority and hierarchies. This way, no one will trust government, law enforcement, the Church, their peers, teachers, doctors, lawyers or each other. This is a form of psychological warfare. Of special interest here is some of the conduct classified under the psychiatric rubric of “exhibitionism.” Whether the indicatable act consists of the words spoken, gestures conveyed, or acts performed, the communication structure of the event often consists of an individual initiating an engagement with a stranger of the opposite gender by means of the kind of message that would be proper only id they were on close and intimate terms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Apart from psychodynamic issues, exhibitions often spectacularly subvert the protective social control that keeps individuals interpersonally distant even though they are physically close to each other. The assault here is not so much directly on an individual as on the system of rights and symbols the individual employs in expressing relatedness and unrelatedness to those about one. For example, there is the game played by a middle-aged female mental patient on a ward in a research hospital: on visitors’ day she would wear only a bathrobe and slippers, proffer a male visitor appropriate small talk, and then, when very close to him and in a ratified state of talk with him, suddenly expose herself. At that moment the visitor would find himself trapped in an engagement that he could neither immediately escape from nor properly sustain. It is necessary to add a comment concerning the relationship between exposed persons and illegitimately opening ones. Troublemakers who breach the communication line and systematically break the gentleman’s agreement concerning communication often pay a price for their liberties. They come to be seen as profane persons, as persons who have sacrificed for gain the respect that is owed them. Once an individual has made this sacrifice, there is little reason why others cannot approach one, since, except for the fact that he may be contaminating, he has no way to hold people off. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

A person who accosts others will therefore often be a person whom others can accost at will, a reciprocity that holds, it was suggested for those who are dined sacredness through no fault of their own, such as the very young who do not yet have their quota of mana, and the senior citizens who have lost theirs. We have cited both legitimate and illegitimate, initiate an official face engagement, even if only for a moment, and support the connection that the individual is either all in or all out of an encounter. However, of course, once this latter normative arrangement is firmly established, we can expect that certain kinds of advantage can be taken of it. For example, in some Western communities there is the practice whereby a male communicates regard for the attractiveness of a passing female with whom some other expressive sign. What follows is up to her. She can elect to act as if no relevant communication has occurred. Or she can elect to turn and ratify the comment by a friendly or hostile comment, in either case creating a momentary face engagement (Apparently the more impersonally appreciative the whistle, that is, the more it can be construed not as a pickup, the more accepting the young lady will be of it.) Every woman who dressed well likes to be appreciated for her trouble. A wolf whistle is rather a crude form of expression, but I supposed it is the equivalent of being hissed at approvingly or pinched. A stranger cannot walk up and talk to a pretty young lady, so he used the whistle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

“It is nice to know you are whistleable. If I feel I deserve it. I occasionally turn around and ‘thank you.’ A whistle is a compliment. Particularly if you know the man is just commenting on your beauty and not trying to embarrass you. If he is I put on my stony face and walk on.” And another: “A long low whistle is a perk-me-up to a girl. It can add a smile to her face, a lilt to her step and put a twinkle in her eyes. It can do more for her than a new hat. Unpolished it may be, but it is a compliment. Part of the fun is that the whistler is often anonymous. You turn around any try to guess who. However, in addition, a woman may smile visibly (so that the whistler knows his message has been appreciatively received), and at the same time look straight ahead so as not to allow for the collapse of separateness and the formation of an engagement. This latter tack represents, in effect, a collusion of both individuals against the rules of communication—an unratified breach of communication barriers. The breach is a slight one, however, since the person whistled at has been on the move away from the whistler and will soon be out of range of engagement. On the same grounds we can understand why it is safe, and therefore not much of an offense, for an individual in a moving boat, train, or bus to proffer a greeting to a stranger who is stationary or moving in the other direction. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

In our society, when a large number of men or boys or girls are together, one of their number seems likely to extend a greeting to a passing stranger. Presumably the threat of a two-person engagement developing is lessened by the numbers involved, and hence more easily tolerated. When the group is in uniform, and therefore to some extent out of role, even more license is likely to be taken, unless forbidden by the group’s leader. When the members of such a group, in addition, are moving in a vehicle they are in no position to stop, and thereby moving away from the target of their sallies, even greater license seems to be taken and tolerated. When critiquing other people, it is always important to first consider your own mistakes. Admitting one’s own mistakes—even when one has not corrected them—can help convince somebody to change their behaviour. “If you were born a certain type, could you ever change it?” somebody asked. If it is a very bad type and you work very hard, you can change it. First you must know the type—that means knowing essence. If you find something in essence which is incompatible with aim, then if you work very hard you can perhaps change it. Essence is hidden in personality; rays of planetary influence cannot penetrate because personality is accidental. People are affected by planetary influences only in certain parts of themselves, parts which are always there, so that these influences have an effect on people in the mass but, in normal cases, seldom affect individuals. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

“To what extent,” someone asked, “does a man who is under the Law of Accident come under the Law of Fate, apart from his birth and death?” It depends upon the relation between personality and essence. If personality is strong it makes a shall round essence, then there is very little fate. The planetary influences which control fate, type, essence, do not reach us when personality is strong. However, there are some people who, quite without the influence of “schools,” live more in essence. In them personality is very faint and they are more under the Law of Fate than other people. They depend more upon certain influences on which other people depend less; I will not say what these influences are, for that only leads to imagination. You must find out for yourselves. In the lives or ordinary people there is nothing of fate except birth and death. Individual man is very little under planetary influences because his essence is undeveloped and very small, or else too much mixed with his personality. As these influences cannot penetrate personality, such men are under the Law of Accident. If man lived in his essence he would live under planetary influences or, in other words, under the Law of Fate. Whether this would be to his advantage or not is another question. It might be better in one case and worse in another. Generally better. But planetary rays cannot penetrate personality; they are reflected from it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Combinations of influences produce combinations of types. We do not know what they are and we cannot find out by making a horoscope. That would be something like mediaeval psychoanalysis. “But the combinations do come from the planets, do they not?” Yes, originally. All our emotions and all our ideas came originally from the planets, they were not born here. “Should one try to live according to one’s emotions, or should one always try to find a good reason for what one is doing?” It is difficult to say. Emotions may be different and one’s capacity to control one’s life may be different. Very often it is imaginary. Very often all questions such as “Should I do this?” or “Should I do that?” are quite artificial, because one can do only in one way. Very often one thinks one can do something in this way or in that way, but really one can only do it in one way. One has no control. However, it is useful to start from this point of view: to see what kind of emotions you mean, whether they are emotions belonging to essence or emotions belonging to personality. And very often—not always, but very often—you can trust emotions belonging to essence and mistrust emotions belonging to personality. However, this is not a general rule; it only shows lines of study in connection with your question. The question itself shows by which line your thinking must go. You must think about essence and personality. You must think about things you cannot control. It is not a question of investigation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

When it comes to determining the level of selection—two basic processes amplify success: selection of agents and selection of strategies. The natural selection of biological agents works by making an entirely new agent without the need to determine the cause of the success of the parent or parents. The selection of strategies, on the other hand, creates new strategies for an existing agent. It often involves some explicit decision about what strategy or part of the agent was responsible for the success. Biological systems are not the only ones that select entire agents. Elections are another such method. If a congressional representative is defeated in an election, another person gets the job. The voters are not able to pick and choose among the features they like in the incumbent and a challenger. They simply have to pick one candidate or the other. This provides an easy answer to the question of what should be given credit for success (or failure). The answer is the whole candidate. As much as a voter might want to give credit and blame separately for some good and bad policy positions or character traits, the vote requires selection at the level of the whole agent. One agent will occupy the office for the coming term; all others will be cast aside. Elections offer a nice example of several coevolving complex systems. While voters are selecting at the level of agents, active politicians are selecting at the level of strategies. They observe carefully what positions were taken by recent victors around the country. Many will adopt those more successful strategies in future campaigns. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

The economy also can select at the level of agents. Companies that go bankrupt and are liquidated are thereafter not present in the population. On the constructive side, imagine a decentralized firm that has a highly successful branch office. The firm might use its earnings to “clone” the successful branch office by setting up another branch that, insofar as possible, duplicates the entire operation of the successful one. If the branches operate fairly autonomously, this would amount to creating a new agent. The central office would have given credit to an entire branch (rather than to any of its particular strategies or characteristics) and tried to amplify success by producing a duplicate agent. Biological evolution works by selecting agents. The success of an organism leads to reproduction. This does not entail any determination of which of the genes “deserve” credit for the reproductive success. Instead, all the genes in the reproducing organism get a roughly equal chance to be passed on to the offspring. This fact is the root of the phenomenon called hitchhiking, in which non-productive, even mildly deleterious, genes are carried into subsequent generations by the success of the overall agent package to which they belong. In all these examples of agent selection, there must be fairly substantial accumulations of resources to create a new agent, whether that agent is an infant organism, a political candidate, or a branch office. The need to accumulate sufficient resources to embody a new agent operates as an important limiting factor in agent-level selection. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

It contrasts with the situation we will see blow for strategy level selection, where what is copied can often be merely the abstract pattern of the strategy. The extreme of this, a process that is profoundly reshaping our era, is the copying of computer algorithms. Here, the marginal costs of assembling a new copy may hover just above zero, allowing low-cost software to run on millions of computers. When using selection of agents to harness complexity, a key question is how strong selection pressure should be. If the best agent in a population gets many copies while the others get few or none, the selection pressure is very high. In effect, strong selection pressure greatly amplifies the success of the best agent in the population but gives very little amplification to slightly less successful. In an era where franchising can provide strong selection pressure, the best ideas for a hardware store or bookstore will be extensively copied, while independent competitors will languish. Conversely, weak selection pressure produces only a slight tendency for the better agents to have more copies and thus provides more uniform amplification to the relatively successful agents. The advantage of strong selection pressure is that it exploits success by quickly spreading copies of the best-performing agents. The disadvantage is that it can quickly destroy the variety in the population that is needed to explore for even better outcomes in the future. Thus the trade-off between strong and weak selection raises the familiar issues of choosing the balance between exploiting the best current outcomes and using variety to explore for possible improvements. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Manager and designers often have opportunities to change selection pressure. Among other things, they can increase rewards and visibility for top performers and set severe punishments for flaws. For example, “zero tolerance” deletion of agents or artifacts with small deficiencies has the effect of reducing variety. It thereby favours exploitation over exploration. In the short run, strong selection pressure converts existing variety to new exploitation, but in the long run exploration may suffer. Harnessing complexity requires taking advantage of variety rather than trying to ignore or eliminate it. An instructive issue in biological reproduction is the founder effect. An example would be an island populated by long-beaked birds descended from a long-beaked pair that were among the first to reach the locale. In its early history, the population is small, and an outstandingly fit individual has offspring that forms a large portion of the next generation. Over subsequent generations, many traits of that “founder” are carried widely through the population. Whether or not they make their own functional contribution, the traits that made the founder effective co-occurred with traits that do not have high value. Both kinds are amplified. A nonbiological example can be seen in the Carnegie libraries that proliferated in the United States of America in the early twentieth century. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Many different communities established libraries staring from the same plans. Overall, the favoured plans were good ones and carried financial subsidies. The practice of using them was beneficial on the whole but did result in libraries with specific services that were arbitrary or even unwanted in some communities in which they were instituted. In the 1986 baseball National League championship series, the New York Mets won a crucial game against the Houston Astros when Len Dykstra hit Dave Smith’s second pitch for a two-run home run in the ninth inning. The two players later walked about what happened. Dykstra said, “He threw mw a fastball on the first pitch and I fouled it off. I had a gut feeling then that he had thrown me a forkball next, and he did. I got a pitch I saw real well, and hit it real well.” According to Smith, “What it boils down to, is that it was bad pitch selection.” By that he meant Dykstra was guessing that, because the first pitch was a fastball, Smith would alter the velocity. “If I had it to do over again? It would be [another] fastball.” Should Smith adopt the strategy of throwing another fastball the next time such a situation arises? Of course not. The batter can see through this level of Smith’s thinking, and expect a fastball. However, then Smith should move gears to the next level of thinking, and throw a forkball, after all. And so on. There is no definite stopping point to this process. The batter can see through and exploit any systematic thinking and action by the pitcher, and vice versa. The only sensible course of action for both is to be unpredictable. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

To be unpredictable, the pitcher should make a random selection from accurate pitches. He should not throw inaccurate pitches. An inaccurate pitcher is unpredictable because he himself does not know where the ball will go. Without accuracy, there is no control over the placement and relative frequencies of the different types of pitches. The best example of an accurate but unpredictable pitch is the knuckleball. Because the ball hardly spins, the seams lead to sudden movements through the air an no one can quite predict its outcome—but few pitchers can throw good knuckleballs. In these situations, a classic mistake in strategic thinking is to believe that you can predict your rival’s moves simply by wearing his shoes. We see this mistake in David Halberstam’s book The Summer of ’49 as he describes the strategic awakening of the strategic awakening of the seventeen-year-old Ted Williams. “Like so many young players, Williams had trouble with breaking pitches. He was never ready for them. Once a pitcher got him out on a curve. Williams, furious with himself, trotted back to his position in the outfield. One of the San Diego pitchers, a former major-leaguer, yelled over to him, ‘Hey kid, what’d he get you out on?’ ‘A goddamn slow curve,” Williams answered. ‘Can you hit his fastball?’ the pitcher continued. ‘You bet,’ Williams answered. ‘What do you think he’ll be looking to put past you next time?’ the pitcher asked. There was a brief pause. Ted Williams had never thought about pitching to Ted Williams—that was something other pitchers did. ‘A curse,’ he answered. ‘Hey kid,’ the pitcher said, ‘why don’t you go up there and wait on it the next time.’ Williams did, and hit the ball out for a home run. Thus began a twenty-five-year study of the mind of the pitcher. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Apparently the pitcher had not learned the need to be unpredictable, but then neither had Williams, for if Williams were thinking about how to pitch to Williams, he would not throw a curve when he recognized that Williams was expecting it! This report shows what to expect when both sides are trying to outsmart the other. Even though you cannot guess right all the time, you can at least recognize the odds. Correctly anticipating and responding to unpredictability is useful well beyond the baseball diamond. Unpredictability is a critical element of strategy whenever one side likes coincidence of actions, while the other wishes to avoid it. The IRS wants to audit those who have evaded taxes, while those who have cheated hope to avoid an audit. Among children, the older sibling usually wants to avoid having the younger one tag along; the younger often looks to follow the older’s footsteps, literally. An invading army wants to achieve tactical surprises in its choice of the place to attack; the defending army wants to concentrate its force on the spot where the attack comes. The setters of fashion in nightclubs, restaurants, clothing, and art want exclusivity; the general public wants to mingle with the trendsetters. Eventually, the “in” places are discovered. However, by then the beautiful people have moved on to somewhere else. This helps explain the short life span of nightclubs. Once a nightclub gets to be successful, too many people want to go there. This drives trendsetters away and they start a new fad somewhere else. As Yogi Berra said, “The place is so crowded, no one goes there anymore.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

While the baseball player’s choice of pitch or the IR’s decision of whom to audit on any one occasion may be unpredictable, there are rules that govern the selection. The right amount of unpredictability should not be left to chance. In fact, the odds of choosing one pitch over another or to whom to audit can be precisely determined from the particulars of the game. “Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t.” Today we live in the age of instant media, a bombardment of contending images, symbols, and “facts.” Yet the more data, information, and knowledge are used in the governing as we penetrate deeper into the “information society,” the more difficult it may become for anyone—political leaders included—to know what is really going on. Much has been written about how TV and the press distort our image of reality through conscious bias, censorship, and even in inadvertent ways. Intelligent citizens question the political objectivity of both print and electronic media. Yet there is a deeper level of distortion that has been little studied, analyzed, or understood. In the coming political crises that face the high-tech democracies, all sides—politicians and bureaucrats, as well as the military, the corporate lobbies, and the swelling tide of citizen groups—will use “info-tactics.” These are power plays and ploys based on the manipulation of information—for the most part before it ever gets to the media. With knowledge in all its forms becoming more central to power, with data, information, and knowledge piling up and pouring out of our computers, info-tactics will become ever more significant in political life. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Before we can understand the sophisticated techniques that will shape political power in the future, we need to look at the methods used by today’s most successful power players. These “classic” techniques are not taught in any school. Shrewd players of the political power game know them intuitively. The rules have not been formalized or set down systematically. Until this is done, talk about “open government,” an “informed citizenry,” or “the public’s right to know” remains rhetorical. For these info-tactics call into question some of our mist basic democratic assumptions. The World imposes limits on what we can do. Technology in general (and nanotechnology in particular) can provide padding for us as we throw ourselves against these hard, sharp limitations, and can sometimes help us slip past old limits through previously unknown gaps. Eventually, though, we will encounter new limits. In the end, solid constraints will limit human action no matter how much we juggle atoms and molecules, or the bits and bytes of information. Many problems differ fundamentally from the material problems of limited matter and energy: they involve information. Some of the most precious stores of information in the World today are the genetic codes of the biosphere. This information, different for virtually every individual organism, is the product of millions of events that we are incapable of modeling or recreating. When this information is lost, it is lost forever. When the atoms encoding this information are thoroughly scattered, there seems to be no way to retrieve it. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

With any species, most genetic information is shared in common, found in all members of that species. However, the variation in genetic code between individuals are important, both to the individuals themselves and to the health and prospects of the species as a whole. Consider the northern white rhino, whose numbers have dropped to an estimated thirty-two animals, or the California condor, of which only forty remain, all in captivity. Even if biologists succeed in reestablishing these species—eight condors were hatched in 1989—much of the diversity of their genetic information has been lost. Worse yet are extinctions of species for which no tissue samples were saved. The future may see some amazing recoveries: Dry skin and bones may yield a complete set of genes when sifted by molecular machinery, and even current techniques have been used to recover genes from an ancient leaf, almost 20 million years old. Our eyes and instruments cannot yet tell us how much information from the past remains, but we do know that genetic information is being lost every day, and once lost, it is irretrievable. A mutational meltdown describes an eco-evolutionary process in which the accumulation of deleterious mutations causes a fitness decline that eventually leads to the extinction of a population. Possible applications of this concept include medical treatment of RNA virus infections based on mutahenic drugs that increase the mutation rate of the pathogen. Extinction is the result of three consequences: initial accumulation of deleterious mutations due to the increased mutation pressure; consecutive loss of the fittest haplotype due to Muller’s ratchet; rapid population decline towards extinction. We find accurate analytical results for the mean extinction time, which shows that the deleterious mutation rate has the strongest effect on extinction time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

Cresleigh Homes

Sometimes, your dreams 💭 stick around even when you wake up…and when you’re living in one of our #Havenwood homes, you’ll know what we mean!

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Luncheon #4 with Coffee

We cannot see reality here and remain closed to it there. That dulls our cutting edge and makes our search for the truth ineffectual. And we can see ourselves rightly only if we can see others rightly, only if we can see them in the context of their social circumstances, which is to say, only if we look sharply and critically at all that is going on around us in the World. This is what love demands of us, too. And if we love our fellow humans, we cannot limit our insight and our love to others as individuals. That will inevitably lead to mistakes. We have to be political people, I would even say passionately involved in political people, each of us in the way that best suits our own temperaments, our working lives, and our own capabilities. A contingency that bears on mutual openness is one we must consider. Previously, we argued that the individual in our society has a right to receive civil inattention. It was also suggested that, when persons ratify each other for mutual participation in an encounter, the rule against looking fully at another is set aside. Typically, then, one person may legitimately begin to look further at another a moment before one initiates an encounter, the legitimacy being imputed retroactively, after it is shown what the individual had been intending to do. If, then, persons find that they must stare at each other, they can try to cope with the matter by initiating a state of talk, the overture being excusable (however embarrassing) because of what can be handled by means of it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

There are standard conditions under which the rule about not staring gives rise to these problems. When a few persons find themselves in a small space, as in a European railway compartment, or around the entrance of a store that is not yet quite open, civil inattention is hard to manage tactfully. To not stare requires looking very pointedly in other directions, which may make the whole issue more a matter of consciousness than it was meant to be, and may also express too vividly an incapacity or a distaste for engagement with those present. In this connection, the plight of close-setting diners in low-priced restaurants in the south of France can create tensions by sitting opposite someone with whom one is not in a conversational relation. The institutionalized solution: each diner pours the wine from one’s small table-bottle into the glass of the other, and with the exchange of these clearance signs, the table is open for conversation, the diners now being ratified coparticipants of social encounter. Fortunately such where-to-look situations do not arise with any frequency. One which does, however, is the elevator one…both while in an elevator brings outs a suspicious streak in people. You arrive before the closed landing door and push a button. Another person comes along and after a glance of mutual appraisal, you both look quickly away and continue to wait, thinking the while uncharitable thoughts of one another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

 The new arrival suspecting you of not having pushed the button and you wondering if the new arrival is going to be a mistrusting old meanie and go give the button a second shove…an unspoken tension which is broken by one or the other of you walking over and doing just that. Then back to positions of waiting and the problem of where to look. To stare the other person in the eye seems forward and usually the eye does not warrant it. Shoes are convenient articles for scrutiny—your own or those of the other person—although it is overdone this may give the impression of incipient shoe fetichism. It [ the where-to-look problem] continues even inside the elevator…especially in the crowded and claustrophobic boxes of the modern high buildings. Any mutual exchange of glances on the part of the occupants would add almost a touch of lewdness to such already over-cozy sardine formation. Some people gaze instead at the back of the operator’s neck, others stare trance-like up at those little lights which flash the floors, as if safety of the trip were dependent upon such deep concentration. A rather similar situation arises in a Pullman diner when one is obliged to sit opposite an unknown at a table for two. How to fill in the awkward wait before writing out “Luncheon #4 with coffee” and the arrival and serving of the same? If one is not the type who, given the slightest provocation, burst into friendly chit-chat with a stranger, the risk of getting conversationally involved with someone who is, brings out the furtive behaviour of an escaped convict. Sometimes it becomes apparent that the other person feels the same way…a discovery which comes as a minor shock but no major solution. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Two strangers sitting directly opposite each other at a distance of a foot and a half, and determined politely but firmly to avoid each other’s eye, go in for a fascinating little game of “I do not spy.” They re-read the menu, they fool with the cutlery, they inspect their own fingernails as if seeing them for the first time. Comes the inevitable moment when glances meet but they meet only to shoot instantly away and out the window for an intent view of the passing scene. It can be awkward, drinking alone at a bar. Is the man behind it wholly a servitor at such times, or must recognition be made of the fact that two human beings are together in an otherwise empty room? It may be added that during such difficult times, if the individual decides against contact, he may well have to find some activity for himself in which he can become visibly immersed, so as to provide the others present with a face-saving excuse for being unattended to. Here again we see the situational functions that newspapers and magazines play in our society, allowing us to carry around a screen that can be raised at any time to give ourselves or others an excuse for not initiating contact. Airplane and long-distance bus travel have here underlined some interesting issues. Seatmates, while likely to be strangers, are not only physically too close to each other to make non-engagement comfortable, but are also fixed for a long period of time, so that conversation, once begun, may be difficult thereafter either to close or to sustain. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

In such cases, a strategy is to “thin out” the encounter by keeping it impersonal and by declining to exchange identifying names, thus guaranteeing that some kind of nonrecognition will be possible in the future. As for airplanes today, seatmates may not exchange a word in a trip across the continent. However, plane conversation is in order if mutually desired and kept impersonal. As on trains, names need not be exchanged. And why should they? After all, it is relaxing to talk without identifying oneself. Relationships with service personnel in our society, when talk is required, may be thinned out in the same way—a thinning, incidentally, that serves may attempt to counteract by asking the name of the customer and proffering their own. Public officials are often criticized for not being accessible to the constituents. They are busy people, and the fault sometimes lies in overprotective assistants who do not want to overburden their bosses with too many visitors. The mayors of some cities frequently admonish because of the way the public sees them. They often claim to have an “open-door” policy; yet at city hall meetings, citizens are arrested, told out right to “shut up!” and the mayor is hard to get ahold of. Furthermore, members of the community are blocked by secretaries and administrators when they call. Finally, taxpayers came up with a suggestion. They wanted to remove the door from his office! However, he still never got the message, and nor has his administration. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Simply staying committed to your promises can change the difference between failure and success and will reduce the likelihood of giving offense or arousing resentment. Many people begin their criticism with the sincere praise followed by the word “but” and ending with a critical statement. For example, in trying to change a child’s attitude toward studies, we might say, “We are really proud of you, Leo, for cutting back on your modeling and acting jobs and raising your grades this term. But if you hard worked harder on your algebra, the results would have been better.” In this case, Leo might feel encouraged until he heard the word “but.” He might then question the sincerity of the original praise. To him, the praise seemed only to be a contrived lead-in to a critical inference of failure. Credibility would be strained, and we probably would not achieve our objectives of changing Leo’s attitude toward his studies. This could be easily overcome by changing the word “but” to “and.” We are really proud of you, Leo, for raising your grades this term, and by continuing the same conscientious efforts next term, your algebra grade can be up with all the others.” Now, Leo would accept the praise because there was no follow-up of an inference of failure. We have called his attention to the behaviour we wished to change indirectly, and the changes are he will try to live up to our expectations. Calling attention to one’s mistakes indirectly works wonders with sensitive people who may resent bitterly any direct criticism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

All people should aim to be leaders and they are more effective when they lead by example. One should be an example that they want others to follow. Every person carries on one’s shoulders the reputation of one’s family. We bring credit to the work of our ancestors. The railing out against good people, the viciousness and the lying about our people as whole have almost entirely died out because people have come to know the desires of our heats, that we have no enmity against even those who malign us. One of the first and most important factors in trying to change oneself is the division of oneself. The right division is between what is really “I,” and all the rest which we can call “Mr. Harris,” or whatever your name happens to be. If this division is not made, if one forgets about it and continues to think oneself in the usual way, or if one continues to use “I” and “Mr. Harris,” but in the wrong way work stops. The first line of work can only make progress on the basis of this division. No other lines are open if this division is forgotten, but it must be the right division. It happens often that people make a wrong division. What they like in themselves they call “I” and what they dislike, or what is weak or unimportant, this they call “Mr. Harris” or “Mrs. Hearst,” or “Mr. Winchester” or whatever their names happen to be. If they divide in this way it is quite wrong. It is not enough that you make a right division today and forget it tomorrow. You must make a right division and keep it in your memory. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

[An actual example of wrong division was given. A man called Petroff who had belonged to one of our groups made a division of himself into two parts. One of these he described as “keeping him alive” and called it “I”; the rest he called Petroff.] This wrong division is simply lying, lying to oneself which is worse than anything because the moment one meets with the smallest difficulty it will show itself by inner arguing and wrong understanding. “What is the origin of this difficulty in dividing oneself?” asked Mrs. X. The origin is you and Mrs. X. Mrs. X. thinks she knows better than you do. She thinks she is more important and wishes you to do as she wants. “One of the difficulties,” said Mr. Y. “is that Y. knows better than ‘I’ in certain situations.” Y. knows nothing. “But he thinks he does,” said Mr. Y. Do you have to obey? If you think he knows best, simply study him and this will bring you to the right understanding. The first condition is that you must believe nothing. What is the use of trying to create permanent “I” while you continue to believe in Mr. Y? The real “I” is created by the desire to be and to know and the rest is non-existent. So really there is nothing to divine. We must believe nothing or we cannot come to anything. In this system the word “I” can be spoken of in five ways on five different levels. Man in his ordinary state, is a multiplicity of “I”s; this is the first meaning. The human “I” has a Master, Time-body, and he also knows the past and also the future. The names we are given at birth are our False Personality which each of us has, but this division must not be confused with the division between Essence and Personality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Essence is what we are born with, our capacities and incapacities. It is connected with “type” and also with the physical body. We cannot work on it directly. From this point of view of work on ourselves, all that we have is personality. When a man begins to work, magnetic center brings observing “I” into being. This “I” is also a personality which has to educate the rest of personality and essence. “Is it right to supposed that a person with a highly developed personality would find this work difficult?” Yes and no. Not so much depends on the weight of personality as on its state, on whether it is educated, badly educated or uneducated. It may be in the power of imaginary “I” and then it is wrong. Being does not enter into the division into personality and essence. Knowledge and being are the two sides of which we speak in relation to the possibility of man’s development. They make one pair of opposites on a different scale. Personality is acquired; essence is our own, what we are born with, what cannot be separated from us. They are mixed and we cannot distinguish the one from the other now, but it is useful to remember this division as a theoretical fact. Essence, or type of man, is the result of planetary influences. Planetary influences determine many big events in the life of humanity such as wars and revolutions. Our emotions come originally from the planets and different essence. According to our type we act in one or another way in certain circumstances. It is said that there are twelve or eighteen chief types and then combinations of these. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

It is very seldom that you meet a pure type, but different features play a different part in different types though each type has everything. That knowledge can bother us. However, the more we know about ourselves and the fewer illusions we have about others, the richer, stronger, more vital our lives will be. Another area of life where we can harness complexity and change success criteria is in the method of establishing a prize competition. Consider for example, the ancient Athenian practice of conducting annual dramatic contests. By explicitly declaring which drama was the best, the award accomplished three things. First, the author was honoured for success, bringing fame and influence to individuals such as Aeschylus and Sophocles. Second, the award encouraged the production of new plays composed to meet the criteria implied by the previous awards. In our terms, the strategies of later playwriting were changed. Third, the award helped educate and shape the tastes of the audience, thereby providing future support for the criteria of excellence the award implied. Today prize competitions are used to reward, encourage, and define excellence in a wide range of activities, from grammar school art contests to the Nobel Prizes in physics, peace, and literature. There are now prizes for beauty, for most valuable players, for best dressed, and for business quality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The effectiveness of prizes is enhanced as society develops more extensive channels to disseminate news of awards. So we should not be surprised that their use is increasing. Every increment in the reach of printing, television, or e-mil newsgroups increases the possibilities for affecting success criteria by announcing winners of awards. Some prizes are for accomplishments that can be assessed more or less objectively, such as the winner of a solar-powered car race. For our purposes, the most interesting prizes are those that are based on subjective criteria. Indeed, for many prizes, the criteria are so indefinite that the burden of defining excellence within some realm falls heavily, if not entirely, on the subjective evaluations of a panel of judges. From the point of view of harnessing complexity, a major advantage of prize competitions is that they can award credit to people or activities based on criteria that are different from current standards. The presumption is that a carefully selected panel of judges can make worthwhile evaluations of quality. The indirect effects are as powerful as the direct effects. Giving a prize not only rewards a winner who might not have excelled in other assessments but also provides a target for others to emulate. Emulation may take the form of superficial imitation, but it may also create innovative exemplars of just what was most valued by experts. In addition, by helping to shape the tastes of the general audience, a prize competition can also shape the criteria used by the broader public. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

For instance, book awards not only provide guidance to writers and publishers about what is being valued but also provide guidance to readers and reviewers about what is worth reading. The promotion of a sophisticated reading public, in turn, helps provide a market for good writing. A prize competition can also promote useful variety. Prizes sometimes serve to identify and promote things that are new and valuable. When a science or literary prize is awarded, it tends to legitimate and promote the entire field or genre of the winner. Of course, there is a tension here. Deciding who or what should receive an award involves the application of standards of excellence. The judges inevitably use standards that are shaped in part by the standards in the broader community of which they are a part. Indeed, judges are usually selected on the basis of their own standing, which in turn is often based on their adherence to current standards. And even if the judges may wish to be leaders in the identification of what is both new and worthy and are willing to take a risk on something that stretches current standards, they also need to be concerned about looking arbitrary or even foolish. The judges are also judged. Therefore, they face the familiar trade-off between exploitation and exploration in making their selections. The trade-off creates a tension between making a safe choice that reflects current standards and making a bold choice that can help transform those very standards. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

To the extent that prize committees are willing to go beyond the orthodoxy of the moment, the represent a valuable potential for increasing useful variety. This potential is not always fully seized. Of the first 85 winners of the Nobel Prize for literature, all but one wrote in a European language. Prizes can stifle variety. It is now very hard for a young pianist to establish a successful recording or concert career without having won one of the major competitions. The reason is that producers rely on the competitions to screen pianists. Young pianists therefore train to win these competitions, go to teachers who have won or whose students have won, choose repertoire suited to winning, and so on. This there is some truth to the criticism that competitions can reduce the variety of piano expression exactly because the competitions can become the dominant focus for young players. It can take a long time for the weak signals of public tastes or music reviews to counter the now strengthened signals of prize jury standards. While each prize sets up a competition among those aspiring to win it, there is also competition among the prizes themselves. The sponsors and judges of each prize seek attention and prestige for their award. Within each domain there is competition for how much credit will be garnered by the winners of a public award. Is a Pulitzer Prize for fiction better than a National Book Award? Prize competitions themselves interact, as when getting one prize makes a winner more likely to het another prize. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Moreover, a lesser-known prize can gain prestige if its winners often go on to receive some better-known prize. Thus there is an intricate set of interactions within and between four populations of agents: prize seekers, members of their audience, judges on awards panels and the various prize competitions themselves. Together they function to alter the criteria that define success in their respective domains. After a battle that lasted longer than twelve years, United States v. IBM stands as a monumental eyesore of antitrust litigation. One of the many issues revolved around IBM’s policy of leasing rather than selling its mainframe computers. The government argued that IBM’s emphasis on short-term leases constituted an entry barrier resulting in monopoly profits. IBM defended the practice as being in consumers’ interest. It argued that a short-term lease insulates customers from the risk of obsolescence, provides flexibility when needs change, commits IBM to maintain its leased equipment (since it is responsible for the operation of the leased computers), and provides financing from the company with the deepest pockets. Many find these arguments a convincing defense. Yet there is a strategic advantage to leasing that seems to have been overlooked by both sides. How would you expect prices to differ if IBM primarily sold its large mainframe machines rather than leased them? Even a company without an outside competitor must worry about competing with its future self. When a new computer is introduced, IBM can sell the first models at very high prices to customers impatiently awaiting the technological advance. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Once the computers are available in large numbers, there is the temptation to lower the price and attract more customers. The main cost of producing the computer has already been incurred in the development stage. Each additional sale is gravy. Herein lies the problem. If customers expect that IBM is about to lower its prices, they will wait to make their purchase. When the majority of customers are waiting, IBM has an incentive to speed up its price reductions and capture the customer sooner. This idea, first expressed by University of Chicago law professor Ronald Coase, is that for durable goods, in effect, a monopolist competes with its future self in a way that makes the market competitive. Leasing serves as a commitment device that enables IBM to keep prices high. The leasing contracts make it much more costly for IBM to lower its price. When its machines are on short-term lease, any price reduction must be passed along to all customers, not just the ones who have not yet bought. The loss in revenue from the existing customer base may outweigh the increase in new leases. In contrast, when the existing customer base owns its computers, this trade-off does not arise; the customer base owns its own computers, this trade-off does not arise; the customers who already bought the computer at a high price are not eligible for refunds. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Thus leasing is an example of moving in small steps. The steps are the length of the lease. The shorter the lease, the smaller the step. Customers do not expect IBM to keep its price high when the steps are too big; they will wait for a price reduction and get the same machine a little later at a lower price. However, if IBM leases its computers only on short, renewable contracts, then it can credibly maintain high prices, customers have no reason to wait, and IBM earns higher profits. As college professors and authors, we encounter the same problem closer to home in the market for academic textbooks. If commitment were possible, publishers could raise profits by brining out new editions of a textbook on a five-year cycle, rather than the more common three-year cycle. Greater longevity would increase the text’s value on the used-book market and consequently the student’s initial willingness to pay when a new addition appears. The problem is that once the used books are out there, the publisher has a strong incentive to undercut this competition b brining out a new edition. Because everyone expects this to happen, students get a lower price for their used books and thus are less willing to pa for the new editions. The solution for the publisher is the same as for IBM: rent books rather than sell them. As we consider the secret teams and plumbers, it is important to understand what they do. of #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Under normal circumstances, much of the work of, let us say, Presidents of the United States of America and Prime Minster has been: to make choices among options (prepared in advance for them by their respective bureaucracies), about issues they understand only superficially, and then only when the different parts of their bureaucracy are unable to reach agreement. There are, of course, decisions that only top leaders can take—crash decisions that cannot wait for the bureaucratic mills to grind, turning-point decisions, war and peace decisions, or decisions that require extraordinary secrecy. These are non-programmable, as it were, decisions that come directly from the leader’s viscera. However, these are comparatively rare when things are running “normally.” When, however, we enter a revolutionary period, and a new wealth system clashes with the power structures built around an old one, “normalcy” is shattered. Each day’s headlines report some new unpredicted crisis or breakthrough. Global and domestic affairs alike are destabilized. Events accelerate beyond any reasonable capacity to stay on top of them. In conditions like these, even the best bureaucracies break down, and serious problems are allowed to fester into crises. The “homeless pandemic” in the United States of America, for example, is not a problem of inadequate housing alone, but of several interlinked problems—low wages, cost of housing, disability, veterans who have medical bills and no support, children who are kicked out of their homes, unemployment, high land prices, drug abuse, intimate partner violence and alcoholism. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Each is the concern of a different bureaucracy, none of which can deal effectively with the problem on its own, and none of which wants to cede its budget, authority, or jurisdiction to another. It is not merely the people who are homeless, but the problem. Drug abuse, too, requires integrated action by many bureaucracies simultaneously: police, health authorities, the schools, the foreign ministry, banking, transportation, and more. However, getting all these to act effectively in concert is almost impossible. Today’s high-speed technological and social changes generate precisely this kind of “cross-cutting” problem. More and more of them wind up in limbo, and more turf wars break out to consume government resources and delay action. In this environment, political leaders have the opportunity to seize power from their own bureaucrats. Conversely, as they see problems escalating into crises, political leaders are often tempted to take extreme measures, setting up all kinds of task forces, “czars,” “plumber’s groups,” and “secret teams” to get things done. Driven by frustration, some political leaders come to despise their bickering civil servants, and rely ever more heavily on intimates, on secrecy, informal orders, and arrangements that end-run and actually subvert the bureaucracy. This is, of course, exactly what the Reagan White House did so disastrously in the Irangate case, when it set up its own secret “enterprise” to sell arms to Iran and pipe the profits to the contra forces in Nicaragua, even at the risk of violating the law. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Less dramatically when George Bush asked the State Department and the Pentagon to prepare proposals for him to present to NATO, in mid-1989, the usual hordes of mid- and senior-level bureaucrats put on their green eyeshades and masticated the ends of the pencils. However, what ultimately came up the line from them were a series of warmed-over, trivial proposals. Bush was under political pressure, at home and abroad, to come up with something more dramatic—something that would steal the thunder from the latest proposals made by Soviet Leader Gorbachev. To get it, he threw away the bureaucratic script, called in Cabinet members and a handful of senior assistants, and drew up a plan to withdraw some U.S.A. troops from Europe. It won instant approval from the allies and the American public. Similarly, West German Chancellor Helmut Kohl simply ignored his foreign ministry when he first outlined his list of ten conditions for uniting the two Germanys. Whenever a leader end-runs the bureaucracy in this way, dire warnings that disaster looms rise from its ranks. This is often followed by leaks to the press designed to undermine the new policy. Nevertheless, in times of rapid change, requiring instant or imaginative responses, cutting ministries or departments out of the loop comes to be seen as the only way to get anything done, which accounts for the proliferation of ad hoc and informal units that increasingly honeycomb governments, competing with a sapping the formal bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

All this, when combined with privatization and the looming redistribution of power to local, regional and supra-national levels, points to basic changes in the size and shape of governments tomorrow. It suggests that, as we move deeper into the super-symbolic economy, mount pressures will force governments, like corporations before them, into a process of painful restructure. This organizational agony will come even as politicians attempt to cope with a wildly unstable World system, plus all the dangers outlined in the past reports, from unprecedented environmental crises to explosive ethnic hatreds and multiplying fanaticism. What we can expect to see, therefore, is sharpened struggle between politicians and bureaucrats for control of the system as we make the perilous passage from a mass to a mosaic democracy. Increasing affluence based on molecular manufacturing will not end economic problems any more than past increases in affluence have. Wilderness can still be destroyed; people can be oppressed; financial markers can be unstable; trade wars can be waged; inflation can soar; individuals, companies, and nations can go into debt; bureaucracy can stifle innovation; tax levels can become crippling; wars and terrorism can rage none of these will automatically be stopped by advanced technology. What is more, the potential benefits of new technologies are not automatic. Nanotechnology could be used to restore the environment, to spread wealth, and to cure most illness. However, will it? This depends on human action, working within the limits set by the real World. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Such a Neighbour Does Not Offer His Eyes to Another

Primitive tribes have social systems in which friendliness and cooperation are predominant and aggression at a minimum. In modern cultures, an important basis of mutual accessibility resides in the element of informality and solidarity that seems to obtain between individuals who can recognize each other as being of the same special group, especially, apparently, if this group be one that is disadvantaged or ritually-profane. In American society, people at bus stops often extend greetings to others who are strangers to them, as people who the same religion do to one another, or people with similar features. Sports car drivers on the road may do the same—especially when the car of each is of the same make, and a rare one. And, of course, when fellow-nationals meet in exotic lands they may feel obliged or privileged to initiate a state of talk. Mutual accessibility also occurs when each of the two persons involved finds oneself in a position that is at once exposed and opening. As one student has already suggested, when two persons unintentionally touch each other in passing on the street, both may take on the guilty role, with consequent mutual openness can occur. The offender can treat oneself as an opening person, needful of setting the record right about oneself, while treating the other as one in need of receiving assurances, and hence place oneself in an exposed position. At the same time the initiate demands for apology, or to confirm that no offense has been taken. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

Similarly, when two pedestrians must pass each other on a narrow walk, or when a pedestrian and motorist pair are in doubt about a join line of action, a mutually initiated meeting of the eyes can be employed to subtly apportion sides of the walk, or to subtly assure right-of-way to the other, or to ratify and consolidate an allocation that has been communicated. Another important basis for mutual accessibility arises from what might be called “open regions”—physically bounded places where “any” two persons, acquainted or not, have a right to initiate face engagement with each other for the purpose of extending salutations. Open regions differ according to the character of the face engagement that is permitted, according to whether or not introductions form part of the consequence of the encounter, and according to the categories of participants that are excluded. In Anglo-American society there exists a kind of “nod line” that can be drawn at a particular point through a rank order of communities according to size. Any community below the line, and hence below a certain size, will subject its adults, whether acquainted or not, to mutual greetings (where strangers owe each other passing greetings, we must study the resulting engagement in connection with the civil inattention that precedes and follows); any community above the line will free all pairs of unacquainted persons from this obligation. (Where the line is drawn varies, of course, according to region). #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

In the case of communities that fall above the nod line, even persons who cognitively recognize each other to be neighbours, and know that this state of mutual information exists, may sometimes be careful to refrain from engaging each other. (In the apt phrase reported in one housing study, such a neighbour does not “offer his eyes” to the other.) Perhaps this is done on the theory that, once acquaintanceship is established between persons living near one another, it might become difficult to keep sufficient distance in the relationship. Villages, towns, and rural places that fall below the nod line do not, of course, put absolutely everyone on nodding terms. Thus, in many parts of Sacramento, there was a general feeling that happy people who sounded and looked American were to be brought within the circle of humanity, but not those from places of unknown origin. The latter tended to be walked past and looked at as if they were not social objects but, rather, physical ones; they tended to be treated as “nonepersons.” In spite of these limits, however, we can still speak of these rural settlements as “open regions,” where coming into the region makes one accessible to anyone else in the vicinity. While rural and small town communities are perhaps the largest open regions, they are by no means the only ones. One instance, apparently the sports field. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Some American military personnel who have play golf are impressed with the friendliness of other players. “Why, they talked to us!” they say. The explanation that a presence on a sports field is the equivalent of an introduction, and that one can talk to strangers then, is greeted with some disbelief. Other sports produce similarly friendly results—athletics, flying, and other darts. In American society, bars, cocktail lounges, and club cars tend to be defined as open places, at least as between men (and although women are not free to engage men, certainly an overture from a male to a female in these settings is not much of a social delict, this fact constituting one of the important attributes of these settings). Something similar can be said about vacation resorts and about other highly bounded settings: A ship may be compared to a country hotel. It is good manners to greet other passengers in a friendly fashion without, however, making presumptuous overtures. You speak to the people next to you in deck chairs, but you do not force conversation upon them. In general, as in a friend’s house, the roof is the introduction, but this does not mean you are expected to do more than bow in the greeting to fellow passengers as you encounter them during the day. And, as implied, social parties and gatherings in private homes bring into being open regions where participants have a right not only to engage anyone present but also to initiate face engagement with self-introductions, if the gathering is too large for the host or hostess to have already introduced them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

If you meet any one whom you have never heard of before at the table of a gentleman, or in the drawing-room of a lady, you may converse with him with entire propriety. The form of “introduction” is nothing more than a statement by a mutual friend that two gentlemen are by rank and manners fit acquaintances for one another. All this may be presumed from the fact, that both meet at a respectable house. This is the theory of the matter. Custom, however, requires that you should take the earliest opportunity afterwards to be regularly presented to such an one. Nevertheless, it is still true that in a private house, or at any part, a guest may speak to any other guest without an introduction of any kind. Another illustration of the open regions provided by convivial occasions is the carnivals. During these costumed street celebrations, a roof and its rights is by social definition spread above the streets, brining persons into contact—a contact facilitated by their being out of role. The assumption of mutual regard and good will built into open regions guarantees a rationale for discounting the potential nefariousness of contact among the unacquainted, this being one basis for sociable accessibility. There are other bases. During occasions of recognized natural disaster, when individuals suddenly find themselves in a clearly similar predicament and suddenly become mutually dependent for information and help, ordinary communication constraints can break down. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Again, however, what is occurring in the situation guarantees that encounters are not being initiated for what can be improperly gained by them. And to the extent that this is assured, contact prohibitions can be relaxed. (If the disaster is quite calamitous, everyone is likely to be forced out of role and hence into mutual accessibility.) Now, how success is defined affects the chances for effective learning. Consider the example of checkers, the difficulties for learning if victory is the sole criterion of success creates a problem. The central problem is that victory or defeat comes only once per game. However, getting more than one measurement of performance per game could dramatically improve the rate of adaptation. The typical way to do this is to use criteria that can be measures in the course of the game. In checkers or chess, this is possible by evaluating the current board to see who is ahead in pieces and in various aspects of position. Such evaluations allow intelligent choices in the midst of the game based on what promises to lead to a better board position in a few moves. This does not require seeing all the way to victory or defeat t the end of the game. Since you cannot precisely measure the consequences of early moves for victory, you introduce other metrics tht are more easily predicted. In a seeming paradox, you increase the chance of winning by concentrating on a set of criteria that does not include winning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Even better, with finer-grained measures you can actually learn to improve the criteria by which you evaluate board positions. For example, you might learn from experience that having many pieces in the center often leads to surprisingly good results a few moves later. Indeed, the Samuel checker-playing program, one of the early triumphs of artificial intelligence research, learns on its own to play better checkers by using expected results in just this way. When it arrives at a board position that is surprisingly good or bad, it uses this information to revise its own success criteria. The program determines what changes in its evaluators would have avoided the surprise and makes the corresponding changes. When it next encounters a similar board, the program will have a better set of criteria for attributing value to broad positions. This approach to learning new success criteria is very powerful. Samuel’s program, running on an early computer that could not keep up with today’s digital wristwatches, could learn checkers well enough to defeat a state champion. Moreover, these are techniques of very broad applicability: When success is measurable only rarely, new measure with a faster tempo can speed learning, even if they do not perfectly reflect the longer-term goal. Whenever outcomes are better or worse than expected, the experience can help to revise evaluation criteria so that, in the future, the attribution of credit will produce better outcomes. Using fine-grained and short-term measures of success can help individual learning by providing focused and rapid feedback. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Such narrow and prompt measures of success can also be used by an organization to evaluate who is successful and who is not. For this reason, managers are often judged by how well their unit does each quarter, or even each month, or by very specific indicators such as cost reductions. However, there is a problem. If the challenges the manager is dealing with are long-term or widespread in the organization, then using fine-grained and prompt measures of success can easily miss much of the value to the organization of any improvement the manager discovers. There can be a lot of bang for the exploratory buck when advances in one domain can be applied for a long time and/or in many places. A challenge for an organization is to develop measures of success that support appropriate levels of exploratory behaviour while taking into account that learning is fostered by fine-graine and rapid feedback. Another challenge in defining measures that will support leaning is that a measure may be correlated with what ultimately matters without actually being causally related. A medical example is the reduction of fever as a measure of success in fighting a disease. A fever indicates the presence of a disease, and the fever disappears when the disease does. However, with the development of aspirin, one can reduce the fever without curing the disease. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Therefore, using body temperature as a measure of success can be misleading for some diseases. Because the elevated temperature might even be part of the body’s method of fighting the disease, parents may learn to treat the fever with aspiring in ways that can actually be harmful. The implication is that one needs to be careful about which indirect measures of success are used to guide action and learning. Taken together, these observations about success measures imply not only risks but also rich possibilities for harnessing complexity through shaping the criteria by which the agents or their activities are evaluated. Performance measures are not immutably given, but are subject to change, both from the outside and from within the system where they operate. What measures are used profoundly affects which agents and strategies will be copied and recombined and, therefore, what adaption will occur. This is the logic that gives long-term power to what may seem modest changes in measures, such as introducing on-time performance into airline regulation, body counts into battle assessments, “pawn structure” into chess, and portfolio risk into financial management. It life, it is important to be a leader. You can change people without giving offense or arousing resentment. It is always easier to listen to unpleasant things after we have heard some praise of our good point. However, you never want to praise someone all the time, and the say, “but you could have done this better.” That will make them feel like compliments are always passive aggressive criticisms and it will be an anticipated downer. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

We do not want to hurt anyone’s feelings nor kill their enthusiasm. Sometimes just tell someone, “No one could have done a better job than you did.” We want people to beware of rashness, but with energy and sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories. Therefore, always begin your interactions with praise and honest appreciation. Humans are divided into four parts: body, soul, essence, and personality. Personality and essence do not appear to be separate, but we can study what belongs to essence and what belongs to personality. The idea of the soul as a separate organism controlling the physical body cannot be said to be based on anything. The nearest approach to the idea of the soul as it was understood up to the seventeenth century is what is called the essence. The term soul is used in this system, but in the sense of life-principle only. Essence, personality and soul, taken together, correspond to what used to be called soul. However, the soul was supposed to have a separate existence from the body, whereas in this system we do not suppose essence, personality and soul to have a separate existence from the body. We are told that when a man dies or when anything dies (man or fish, it is just the same) its soul (id est, life-principle) goes to the moon. The soul is material; a certain quantity of fine matter, energy if you life, which leaves the body at death. In a normal man the soul has no consciousness, it is just mechanical so that it does not suffer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

However, humans can create a sort of half-consciousness which can pass to the soul and then the soul going to the moon may be aware of what happens to it. This occurs only in some very rare cases and when essence has died during life. Then the soul can get some material from essence this way. Actually there are many other people who kill essence and are really dead in life, but that does not concern us. So let us speak about what it would mean to create moon in oneself. First, what is the moon? What is the moon’s function in relation to man, individual man? What would happen if this function of the moon were to disappear; would it be beneficial or the opposite? We know, for instance, that the moon controls all our movements, so that if the moon were to disappear we should not be able to make any movements, we should collapse like marionettes whose strings have been cut. We must realize that all this refers to Being. What are the features of our being? The chief feature of our being is that we are many, not one. If we want to work on our being, to make it correspond better to our aim, we must try to become one. However, this is a vary fair aim. What does it mean to become one? The first step, which is still very far, is to create a permanent center of gravity. This is what is meant by creating moon in ourselves. The moon is a permanent center of gravity in our physical life. If we create a center of gravity in ourselves, we do not need the moon. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

However, first we must decide what the absence of permanent “I” means. We shall find in its place many of the features or weakness referred to above, but these must be established definitely, for ourselves, by observation. Then we must begin a struggle against these features which prevent us from becoming one. We must struggle with imagination, negative emotions and self-will. Before this struggle can be successful, we must realize that the worst possible kind of imagination from the point of view of obtaining a center of gravity is a belief that one can do anything by oneself. After that we must strive with the negative emotions which prevent us from doing what we are told in connection with this system. For it is necessary to realize that self-will can only be broken by doing what one is told. It cannot be broken by doing what one decides oneself, for that will still be self-will. Self-will is always struggle against another will. Self-will cannot manifest without opposing itself to another will. It may be useful for you to take a piece of paper and to write on it what constitutes your being. Then you will see that being cannot grow by itself. For instance, one feature of our being is that we are machines; another, that we live in only a small pat of our machine; a third, our plurality of “I”s. We say “I” but this “I” is different at every moment. At one moment I say “I” and it is to one “I”; five minutes later I say “I” and it is another “I.” So we have many “I”s all on the same level and there is no central “I” in control. This is the state of our being; we are never one and we are never the same. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

If your write down all these features you will see what would constitute a change of being and what can be changed. In each particular feature there is something that can change, and a little change in one feature means also a change in another. It is not only in the film The Godfather that one hears an “offer you can’t refuse.” With minor variations, this situation arises surprisingly often. At the end of what appeared to be a successful job interview, our friend Rupert was asked where the firm ranked in his list of potential employers. Before answering, he was told that the firm hired only those applicants who ranked it first. If the firm was in fact his first choice, then they wanted him to accept in advanced a job offer should one be made. (For the starting position, there was a standard starting salary which was pretty much identical across competitors. Hence, he could predict what he would be accepting even before it was offered.) With this prospect of an “offer you can’t refuse” (because otherwise you do not get it), what should Rupert have done? With the X-ray vision of the game theory, we can see through this ploy. The firm claims that it wants to hire only people who rank it first. However, the effect these pressure tactics have is the opposite of what they claim. If the firm truly wanted to have employees who ranked first, then it should not make job offers conditional on the applicant’s ranking of the firm. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

If, after completing the interview process, the firm was in fact Rupert’s first choice, then the firm can expect him to accept its offer. No firm need worry about having its offer turned down by someone who wants to work there. On the other hand, if the firm was in fact Rupert’s second choice, but Rupert’s first-choice firm had yet to make an offer, then he might be willing to accept his second-choice job to avoid the risk of getting none. The firm’s pressure tactic of saying that it will offer jobs only to those who accept first has the effect of hiring candidates who do not in fact rank the firm first. More truthful and what they really mean is, “We want you to work for us. If you rank us first, then we know we will get you. However, if you rank us second, we might lose you. To get you even if we are not your first choice, we want you to agree in advance to accept our offer or you will get none at all.” Seen in this light, this does not seem to be a credible threat. The firm wants Rupert so much that it is willing to take him even if it is not his first choice. At the same time, it claims that if Rupert refuses to accept in advance, but instead comes back later to accept, it will no longer offer him a job. It is possible but unlikely. Our friend Rupert explained that he was only beginning his interviews and thus had too little information to make a ranking. The firm reminded him that unless he accepted in advance, he would not be offered a job. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Rupert left the Wednesday interview without an offer. That Friday, he received an offer on his answering machine. Monday there was another message reiterating the offer. On Wednesday, a telegram arrived offering a sign-on bonus. It is hard to make a credible commitment not to offer a job to someone you hire. What could the firm have done to make its threat credible? Here, teamwork can help, but not in the usual sense. Once there are several people with hiring power, it is possible that should you not accept immediately, the coalition that supported your candidacy may break down in favour of some later applicant. As we have discovered, when it comes to voting, the order in which candidates are considered may determine the ultimate decision. In this way a decision made by a committee is sufficiently dependent on chance that it cannot promise that given the same inputs it will reach the same verdict. A committee’s inability to commit itself to “rational” decision-making makes the take-it-or-leave-it threat credible. An offer valid not but not necessarily later presents people from comparison shopping. Stereo stores and care dealers use this tactic to great effect. However, how to these salesmen make credible their threat to turn down tomorrow an offer that they would accept today? Business may turn up, cash-flow problems may be lessened. As they are fond of saying, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

We saw earlier that many corporations, from auto makers to airlines, are struggling to cut down the degree of “vertical integration”—the reliance on their own people, keeping everything in-house, rather than contracting tasks to outside supplier firms. Many governments, too, are clearly reexamining their “make or buy” decisions and questioning whether they should actually be running laboratories and laundries and performing thousands of other tasks that could be shifting to outside contractors. Governments are moving toward the principle that their task is to assure the delivery of services, not to perform them. Whether the specific function is, or is not, appropriate for private-sector contractors to perform, the drive toward contracting out is the mirror image of industry’s reappraisal of vertical integration. Again, exactly like businesses, governments are also beginning to bypass their hierarches—further subverting bureaucratic power. “There are fewer hierarchies in Washington today than in Roosevelt’s time,” says political scientist Samuel Popkin of the University of California a San Diego. There are ”fewer leaders with whom a President can cut a deal and reasonably expect them to be able to enforce it in their agency of committee.” New communications technologies also undermine hierarchies in government by making it possible to bypass them entirely. When a crisis occurs anywhere in the World, the White House can instantaneously communicate with persons who are on the spot. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

These instantaneous relays to the President from on-the-spot observers and commanders disrupt the traditional channels of information and the chain of command. Specialists who do not yet have access to the last-minute information cannot address the President’s concerns. However, despite such changes, as complexity grows, change accelerates, and bureaucratic responses lag as more and more problems pile up that bureaucracies cannot handle. Another place where instantaneous messages are important is in the medical field. A challenging problem related to medicine (and to biostasis) is that of species restoration. Today, researchers are carefully preserving samples from species now becoming extinct. In some cases, all the have are tissue samples. For other species, they have been able to save germ cells in the hope that they will be able to implant fertilized eggs into related species and thus bring the (nearly?) extinct species back. Each cell typically contains the organism’s complete genetic information, but what can be done with this? Many researchers today collect samples for preservation thinking only of the implantation scenario: one that they know has already been made to work. Other researchers are taking a broader view: the Center for Genetic Resources and Heritage at the University of Queensland is a leader in the effort. Darly Edmondson, coordinator of the gene library, explains that the center is unique because it will “actively collect data. Most other libraries simply collate their own collections.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Director John Mattick describes it as a “genetic Louvre” and points out that is genes from today’s endangered species are not preserved, “subsequent generations will see we had the technology to keep [DNA] software and will ask why we did not do it.” With this information and the sorts of molecular repair and cell-surgery capabilities we have discussed, lost species can someday be returned to active life again as habitats are restored. One such center is not enough: the Queensland center focuses on Australian species (naturally enough) and has limited funds. Besides, anything so precious as the genetic information of an endangered species should be stored in many separate locations for safety. We need to take out an insurance policy on Earth’s genetic diversity with a broader network of genetic libraries, concentrating special attention on gathering biological samples from the fast-disappearing rain forests. Scientific study can wait: the urgency of the situation calls for a vacuum-cleaner approach. The Foresight Institute is promoting this effort through its BioArchive Project. The discussions of potential economic, medical, and environmental benefits may have given the false impression that nanotechnology will create a wondrous utopia in which all human problems are solved and we all live happily ever after. This is even more mistaken than the idea that new technologies always cause more problems than they solve. Many of the main constraints and difficulties faced by people are based not on technology or its lack, but instead by the very nature of the World we live in and the essence of our humanness. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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In that Sense, they are Truly Lost Souls

It was dark in the mansion, though outside the cloister the sky was an even midnight blue over the topmost gables of the house. Shadows hung down the four stories of the mansion itself, where only here and there a shape distinguished itself, boughs heavy with apricots, and those lilies flickering in the dark, like waxen candles. And here and there, behind the many-paned windows was the glimmer of candles. Mrs. Winchester found herself found herself standing alone in the parlor this winter night. She was tired and hungry, more deeply chilled than she had known till she started several blazing fires in the fireplaces in one rambling section of the mansion called the Hall of Fires. The mansion has forty-seven fireplaces and seventeen chimneys. The Hall of Fires was designed to produce as much heat as possible. The three adjoining rooms have four fireplaces and three hot air registers from the coal furnace in the basement. This evening, Mrs. Winchester was sick of perpetually treading stairs. The room was full of flowers. Flowers everywhere, not in senseless profusion, but placed with the same conscious art as in her Victorian gardens. How the flowers could survive all the heat was unknown to anyone. A vase of arums stood on the writing table, a cluster of strange-hued carnations on the stand at her elbow, and from bowls of glass and porcelain clumps of freesia bulbs diffused their melting fragrance. A few hours passed, and Mrs. Winchester was rejoicing at the prospect of food. She sat out to make her way to the dining room. She had not noticed the direction she had followed this evening in going to the dining room, and was puzzled, to find two news staircases, of apparently equal importance, inviting her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10

She chose the one to her right, and reached, at its foot, a long gallery. The gallery was empty, the doors down its length were closed. The room Mrs. Winchester entered was square, with dusky picture-hung walls. In its center, about a table lit by veiled lamps, there were apparitions already seated at dinner; then she perceived that the table was covered not with food but with papers, and she was invited into what seemed to be a meeting full of plans to expand her mansion. From the end of the table, Mrs. Winchester was greeted by an apparition with a smile which displayed a glance of impartial benevolence. “Certainly. Come in, Mrs. Winchester. If you won’t think it a liberty—” Carmelita, another apparition who sat opposite the host Coleman, turned her head toward the door. “Of course, Mrs. Winchester’s and American citizen?” Coleman laughed. “That’s all right! Oh, no, not one of your pin-pointed pens, Carmelita! Haven’t you got a quill somewhere?” Mrs. Winchester said, “No need to fuss. I have my quill right here.” Mrs. Winchester dipped her quill in the inkstand and dashed the plans the spirits gave her to expand the mansion on her lovely Edwardian linen dinner napkins. Mrs. Winchester, understanding what was expected of her, stood awaiting more instructions. Coleman was about to let Carmelita have a turn at the blueprint instructions; but he said in his sad imprisoned voice: “The Switchback Staircase–?” Mrs. Winchester continued, glancing about the table. #RandolphHarris 2 of 10

 Coleman then said, “to reduce the effort of treading stairs, I propose a Switchback Staircase which will include 44 stairs, two inches in height, with 7 complete turns, that will travel 100 feet!” Mrs. Winchester sketched the details on her napkin and she continued to smile on her guests, then turned from the room and ran upstairs. The impression was so starling that Mrs. Winchester forgot what was going on about her. She was just dimly aware of living the dining room and being transferred back to the Hall of Fires. With a deadly sense of being unable to move, or even understand what she was doing, when she stood up from her chair which was near a warm fireplace—a strange weight of fatigue came on all her limbs—and there was a figure behind her chair. Then it suddenly disappeared. Mrs. Winchester felt an immediate sense of relief. It was puzzling that the man’s exit should have been so rapid and noiseless, but at any rate he was gone, and with this withdrawal the strange weight was lifted. Everything suddenly seemed to have grown natural and simple again, and Mrs. Winchester found herself responding with a smile. As she gazed out of the window, the sky deepened. The garden changed. The apricot tree beyond the arch, once full with shadow, had not lost its shape. Nothing could be seen of the fountain, nothing of the white lilies. And those lights in one of the wings of her mansion had the only clarity now, so many beacons in the dark. #RandolphHarris 3 of 10

Mrs. Winchester decided to walk through her enormous and only half-lit living room, along a short hallway, into a den with rich teak paneling and a copper ceiling. The maroon leather armchairs and couch were expensive and comfortable. The polished teak desk was massive, and detailed of a five-masted schooner, all sails rigged, stood on the corner. Nautical items—a ship’s wheel, a brass sextant, a carved bullock’s horned filled with tallow that held sail-making needles, six types of ship lanterns, a helmsman’s bell, and sea charts—used a as decoration. Mrs. Winchester opened a book. She curled up in one of the arm chairs. She felt a lump of emotion in her throat, and entity seemed to have followed her. She then found herself in an echoing hall with a high ceiling, bare except for a long, pew bench, a table, and old portraits of popes upon the walls. She had never seen this portion of her mansion before. There were bad things. Shadows. Big, black shadows. There was someone there but she could not see him properly. He kept changing. There were noises too. They were all over the house. They were up in the ceiling and in the walls. Really scary stuff. Like there were animals there. The demon showed her stuff. He showed her what her house would look like ten years from this night. He showed her a vision of the nine-story tower. Behind this vision was a fragment of a yellow mansion that looked a lot like the one she was currently living in. Next, the demon taught Mrs. Winchester to say a prayer. It was simple. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10

As her eyes roved around the room with dark paneling and the somber paintings of ancient martyrs, the demon’s hand was moving rapidly over a book. Mrs. Winchester watched with astonishment and a creeping disquiet as the quill traveled over the pages. The words the demon was writing—though English they were—made no sense at all. The demon continued to write frantically. Then all at once he stopped. He seemed to relax and he calmly turned to the next page. Mrs. Winchester went to get the book and the demon calmly turned to the next page. His body had tensed again and the frantic writing continued. She tried to lift his wrist, but was shocked to discover that his arm and the hand that held the quill were quite immovable, as if made of stone. Mrs. Winchester watched in horror as the writing, clear and then illegible by turns, started pouring out filthy words and phrases that had no place in the presence of a woman. There were drawings too: symbols of archangels and pentagrams. She knew one of the symbols to be Aspenjargack. This demon wields and withholds the rain, each drop being a desire of the sorcerer. She knew this must be the demon who was communicating with her. She tried to leave the room, but her body remained in a rigid seated position as the demon continued to make frantic writing motions in midair. Mrs. Winchester then acknowledged that this was a powerful force. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10

A week later, Mrs. Winchester started experiencing other paranormal activity in her home. She was awaken by the sound of a screw being unscrewed and falling to the floor. When she got up to inspect the noise, there were several shadowy manifestations; they were present in her bedroom and in other parts of the house. She was shown visions of hell, saw demons of abominable form lurking in her hallway, heard voices. Her ancient blood was flowing faster. She was tarrying to see what would happen next—to see what the conjurer had up his sleeve. Mrs. Winchester heard a loud thud from downstairs. It had come from the one of the living rooms. It was a loud thud of an object falling from a height. She ventured downstairs. All was quiet; she heard nothing but her own rapid breathing. Gingerly, Mrs. Winchester turned the key to the living room door. In one deft movement, it flung wide open. She pushed the light switch and stood in the doorway, staring in astonishment. The Grandfather clock lay on the floor. On the mantel-piece the crystal candleholders were laid out like a crucifix. The room had been locked. There was no sign of forced entry. The fright Mrs. Winchester experienced was unimaginable. The house was telling Mrs. Winchester something. It was drawing Mrs. Winchester’s attention to itself, showing her what it could do. Later that evening, Mrs. Winchester was sipping her tea when she heard some hammering on the wall. It was so sudden and fierce, it made her drop her cup. Mrs. Winchester figure it was the carpenters working on the house. However, she was sure they were on dinner break. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10

Without further thought, she cleaned up the mess she had made. She was in her bedroom when she heard the noise again. However, now the noises seemed more urgent and were somehow more deliberate and purposeful. There was something eerie about the patter of sound as it traveled to various points on the wall, each time repeating a succession of what she could only describe as hammer blows. Mrs. Winchester was becoming uneasy. She hurried from the room, slamming the door shut behind her. Once downstairs, she had an odd sense of foreboding. The feeling was made all the more powerful when, she heard echoes coming from a cabinet. The finest cabinetmakers had toiled for years, using richly polished roods, to create built-in chests with deep drawers and tremendous bins and lockers. Inside were store the rarest satins and silks; hand-embroidered linens from China, Ireland, and Germany; and bolt upon bolt of elegantly woven cloth from Persia and India. However, when she opened this particular cabinet, she noticed it had become a doorway that went straight to the back of the house where she discovered thirty new rooms had been built within hours, and all fully furnished. There were stained-glass doors, crystal chandeliers, French Provincial sofas, beautiful drapes, and Persian rugs. Perhaps the carpenters were shy men who did not want to be disturbed. As astonishing at this was, she was turning to go back upstairs. However, something in the newly fashioned sixth kitchen caught her eyes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10

Shielding her eyes against the glare of daylight and peering more closely, Mrs. Winchester tried to come to terms with the inexplicable. Right in the middle of the pine floor was a lighted candle in a small brass holder, and next to it an open book. It is were more blueprints and plans to further expand the estate. Yet, the mansion was not done with surprises. Mrs. Winchester heard some movement on the 7-11 staircase. What she took to be a bright blue ball of light was swiftly descending. It moved away with such speed. She moved a little forward and made out that she was looking into a room full of paintings! On the walls were mounted immense pictures. In the distance they seemed finished and alive: clusters of biblical faces and forms surely as perfected as those that covered all the palaces and churches in which she had ever been. There was Saint Michael the Archangel, his face subtly illuminated by the fire below. And beside him was a picture of an unknown saint, a woman with a crucifix clasped to her chest. The colours pulsed in the light. And all of these pictures seemed darker, more solemn, than those she had known. She could hear little sounds from the room. The stillness of the garden, its concealing darkness, gave her that delicious feeling of being invisible, and she drew even closer now. The chill in Mrs. Winchester grew icier. The atmosphere in the room was subtly changing. Mrs. Winchester found the words “HIDE HERE NOW” scrawled in blood on the wall. Other mysterious symbols appeared on the walls of the living room, kitchen, and hallway. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10

Evil invariably comes with coldness. A door had been opened by restless spirits. Evil is not a word which can be defined on its own, nor is the use of the word devil. It should be added that there is a function of Satan. Satan is the tester; he has a pretty awful job to do which is not as the evil devil figure portrayed in the Christian religion. Satan within Judaism is not the devil; his job is to operate on the Tree of Life to make sure that people do not progress through the stages towards perfection until they have managed to purify themselves to make sure that nobody gatecrashed until they have worked hard enough and developed their life, that they do not get up the Tree until they have achieved total purification. The Christian definition of the devil sometimes is just an explanation for human nature that no one wants to own as their free will.  That is not to say that evil entities do not exist. They can exist in the same way that any spiritual entities exist; they are a projection of the course a person’s superconsciousness or subconscious takes. Evil and good are two forces bearing down; they are a whole, a question of balance. O thou great powerful governor Amaimon, who reigneth exalted in the power of the only El above all spirits in the kingdoms of the East (South, West, North), I invoke and move thee in the name of the true God, and in God whom thou worshippest: and in the seal of thy creation: and in the mighty names of God, Iehevhe Tetragrammaton, who cast down from Heaven, thou and the spirits of darkness, and in al the names of the mighty God who is the creator of Heaven and Earth, and the dwelling of darkness, and all things and in their power and brightness; and in the name Primeumaton who reigns over the palaces of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10

Bring forth, I say, the Spirit of Sarah L. Winchester; bring her forth in the 24th of a moment let her dwelling be empty until she returns to the Winchester Mansion and visits us in peace, speaking the secrets of truth; until she returns to us and obeys our power and her creation in the power of God, El, who is the Creator and doth dispose of all things, Heaven, firmament, Earth, and the dwelling or darkness. Cross all space and time and rise up within that we may compel the rise of the fallen ones. Formulate spiritual armor with this energy as well. Allow us to become the composite image of the powers of Darkness within the World however that may be conveyed through us as individuals. What protector is needed by us O Ahriman, for we are the God of our World! Though the oppression of tyrants attempts to encompass us, the blackened fire of spirit and sorcery works through our evil minds to improve our desires upon the corporal realm of stasis and limitation. May the power of darkness eternal be revealed through us now. Send forth Divs and Druj to reside within this Winchester Mansion with the power of darkness. Open the gates to other dimensions and allow the supernatural to manifest. Exorcise thy limits which enslave! I know banish and tear the powers of spiritual limitation from imposing its limits upon the Winchester Manion, expelling them from the Winchester Manion in the name of eternal darkness and all of its power and glory! Reveal the Black Sun and allow us to perceive the unseen planes and the sorcerous words of power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10

Winchester Mystery House

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