Randolph Harris II International Institute

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It’s So Hot—Would You Like a Drink?

There is a near universal agreement that violent messages permeate nearly every aspect of social life in this country, as we live in a society that implicitly and/or explicitly exposes individuals to heavy doses of violent imagery and ideals. Our movies, TV news, and television programs are mostly hyperviolent. Our sporting events and other leisure activities tend to revolve around violent themes. Even our children’s cartoons and video game are inundated with violence. Although no direct, causal relationship exist, social commentators tend to agree that this pervasive subculture of violence serves to reinforce individual-level thoughts and behaviors. The actual assaultive or homicidal transactions generally do not hinge upon recent or heightened levels of exposure to these violent stimuli; however, this type of social climate does make physical problem solving appear to be a more acceptable and realistic course of action. Murderers have been known to interact or network with other known killers, taking on everything from a collegial to a formal organizational format. However, when it comes to the issue of organizational alignment, most murderers fit the description of what Best and Luckenbill (1994) call loners. Namely, they choose to work alone and go to great lengths to keep their offending a secret. While some perpetrators of criminal assaultive operate as loners (abusive parents or domestic partners), the average assaulter (the male combatant who is prone to street or barroom fights) operates within a colleague or peerlike existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

In extreme cases, such as gang violence, offenders are known to interact as part of a team or formal organization. Here, the violence takes on a collective form with fellow combatants passing along normative and behavioral guidance to one another. Sometimes, we even see active recruitment and apprenticeships within these collectives. The average offender learns violent ways by mutating or exaggerating existing socialization scripts. They tend to be persons with a history and proficiency in physical problem solving. Faced with emotionally charged situations, these individuals allow the situation to get out of hand to such a degree that a would-be assault becomes an assault or murder. Society’s formal social control agents clearly take a hardline orientation toward the crimes of homicide and assault. Law enforcement hits the ground running when these crimes occur. In 2021, 65 percent of all known homicides and 60 percent of all aggravated assaults were cleared by arrest. No other form of violent or property crime enjoys a clearance rate that approaches this level. Statutory provisions allow for the serious charges to be levied against these arrested individuals. For example, The Model Penal Code assigns a felony status to all three grades of criminal homicides. Murder is treated as a first degree felony which means that, in more jurisdictions, it I punishable by a 1- to 20 year prison term. Where aggravating circumstances are present, someone convicted of murder may be sentenced to life in prison or even death. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The Mode Penal Code defines manslaughter to be a second degree felony. If convicted on this charge, the defendant can be sentenced to 1 to 10 years in prison. Finally, the Model Penal Code classifies negligent homicide as a third degree felony. A person convicted on this charge must contend with a 1- to 5-year prison sentence. The Model Penal Code classifies aggravated assaults (those committed with a deadly weapon or against a peace officer) as a felony in the second degree. Such an offense is punishable by 1 to 10 years of prison. Simple assault is assigned a graded offense designation. Most simple assaults receive a generic misdemeanor or a designation, punishable by a fine and/or jail term of less than 1 year. When evidence of mutual consent (id est, a fight) is present, the offense may be downgraded to a petty misdemeanor. This grade of offense is punishable by a fine and/or jail term of up to 6 months. Murder and assault cases receive close scrutiny from the court system. Nearly two thirds of all homicide defendants and one third of the assault defendants remain in jail while they await trial. The average bail amount for murder is $500,000. For involuntary manslaughter, the average amount is $50,000. The average bail amount for assault with a weapon is $100,000. And the average bail amount for assault without a weapon is $15,000. Researchers found that 70 percent of the homicide defendants and 60 percent of the assault defendants in their study were eventually convicted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Once convicted, the vast majority of homicide and assault defendants were subject to extreme sanctions. Over 90 percent of the murderers were sentenced to incarceration with a median prison sentence of 30 years. Only 10 percent of the murderer were sentenced to less than 10 years in prison and nearly 25 percent of all murder cases typically result in a life sentence. Nearly 75 percent of all assault defendants are sentenced to prison with the average sentence set at 69 months. Nationwide, there are approximately 2,500 murderers awaiting death sentences. This means that there was one individual on death row in the United States of America for every nine homicides that were committed in 2021. Surprisingly, informal reactions to homicide and assault offenders and offenses vary across different situations. The presence of third parties can alter the process of a homicide transaction in a number of ways. They can avoid involvement, negotiate further escalation, intervene in the dispute, or simply tolerate the violence as an impartial observer. Staged experiments show that citizens are wary to intervene in physical disputes that they witness This holds true even when the attackers is a man and the victim is a woman. Onlookers are particularly hesitant about intervening in disputes when they do not have social ties (id est, friendships, family ties, group affiliation) to the combatants. Conversely, when third parties know one or more of the combatants, these allegiances are more likely to inspire them to join the fight. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Unfortunately, this involvement usually serves to exacerbate, not defuse, the level of violence. The complex and unpredictable nature of third-party responses lead scholars to conclude that their presence rarely takes on a noticeable social control function. By definition, criminal homicide is a collective transaction. An offender, victim, and possibly an audience engage in an interchange which leaves the victim dead. Furthermore, these transactions are typically situated, for participants interact in a common physical territory. As with other situated transactions, it is expected that the participants develop particular roles, each shaped by the others and instrumental in some way to the fatal outcome. However, research, with a few exceptions, has failed critically to examine the situated transaction eventuating in murder. At most, studies have shown that many victims either directly precipitate their destruction, by throwing the first punch or firing the first shot, or contribute to the escalation of some conflict which concludes in their demise. However, how transactions of murder are organized and how they develop remain puzzles. What are the typical roles developed by the offender, victim, and possible bystanders? In what ways do these roles intersect to produce the fatal outcome? Are there certain regularities of interaction which characterize all transactions of murder, or do patterns of interaction vary among transactions in a haphazard fashion? These are important questions that we will soon cover. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

I have suggested that an individual can betray one’s encounter either by entering collusive byplays against it or by taking leave in a precipitous fashion. There is another possibility, however—one that is especially important for the kind of leave-taking that also terminates the engagement. Leave-taking, as already suggested, is a physical act well designed to express rejection of those taken leave of. In the case of two-person engagements, the person left is not only the person available as the target for this implication, but also finds oneself perforce unengaged—and this state, during some social occasions, may be a threat not only to the unengaged individual but to those managing the occasion as well. Perhaps the most familiar instance of this issue is found in the leave-taking considerateness associated with “getting stuck” at social parties. A girl at a party who is left without a dance or talk partner is left exposed as an undesired person (and, incidentally, exposes the party itself as an entity that cannot incorporate its members). Hence, there are often rules against a male dropping his partner, no matter how long he has been stuck with her, if this means she will be exposed to the gathering unengaged. In theory, in “society” the male must wait for the officially sanctioned means of release: delivery of the female to a desirable unit of participation, especially another male openly seeking her company. At public dances for the lower-middle and lower class, a male’s obligation to his current partner may extend only to walking her back to the female side of the hall; sauntering back with her, however, is more protective of the female than is walking with a rapid pace. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Even then, however, the social task of the person released may not be at an end: If you are talking to a lady with the ordinary indifference of a common acquaintance, and are only waiting till some one else comes up, for an opportunity to leave her, you should not move the instant another arrives, for that would look as if your previous tarrying had been compulsory; but you should remain a few moments and then turn away. In the face of this difficult obligation, the withdrawer may devise strategies to reduce the potential offensiveness of his withdrawal. Currently, at informal parties, a person locked in an encounter may seize on a desire for a fresh drink as a reason for tactful leave-taking. A more general tack is to rely on the tacit cooperation of the person who is being left; she must look for cues and hints and take them. While a guy must be willing to dance a little longer than he might want, or even until officially released by another male, the female herself ought to come to his rescue after a while: The beginning of wisdom is to accept the fact that one has danced long enough with one partner and that he might like to change. A woman who clings for hours, pathetic though she may be, will not soon dance with that partner again. Failing that perfect refuge, a table and a group of friends, she should suggest leaving the floor quite quickly, as soon as getting stuck seems likely. The classic phrase for this is, “It’s so hot—would you like a drink?” or, Let’s sit down for a bit.” Once away from the floor, she and her partner should join in a group of friends—better a group than a couple—unless a man comes up to speak to her, at which point her partner may slip away. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The tactful work of the leave-taker and the left is sometimes facilitated by the person responsible for order in the occasion; this officer may provide diplomatic means of effecting other persons’ tactful departures. Thus, the fact that a guest may use the punch bowl as a means of switching encounters can lead a wise hostess to arrange to have drinks and food out, but at a far table. However, of course, the hostess’s action may be even more direct: she may herself arrange to break into those conversational clusters in which she feels persons have been stuck. Some of the tete-a-tetes will break up by themselves, if the guests have sense and experience enough to move around and handle themselves. However, very often the intervention of the hostess will be themselves. In fact, unless a tete-a-tere seems to be particularly animated and gay the hostess is sure that both guests are enjoying themselves thoroughly, she should change the combinations from time to time. So, too, with partners who have been too long stuck with each other dancing. Here the hostess may ensure that there will be men present, often relatives of the house, who are willing to engage in “duty” dances and other emergency operations. The traditional role of the usher is a formalization of this function, giving to men whose sign of office is white boutonniere the right and obligation to keep partners “circulating.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

When it comes to personal achievement, attitude may be right and understanding may be right, but you still find that things happen in a certain way. Any ordinary things. It is very useful to try to remember instances where one tried to do something differently and to see how one always came back to the same thing even if one made a slight deviation—enormous forces driving one back to the old ways. “When you said that we cannot help the same things happening, did you mean until our being is changes?” I did not speak about work. I said it was necessary to understand that by ourselves we cannot “do.” When this is sufficiently understood, you can think what it is possible to do: what conditions, what knowledge and what help are needed. However, first it is necessary to realize that, in ordinary life, if you try to do something different, you will find that you cannot. When this is emotionally understood, only then is it possible to go further. “If we are machines, how can we change our being?” You cannot wait until you change. There is one very important principle in the work—you never have to work in accordance with your forces, but always beyond your forces. This is a permanent principle. In the work you always have to do more than you can. Only then can you change. If you do only what is possible, you will remain where you are. One has to do the impossible. You must not take the word “impossible” on a big scale, but even a little means much. You have to do more than you can, or you will never change. This is different from life—in life you only do what is possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

“I want to find the way to make a decision to work from which I cannot draw back.” This is one of our greatest illusions, that we can make decisions. It is necessary to be in order to make decisions because, as we are, one little “I” makes decisions and another “I” which does not know about it, is expected to carry them out. This is one of the first points we have to realize, that, as we are, we cannot make decisions even in small things—things just happen. However, when you understand this rightly, when you begin to look for the causes, and when you find these causes, then you will be able to work and perhaps you will be able to make decisions, but for a long time only in relation to work, not to anything else. The first thing you have to decide is to do your own work and to do it regularly, to remind yourself about it, not to let it slip away. We forget things too easily. We decide to make efforts—certain kinds of effort and certain kinds of observations—and then just ordinary things, ordinary octaves, interrupt it all and we quite forget. Again we remember and again we forget, and so on. It is necessary to keep certain realizations, certain things that you have already realized and understood, always with you. You must try not to forget them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The chief difficulty is what to do and how to make yourself do it. To make yourself think regularly, work regularly—this is the thing. Only then will you begin to see yourself, that is, to see what is more important and what is less important, where to put your attention and so on. Otherwise what happens? You decide to work, to do something, to change things—and then you remain just what you were. Try to think about your work, what you are trying to do, why you are trying to do it, what helps you to do it and what hinder you, both from outside and inside. It can also be useful to think about external events because they show you how much depends on the fact that people are asleep, that they are incapable of thinking rightly, incapable of understanding. When you have seen the outside, you can apply it to yourself. You will see the same confusion in yourself on all sorts of different subjects. It is difficult to think, difficult to see where to begin to think: once you realize this, you start to think in the right way. If you find your way to think rightly about one thing, that will immediately help you to think rightly about other things. The difficult is that people do not think rightly about anything. For instance, one should think not only about the consequences of committing a crime and the consequence of self-defense, but also look at the economic factors such as the cost of bail, time lost from work, and if your vehicle happens to be in the area because what will happen if you are not there to move it? Although the macho response to a threat may seem like the best course of action in the moment, walking away may be more rightly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

There is so much trouble in the World today that we really should limit the people we are around if they are constantly unhappy and upset or generally not in a good disposition. Movies and TV often depict violence, and most of the time the character gets out of trouble super quick because they have to in order to keep the show of the film flowing. People only see the glamourous side of violence, but the real consequences so they do not stop to really consider if acting out is a viable option. When individual character deviates from the social character, the social group tends to reinforce all those character elements that correspond to it, while the opposite elements become dormant. If, for instance, a sadistic person lives within a group where the majority are nonsadistic and where sadistic behavior is considered undesirable and unpleasant, the sadistic individual will not necessarily change one’s character, but one will not act upon it; one’s sadism will not disappear, but will “dry up,” as it were, for lack of being fed. Life in the kibbutzim and other intentional communities offers many examples of this, although there are also instances where the new atmosphere produces a real change of character. A person whose character is sadistic will be essentially harmless in an antisadistic society; one will be considered to be suffering from an illness. One will never be popular and will have little, if any, access to positions in which one can have social influence. If it is asked what makes the sadism of a person so intense, one must not think of only constitutional, biological, but of psychic atmosphere that is largely responsible not only for the generation of social sadism but also for the vicissitudes of individually generated, idiosyncratic sadism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

With any exercise of brinkmanship, there is always the danger of falling off the brink. While strategists look back at the Cuban missile crisis as a successful use of brinkmanship, our evaluation would be very different if the risk of a superpower war had turned into a reality. The survivors would have cursed Kennedy for recklessly and unnecessarily flaming a crisis into a conflagration. Yet in an exercise of brinkmanship, the risk of falling off the brink will sometimes turn into a reality. The riots in America in 2020 are a sad example. The people were on a collision course with law enforcement. One side would have to lose; either the hard-liners would cede power to more reform-minded leaders or the people would compromise on their demands. During the confrontation, there was a continual risk that the hardliners would overact and use force to squelch the democracy movement. When two sides are playing a game of brinkmanship and neither side is backing down, there is a chance that the situation will get out of control, with tragic consequences. In the aftermath of the democracy movement, government leaders became more aware of the dangers in brinkmanship—for both sides. Faced with similar democracy protests in East Germany and Czechoslovakia, the communist leaders decided to give in to popular demands. In Romania, the government tried to hold firm against a reform movement, using violent repression to maintain power. The violence escalated almost to the level of a civil war, and in the end President Nicolae Ceausescu was executed from crimes against the people. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

It helps to think of spying as a gigantic business. In fact, it is not inappropriate that U.S.A. Central Intelligence Agency is nicknamed The Company. As in any industry, there are a few giant firms and many smaller ones. In the global espionage industry, U.S.A. producers are dominant. These include, apart from the CIA, the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency and, above all, the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office, which together are responsible for most of the “techint” data collection. In addition there are specialized military intelligence units attached to various military commands. Less known are the small intelligence units, frequently staffed by CIA people on loan, in the State Department, the Energy Department, the Treasury, the Commerce Department, and sprinkled throughout the government. Together they for the U.S.A. “intelligence community.” The Soviets, on their side, rely on part of the KGB (the other part has domestic security functions) to collect foreign intelligence, and on the GRU, which specializes in military and technological espionage. The Soviets, too, possess a vast system of satellites, ground stations, giant radar, reconnaissance aircraft, and other means to monitor international communications and nuclear activities around the World. The British—famed for excellent analytic skills and for the number of Soviet moles who succeeded in worming their way into their intelligence agencies—depend on their Secret intelligence Service, known as M16, and their own NSA counterpart, called Government Communications, Headquarters, or GCHQ. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

The French CIA is the DGSE, also known as La Piscine or “the swimming pool,” and is supplemented by the GCR, or Groupement de Controles Radioelectrique. Frequently on the outs with other Wester services, it is rising in prestige, despite its Keystone Kops performance in the so-called Greenpeace incident, which led to the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior, a ship belonging to anti-nuke protestors. The highly rated Israeli Mossad, often called “The Institute,” and the West Germany Bundesnachrichtendienst are also important producers, as are the three main Japanese services. The first of these is the Naicho, or Cabinet Research Office, a small organization that reports directly to the Japanese Prime Minister. The private organizations and news media like Kyodo News service and Jiji Press; and from the Chosa Besshitsu, or “Chobetsu,” which handles electronic and aerial reconnaissance, focusing mainly on North Korea, China, and the U.S.S.R. (In 1986, eighty-four years after Giichi Tanaka’s firsthand look-see at the Trans-Siberian Railroad, the Soviets discovered an odd Japanese container on the railroad. Techint had supplanted Humint.) In short, virtually every nation has some semblance of an agency for the collection of foreign intelligence. Additionally, certain nongovernmental institutions, from giant oil companies to the Vatican, conduct extensive intelligence operations. In aggregate, these organizations form one of the World’s greatest “service” industries. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The chief danger of nanotechnology is not accidents, but abuse. The safety benefits of nanotechnology, when used with normal care, will free some of our attention to grapple with this far more difficult problem. Nanotechnologies have such great power that they could be used for evil or environmentally destructive purposes as easily as they could be used for good and environmentally nourishing purposes. This great danger will require a level of political control far beyond that which most nations know how to exercise. We have a prodigious social learning task that we must face. Thus far, we have focused on how increased abilities can serve constructive ends. Not surprisingly, the potential consequences—with the huge exception of social and economic disruption—are overwhelmingly positive. Inherently, clean, well-controlled, inexpensive, superior technologies, when applied with care, can yield far better results than inherently dirty, messy, costly, inferior technologies. This should come as no surprise, but it is only half the story. The other half is the application of those same superior technologies to destructive ends. Readers feeling that all this may be too good to be true can breathe a sigh of relief. This problem looks tough. Molecular manufacturing will lead to more powerful technologies, but our current, crude technology already has World-smashing potential. We have lived with that potential for decades now. In the coming years, we will need to strengthen institutions for maintaining peaceful security. Remember, Americans, be proud of who you are, display your superiority and buy American cars, produce, meat and other products to keep America the World’s Superpower. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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Spy-in-the-Sky

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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I Do Not Know What You Mean by Knowing Fate

In the cybernetic age, the individual becomes increasingly subject to manipulation. His work, his consumption, and his leisure are manipulated by advertising, by ideologies, by what Dr. Skinner calls “positive reinforcements.” The individual loses his active, responsible role in the social process; he becomes completely “adjusted” and learns that the behavior, act, thought, or feeling which does not fit into the general scheme puts him at a severe disadvantage; in fact he is what he is supposed to be. If he insists on being himself, he risks, in police states, his freedom or even his life; in some democracies, he risks not being promoted, or more rarely, he risks even his job, and perhaps most importantly, he risks feeling isolated, without communication with anybody. As we have discussed, criminal events take on a transactional (give-and-take) nature. It was argued that the “form” and “content” of these exchanges can vary across different types of crime. Homicide and assault transactions generally take on the form of a one-on-one, heated interaction between acquaintances. The vast majority of homicide incidents that were reported to the police in 2022 were known to involve a long assailant and a lone victim. Only 20 percent were known to involve more than two offenders and 6 percent involved multiple victims. Similarly, victimization report indicate that multiple offenders were present in only 25 percent of the assault cases occurring in 2022. Turning to the nature of relationship, about one half of all murder and/or assault victims are known to be related or acquainted with their attacker. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Moreover, roughly one in ten of these incidents are categorized as cases of intimate violence wherein the combatants are either intimates or are linked via a blood or marital relationship. An analysis of the circumstances surrounding murder reveal that nearly one third of all homicides begin as a simple argument, while less than one in give are committed in conjunction with another felony offense. Homicides and assaults occur disproportionately in loose social settings. Most often, violent exchanges take place at night and on weekends in locations where acquaintances are accustomed to interacting with one another. These types of familiar settings are governed by relaxed social norms that allow individuals to more freely express their emotion. For example, researchers discovered that 55 percent of all homicide cases occur in residences, while 9 percent occur in or near bars. Only 18 percent were found to occur in the more impersonal setting of a street or public park. Most violent predators commit their crimes in close proximity to their residence. The majority of homicide and assault transactions involve individuals of the same age, race, and gender groups. In 2020, the average homicide offender was 28.5 years of age and the average victim was 32.2 years of age. That same year, individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 committed murder at a rate of 28 per 100,000. This figure was more than five times larger than the homicide rate of the 35- to 49-yer-old age group and nearly twenty times higher than for persons over the age of 50. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

The same type of trend is observable in the victimization rates. Take for example the crime of assault. In 2020, the reported assault victimization rate for individuals between the ages of 12 and 24 years exceeded forty per 1,000 persons or households. This is almost double the rate in the overall population and more than twenty times the rate reported among persons over the age of 65. A similar trend can be observed with regard to the age of the offender. Most victims of assaultive behavior estimate that at least one of their attackers was under the age of 30—this was the case in 60 percent of the single offender assaults and 95 percent of the multiple offender assaults. Murder is no different. In fact, the CDC ranked homicide as the No. 2 cause of death among 18- to 25-year-olds. Only unintentional injuries accounted for more deaths among members of this age group. It is clear that murder and assault take on an intra-aged transactional form, meaning that offenders and victims come from similar age groups. In the case of assault, nearly three fourths of all victims between the ages of 12 and 20 estimate that their attacker comes from this same age group. Similar patterns are observed in the 30 and above age bracket. Race is another telling indicator in homicide and assault transactions. Assault rates among African Americans (28 per 1,000) were slightly higher than those among European American (22) and Hispanics (25). #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Race is another telling indicator in homicide and assault transactions. The assault rate among African Americans (27 per 1,000) were somewhat higher than those observed among European Americas (23) and Hispanics (25.6). This trend is further reflected in the arrest data—despite comprising only 12 percent of the overall population, African Americans typically account for 30 percent of the aggravated assault arrests each year. The picture becomes even more grim when we focus solely on murder. An African American person faces a one in forty-four chance of becoming a homicide victim at some point in his or her life. Think about that. If you are in a room with 44 African Americans, it is likely one will be a murder victim. That is compared to a one in 253 chance among European Americans. Makes you want to take stalking and death threats more seriously is one has such a high chance of becoming a murder victim, huh? African Americans represent 52 percent of the known homicide offenders and 48 percent of the known homicide victims. Homicide and assault take form as a markedly intraracial crime (occurring within the same racial group). For example, typically 86 percent of European American victims are killed by European American perpetrators and 94 percent of African Americans were killed by other African Americans. A close examination reveals that most interracial (across races) murder involve younger perpetrators victimizing strangers. Shifting to the crimes of assault, 80 percent of European American assault victims claim that their attackers were of the same race and 83 percent of the African American assault victims claim that they were attacked by a fellow African American. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

It appears that even offenders behave in an intraracial capacity—only one in ten assault victims who was attacked by more than one offender claims that the attackers were of mixed races. Homicide events traditionally involve male participants. For example, generally, 90 percent of the known homicide offenders and 80 percent of the homicide victims. In fact, men are 10 times more likely than females to be a murder offender and more than three times more likely to be a victim. Most homicide events take shape as intragendered (male on male or female on female) transactions, and nearly 70 percent of the known homicides involve all male participants. A slightly different portrait emerges for assault. Here again, males account for the majority of the offender and victim pools. In fact, 80 percent of the individuals who are arrested for aggravated assault, and 58 percent of the pool of the assault victims are men. The fact that men account for only a slight majority of the victim population but a considerably larger majority of the offender pool suggests that many of these assaults manifest themselves as male-on-female or intergendered transactions. In most cases, this male-on-female violence takes its form as intimate partner violence (id est, domestic violence or spousal abuse). A recent survey of representative samples of 8,000 men and women found that 23 percent of women versus 9 percent of the men had been the victim of domestic assault at least once in their lives. It is estimated that a total of 24,546, 840 women who are alive today will at some point be physically assaulted by an intimate partner—at a rate of 1,400,000 per year. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Murder and assault rates become particularly problematic when the age, gender, and race variables are included in the same equation. The overall reported U.S.A. homicide offending rate is 6.1 and the victimization rate is 5.5 per 100,000 population. For African American males between the ages of 18 and 24 those rates ballooned to 206 and 102, respectively. Conversely, the homicide offending and victimization rates among European American females 25 years or older is 1 and 2.3, respectively. African American males between the ages 18 and 24 make up 1.5 percent of the U.S.A. population but account for a staggering 30 percent of all known homicide offenders and 15 percent of all homicide victims. The process of the homicide and/or assault transaction is typically marked by brevity and intensity. Most murders and/or assaults last only a few seconds. In the case of murder, the short amount of time required of the act can be attributed to the fact that firearms are present in nearly two thirds of all homicide cases. This is well evidenced by the fact that 30 percent of aggravated assault victims claimed their attacker carried a gun, compared to 7 percent of the overall pool of assault victimizations. When asked why they carried guns, one fourth of violent felons claimed that the gun was originally intended as a scare tactic. Murders and assaults take on an undeniably interactive and escalating flavor. Most homicides are disputes and/or potential assaults that have gone terribly wrong. They are situations in which factors such as ego, reputation, and irreversible moments of misinterpretation regrettably come together to produce lethal consequences. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Spies have been busily at work at least since the Egyptian Book of the Dead termed espionage a soul-endangering sin. However, from the Pharaohs to the end of World War II the technologies available for espionage remained primitive, and early spies, like early scientists, were largely untrained amateurs. In the first years of the 20th century, Robert Baden-Powell, later the founder of the Boy Scouts movement, masqueraded as a dotty butterfly collector when he hiked through the Balkans, sketching fortification and hiding their outline in drawings of complicated butterfly wing. (Baden-Powell insisted that enthusiastic amateurs, who regarded spying as sport, would do the best work.) Another self-taught spy was the Japanese Captain Giichi Tanaka. After serving on the staff of the Japanese military attache in Moscow, learning to speak Russian and claiming adherence to the Russian Orthodox church, Tanaka took a leisurely two-month trip back to Tokyo so he could reconnoiter the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railroads, brining back with him intelligence used by Tokyo in planning for the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. Much spy literature today still focuses on the derring-do of intrepid individuals pursuing military secrets. The industrial revolution, however, transformed war. The conscripted mass army, the mechanization of transport, the machine gun, mass-produced tanks and airplanes, and the concept of total war were all product of the Second Wave or smokestack era. The potential for mass destruction grew, right along with the rise of mass production, reaching its final point of no return in the U.S.A.-Soviet nuclear stalemate. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

The industrialization of intelligence followed that of war. In the early 20th century, spying became more systematic and bureaucratic, with the Tsar’s fearsome Okhrana, forerunner of the KGB, leading the way. Espionage schools were set up. Spies began to be trained as professionals. However, a handful of even well-trained spies could no longer satisfy the growing market for intelligence. Thus, just as individual craft took a back seat to assembly-line production in the factory, attempts were made to mass-manufacture intelligence. By early in the 20th century, the Japanese were no longer relying exclusively on a handful of full-timers like Tanaka but on thousands of foot-soldiers spies, as it were—emigrants settled in China or Siberia, cooks, servants, and factory workers who reported on their host countries. Japanese intelligence, following the factory production model, used unskilled “espionage workers” to mass-produce information, then built a growing bureaucracy to process the “take.” After the 1917 revolution in Russia, Lenin promoted the idea of “rabcors” or “people’s journalists”—thousands of ordinary workers were encouraged to write to the newspaper denouncing supposedly antirevolutionary saboteurs and traitors. The idea of masses of amateur correspondents was applied to foreign intelligence, too, and by 1929 there were three thousand so-called “rabcors” in France, including workers in state arsenals and the defense industries who were told to write to the Communists press to expose their poor working conditions. These contributions, however, provided useful insights into war production, and the most revealing letters were not published, but sent on to Moscow. It was another attempt at mass collection of low-level intelligence by amateurs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

High-level espionage, however, was entrusted to carefully trained professionals. Richard Sorge, born in Baku and raised in Berlin, became one of the most brilliant soviet agents in history. Because of his German boyhood, Sorge was able to penetrate the Nazi Party and get himself sent to Japan posing as the enthusiastically pro-Hitler correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung—a cover that won him access to top German and Japanese officials and diplomats in Tokyo. The Soviets were terrified of a Japanese surprise attack on Siberia. Sorge correctly told them it would never happen, but that the Soviet Union would be attacked by Germany instead. In 1941, Sorge actually sent Moscow advance news of the coming Nazi invasion of the U.S.S.R., warning that 150 German divisions were concentrating in preparation. He even pinpointed the date—22 June 1941. However, his information was ignored by Stalin. Sorge was about to tip off Moscow about the coming Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—once again naming the exact date—when he was captured and later executed by the Japanese. Sorge was subsequently described by General Douglas MacArthur as “a devastating example of a brilliant success of espionage.” Sorge’s career surely underscored the continuing value of the courageous and resourceful individual spy and spymaster. However, World War II also saw remarkable breakthroughs in everything from coding and deciphering equipment to reconnaissance aircraft, radio, and radar—technologies that laid the basis for true mass production of intelligence, some of its high-level stuff indeed. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

If you are trying to extract some exclusive information from someone, your threat to kill him unless he reveals the secret will not be credible. He knows that when the time comes, you will realize that the secret dies with him, and will have no incentive to carry out the threat. Hollywood films provide two excellent illustrations of this problem, and how to deal with it. Schelling uses a scene from the film High Wind in Jamacia. “The pirate captain Chavez wants his captive to tell where the money is hidden, and puts his knife to the man’s throat to make him talk. After a moment or two, during which the man keeps his mouth shut, the mate laughs. ‘If you cut his throat he can’t tell you. He knows it. And he knows you know it.’ Chavez puts his knife away and tries something else.” Chavez might have kept the knife out and tried brinkmanship, if only he had seen The Maltese Falcon. There Spade (Humphrey Bogart) has hidden the valuable bird, and Gutman (Sydney Greenstreet) is trying to find out where it is. Spade smiled at the Levantine and answered him evenly: “You want the bird. I’ve got it…If you kill me how are you going to get the bird? If I know that you can’t afford to kill me till you have it, how are you going to scare me into giving it to you?” In response, Gutman explains how he intends to make his threat credible. “I see what you mean.” Gutman chuckled. “That is an attitude, sir, that calls for the most delicate judgment on both sides, because as you know, sir, men are likely to forget in the heat of action where their best interest lies and let their emotions carry them away.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Gutman concedes that he cannot threaten Spade with certain death. Instead, he can expose Spade to a risk, a probability that things might get out of control in the heat of the moment. The outcome is left to chance. It is not that Gutman would actually want to kill Spade, but accidents do occur. And death is irreversible. Gutman cannot commit to killing Spade for sure if Spade refused to talk. However, he can threaten to put Spade in a position in which Gutman cannot guarantee that he will be able to prevent Spade from getting killed. This ability to expose someone to a probability of punishment can be enough to make the threat effective if the punishment is bad enough. The greater the risk of Spade getting killed in this way, the more effective the threat. However, at the same time, the risk becomes less credible. Gutman’s brinkmanship will work if, and only if, there is an intermediate range of probabilities where the risk is large enough to compel Spade to reveal the bird’s location, and yet small enough to be acceptable to Gutman. Such a range exists only if Spade values his own life more than Gutman values the bird, in the sense that the probability of death will frighten Spade into talking is smaller than the risk of losing his information that gives Gutman pause. Brinkmanship is not just the creation of risk, but a careful control of the degree of that risk. Now we have a problem. Many of the mechanisms that generate risk also prevent a sufficiently accurate control of the degree of that risk. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

We saw how Kennedy could use internal politics and standard operating procedures to ensure that the situation would get somewhat outside his control, and therefore not affected by Kennedy’s temptation to back down. However, those very things make it difficult for him to ensure that the risk does not climb to a degree that is intolerable to the Untied States of America. Kennedy’s own estimate of the risk—between one out of three and even—is a wide range of risk, to the point where one worries if the risk is being controlled at all. We have no perfect or generally valid answer to this dilemma. Brinkmanship is often an effective device, but equally often it remains something of an adventure. Now, when it comes to nanotechnology, it is important that we know how to prepare for a big mistake. The so-called Star Trek scenario (named after an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation that featured runaway “nanites”) is perhaps the most commonly imagined problem. In this scenario, someone first invests considerable engineering effort in designing and building devices that are bacterial-sized, omnivorous, able to survive in a wide range of natural environment, able to build copies of themselves, and made with just a few built-in safeguards—perhaps a clock that shuts them off after a time, perhaps something else. Then, accidentally, the clock fails, or one of these dangerous replicators builds a copy with a defective clock, and away we go with an unprecedented ecological disaster. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

This would be an extraordinary accident indeed. Note well, though, that this accident scenario starts with someone building a highly capable device that is almost disastrously dangerous, but held in check by a few safeguards. This would be like wiring your house with dynamite and relying on a safety-catch to protect the trigger: a subsequent explosion could be called an accident, but the problem is not with the safety mechanism, it is with the dynamite installation. Do we need to build nanotechnological dynamite? It is worth considering just how little practical incentive there is for anything even resembling the dangerous replicator just as described. (Note that our topic here is accidents; deliberate acts of aggression are another matter.) When looking at open collusion, there are some illustrations we need to consider. A few attendants tease a patient in order to laugh at their bizarre reactions—such as a nip on the ear or a slap on the head to bring about a temper tantrum. This teasing sometimes becomes cruel, and does not seem to be restricted to trouble-makers among patients. This may be done to break the monotony, or may be due to psychological quirks in the few attendants who do it. Miss Kurt asked the attendant for a cigarette. The attendant replied, “say pretty please.” Miss Kurt, on saying pretty please, was answered, “now say, ‘hello, Miss Crandall’ twice,” pointing to the other attendant. Miss Kurt did not answer. The attendant held a cigarette aloft and said again, “If you say ‘hello Miss Crandall’ twice you will get his cigarette.” Miss Kurt did as requested. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Similar interactions can be cited from Central Hospital. For example, an attendant would occasionally take a “pet” patient and dance with him or her while winking broadly to the rest of the ward staff. The wink is a classic device for establishing byplay in our society, but at the same time an item in our involvement idiom that seems to be passing into disuse. The fun reached its climax at the point where the patient was released and the attendant turned back to participation with the rest of the now laughing staff. Similarly, a few patients would sometimes encircle a mute fellow patient who had taken the tack of obeying all commands. They would then address the mute patient, ordering one to do a series of increasingly self-profaning acts, until the circle was excited into laughter. The same sort of treatment is often accorded young children in our society: the child is teased or prodded into responding to a question focusing on the child as an unwitting source of amusement or pride for the adults. Some extreme forms of engagement disloyalty are managed without the butt necessarily becoming aware of what is being done to him. The very obligation to the individual in a two-person encounter to tactfully support his fellow-participant in maintaining the illusion that both desire to be engaged together can itself lead to disaffection which I carefully concealed from the other, but sometimes from him alone. Thus, when one participant fees it is beneath one in some way to be publicly joined to the other in a special relationship of any kind, the disgruntled participant may secretly tease the other participant before the assembled company or communicate in other ways to them that the encounter is not one that should be taken seriously. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

At Beijing, China dances I occasionally saw a young lady maintain the right of any man to dance by accepting a request from a someone from the southern region, or an international seaman, but once his arms convey by collusive gestures to the circle of people behind his back that the dance-engagement was a lark and that she was not to be judged by it. Cautionary tales in our own society tell of college or high school dances where a male, who may wish to be unburdened of the girl whom he finds himself dancing, holds up a twenty-dollar bill behind her back as they pass the stag-line, a mute but raucous bribe for someone to “cut in.” Of course, the possibility of this kind of sellout is one factor in social control, leading the individual to forego engagements in which his fellow-participants might not be loyal to him. “I do not understand why one should excuse oneself.” One does not want to give up the idea that one can “do,” so that even if one realizes that things just happen, one finds excuses, such as, “This is an accident but tomorrow it will be different.” That is why we cannot realize this idea. All our lives we see how things happen but we explain them as accidents, as exceptions to the rile that we can “do.” Either we forget, or do not see, or do not pay enough attention. We always think that at every moment we can begin to “do.” This is our ordinary way of thinking about it. If you see in your life a time when you tried to do something and failed, that will be an example, because you will find that you explained your failure as an accident, an exception. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

If things repeat themselves, again you think you will be able to “do,” and if you see this again, again you will explain your failure as just an accident. It is very useful to go though your life from this point of view. You intended one thing and something different happened. If you are really sincere, then you will see; but if not, you will persuade yourself that what happened was exactly what you wanted! You must start with some concrete idea. Try to find what really prevents you from being active in work. It is necessary to be active in work; once can get nothing by being passive. Now we forget the beginning, where and why we started, and most of the time we never even think about aim, but only about small details. No details are of any use without aim. Self-remembering is of no use without remembering the aims of the work and the original fundamental aim. If these ais are not remembered emotionally, years may pass and one will remain in the same state. It is not enough to educate the mind; it is necessary to educate the will. You must understand what our will is. From time to time we have will. Will is the resultant of desires. The moment we have a strong desire, there is will. In that moment we must study our will and see what can be done. We have no will but self-will and willfulness. If one understands that, one must be brave enough to give up one’s will, to pay attention to what was said. You must look for those moments and you must not miss them. I do not mean create them artificially, although in a house [organized according to work principles] special possibilities to give up one’s will are made, so that if you give up your will, later you may have your own will. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

However, even people who are not in the house, if they watch themselves and are careful, can catch themselves at such moments, and ask themselves what they are to do. Everybody must find what is one’s own situation. “How should we think about our inability to ‘do’ in relation to responsibilities?” You are given certain definite tasks, things to do. When you learn to remember yourself, even a little, you will find you are in a better position in relation to all other things. “Does the system put forward any thesis about will-power other than by using it as it grows, and by disuse it fades away?” The system explains that you have many “I”s and that each has its own will. If instead of being many, you become one, then you will have one will. Will, in normal 1, 2, and 3 men, is only the resultant of desires. Certain conflicting desires, or combinations of desires, make you act in a certain way. That is all. “Is the observing ‘I’ the embryo of Permanent ‘I’? Observing “I” is the embryo of Permanent “I,” but it has no real will. Its will is not opposed to self-will. What can be opposed to self-will? There are only two things opposed to one another: work and self-will. Self-will wants to talk, for instance, and there is a rule against talking. A struggle ensues, and the result is according to which of the two conquers. “The making of effort is what you call struggle, but suppose one is not aware of a struggle?” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

That means it happened. Things can happen to us in for ways—by accident, through cause and effect, by fate, and by will. Struggle must be by will, intention. And you must be aware of your intention. You cannot make effort and not be aware of it. Will would be if you wanted something, and decided and acted and achieved what you wanted. That is what is important. “I thought I heard is said that if a man studies groups of “I”s, he will understand how groups of “I”s help each other.” What is important in this case is will-action. At first we were told about three things only—will, fate, and accident. Then we came to the conclusion that there must be a fourth class corresponding to Karma. However, as this word had gained many wrong associations from theosophy, we used the words “case and effect,” meaning by them something that happens in this life and refers to oneself only, because from another point of view the whole World is based on cause and effect. “In those four categories, will is not often used, is it?” Will has to be used. We are never ready for work but we must work all the same. If we are ready, then we are given other work for which we are not ready. “Knowing one’s fate, how can one act along a line to avoid accident?” I do not know what you mean by “knowing fate.” It has nothing to do with avoiding accident. One avoids accidents (in our special sense) by creating causes and increasing effects. This is coming to will. It is not will but it is coming to it. Only a certain number of things can happen in an hour or a day, so if one creates more causes, there is less room for accidents to happen. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

We can take fate only in relation to our physical state, to health and so on. Fate has nothing to do with attainment. Cause and effect begins it. However, cause and effect is when the result depends on one’s own action, but unpremeditated action. In work, one must try to use will—as much as we have of it. If one has one inch of will and uses it, then one will have two inches, then three, and so on. “How can I learn to act differently in life so as to avoid the same limited and recurrent emotions which I now feel?” This is our aim; this is the aim of the whole work. This is why work is organized, why we have to study different theories, to remember different rules, and so on. What you speak of is the far aim. We have to work in the system first. By learning how to act in connection with the system and the organization, we learn how to act in life; but we cannot learn to act in life without first going through the system. “If we are all weakness and no strength, from what source do we draw such strength as is needed even to begin work on ourselves?” We must have certain strength. If we are only weakness, then we can do nothing. However, if we had no strength at all, we should not have become interested in that work. If we realize our situation, we already have a certain strength, and new knowledge increases this strength. So we have quite enough to begin. Later, more strength some from new knowledge and new efforts. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Let’s Make it Two Out of Three Before Armageddon

Destructiveness appears in two forms: spontaneous, and bound in the character structure. By the former, I refer to the outburst of dormant (not necessarily repressed) destructive impulses that are activated by extraordinary circumstances, in contrast to the permanent, although not always expressed, presence of destructive traits in the character. The most ample—and horrifying—documentation for seemingly spontaneous forms of destructiveness are on the record for civilized history. Disagreement seems to be a cornerstone of human interaction. In most cases, disputes are revolved calmly and civilly with little more than heated emotions and words being exchanged. However, this is not always the case. In some instances, there is a breakdown in verbal problem solving and a violent physical altercation occurs. Research shows that the outcome severity of these violent confrontations (id est, lethal versus nonlethal) can hinge on everything from luck to the level of emotion and force that are present in the situation. Most lethal altercations do not start out with death as an intended outcome. Instead, most murders manifest themselves as assaults gone awry wherein an unintended fatality results from an overly efficient weapon, an errant blow, or the blind rage of the moment. As such, it is best to think of the crimes as assault and murder as comprising a single conceptual category wherein varied degrees of negative consequences are possible (id est, injury versus death). #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

According to the Model Penal Code (American Law Institute, 1962, p.125), a person is guilty of a criminal homicide if he or she “purposely, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently causes the death of another human being.” Most jurisdictions distinguish between three grades of homicide: murder, manslaughter, and negligent homicide (although the label may vary). These gradations are shaped by the element of criminal intent, with murder referring to a purposeful or knowing material state, manslaughter referring to a condition of recklessness, and negligent homicide encompassing those acts committed under a state of unjustifiable risk or “negligence.” This three-pronged definition leaves room for noncriminal homicides, as in the case of a state-sanctioned killing (id est, capital punishment, wartime killing, or lethal force on the part of a law enforcement officer). The law also recognizes a private citizen’s right to use deadly force against another person where it can be shown that failure to do so would likely result in his or her own death (id est, self-defense). Involuntary intoxication and insanity are legal defenses that speak to a private citizen’s inability or lack of capacity to form criminal intent and thus, in extreme cases, have been used as criminal homicide defenses. Lawmakers have also long frowned upon nonlethal means of physical problem solving. As far back as the ninth century, judges are known to have sanctioned instances of battery (defined as unjustified offensive touching), and assault (defined as attempted or threatened offensive touching) among the populous. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Over time, these two legal categories grew together into what is today commonly referred to in criminal codes as criminal assault or assault and battery. In most jurisdictions, one is guilty of assault and battery (shortened hereafter to assault) is one purposely, knowingly, recklessly, or negligently engages or threatens to engage in an act of offensive touching against another person. Criminal statutes differentiate between simple and aggravated assault as a way of allowing the state to factor in the amount of harm that is caused by a given attack. The Model Penal Code (American Law Institute, 1962, p. 134) defines simple assault as any attempted threatened, or completed act whereby an individual knowingly, purposely, recklessly, or negligently cases bodily harm to another. This statutory provision is generally invoked in response to minor fights or fisticuffs. Conversely, the Model Penal Code states that the more serious criminal offenses of aggravated assault occurs when a perpetrator purposely, knowingly, or recklessly seems to “cause serious bodily injury” to another. Central to this more flagrant offense category is the presence of a deadly weapon or any violent behavior that demonstrates an “extreme indifference to the value of human life.” Practically speaking, a charge of aggravated assault is usually reserved for potentially lethal violent encounters or those requiring medical attention. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Each year, the federal government conducts the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). This study uses a complex sampling strategy to query tens of thousand of households about their victimization experiences over the past year. The survey asks about a wide variety of violent and property offenses and is used to generate victimization estimates (raw numbers and rates) for the entire U.S.A. population. Data from the 2021 NCVS suggest that nearly 4.9 million assaults (3.7 million simple assaults and 1.2 million aggravated assaults) took place in America that year. All total, those two offense categories constitute 20 percent of the 27.4 million total criminal victimizations and 82 percent of the violent victimizations (id est, robbery, rape, and assault) that occurred that year. This translates into victimization rate of 27.4 victimizations per 1,000 persons or households. About 46 percent of violent victimizations were reported to police in 2021, higher than 2020 (40 percent). No other form of violent crime registers a victimization rate this high and theft and burglary are the only other forms of major crime to post higher victimization rates. Put it a different way, data suggest that one in every fifty-five Americans was a victim of criminal assault. The FBI estimates that an aggravated assault occurred every 34.8 seconds. Although assaults tapered off from 1993 until present from 31.5 simple assaults per 1,000 persons/households, these same victimization reports are of little help when it comes time to assess the scope of the homicide problem—dead individuals cannot tell tales. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Our best source of homicide data is the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). The homicide rates generally increased through the 1960, and 1970s (reaching an all-time high of 11.6 per 100,000 persons in 1980), and homicide rates had decreased rather steadily over three decades to 5.5 per 100,000 in 2000, but we experienced a sharp uptick in 2020 to 7.8 per 100,000. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that U.S.A. residents face a one in 154 chance of being the victim of a homicide during their lifetime. There were 22,900 homicides in 2021. Thus, unlike assault, homicide is a relatively rare criminal event comprising 1 percent to 2 percent of the roughly 1.5 to 2 million violent crimes that are reported to the police annually. Homicide and assaults have long been largely urban phenomena with the highest rates reported in major metropolitan areas. For example, 80 percent of the homicides in 2021 took place in locales with a population exceeding 50,000 persons. America continues to lead in murder and assault rates. Our nation’s sizable murder and assault rates are due a few factors. High levels of economic and racial inequality, the proliferation of the illegal drug trade, and a culture of violence that is clearly manifest from a “code of the streets.” Social inequality can effect levels of homicide and assault. The strongest democracies and wealthiest countries have traditionally experienced the highest homicide rates. Moreover, factors such as poverty, chronic stress and frustration, and relative deprivation are contributing to the high homicide rates that are experienced in our inner-city, minority neighborhoods. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

The illegal drug market is contributing to our nation’s high rates of interpersonal violence. Drug deals and competition over drug markers add to a culture of lethality. Over 50 percent of the murders that occurred in New York City and Washington D.C., are directly linked to the cities’ illegal drug trade. Factors such as rising poverty rates and the proliferation of the drug markets (especially crack cocaine) have led to the emergence of a code of the streets in most urban areas. They observe that blocked opportunities and mounting frustrations have slowly lead to the emergence of alternative core beliefs and values. Many inner-city youth no longer view earning potential and educational attainment as viable sources of social capital. Instead, a steadfast willingness to engage in violence or a menacing public presence becomes the primary source of self-respect and cultural capital for these youth. Contrary to public perception and television portrayals, interpersonal violence—be it murder or assault—is generally not associated with high levels of skill and precision. Most homicide and assaults are spontaneous acts of rage. Most assault take shape as low skill, low tech confrontations. More often than not, offenders enlist their bare hands to inflict their injuries. In 2021, there was an absence of weaponry in 70 percent of all assaults—6.4 percent involved a firearm, and 5.6 percent a knife or sharp object, and 4.6 percent a blunt object. A decidedly different portrait emerges among those assaults during which serious bodily injury was incurred (id est, aggravated assaults). Here, victims reported that a weapon was present 94 percent of the time. Guns were the tools of trade in 27 percent of these cases, knives or sharp objects were present 24 percent of the time, and blunt objects in 19 percent of the cases. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Why is vengeance such a deep-seated and intense passion? I can only offer some speculations. Let us consider first the idea that vengeance is in some sense a magic act. By destroying the one who committed the atrocity one’s deed is magically undone. This is expressed by saying that “the criminal has paid his debt”; at least in theory one is now like someone who never committed a crime. Vengeance may be said to be  magic reparation; but even assuming that this is so, why is this desire for reparation so intense? Perhaps man is endowed with an elementary sense of justice; this may bebecause there is a deep-rooted sense of “existential equality”: we all are born from others, we were once powerless children, and we shall all die. Although man can often not defend himself against the harm others inflict upon him, in his wish for revenge he tries to wipe the sheet clean by denying, magically, that the damage was ever done. (It seems that envy has the same root. Cain could not stand the fact that he was rejected while his brother was accepted. The rejection was arbitrary, and it was not in his power to change it; this fundamental injustice aroused such envy that the score could only be evened out by killing Abel.) However, there must be more to the cause of vengeance. Man seems to take justice into his own hands when God or secular authorities fail. It is as if in his passion for vengeance he elevates himself to the role of God, and the angels of vengeance. The act of vengeance may be his greatest hour just because of this self-elevation. Cruelties like physical mutilation, castration, and torture violate the minimal demands of conscience common to all men. Is the passion for vengeance against those who commit such inhuman acts mobilized by this elementary conscience? #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

People are not always prepared to obey. Usually we have a bad will. We very seldom have good will. There are many things mixed here. One does not know how to think about will. With one side of you, your realize that you are machines, but at the same time you want to act according to your own opinion. In that moment you must be able to stop; not to do what you want. This does not apply to moments when you have no intention to do anything, but you must be able to stop if your desire goes against rules or principles, or against what you have been told. It is important to realize two things: that we cannot “do” and that we live under the law of accident. In most cases people think they can “do,” that they can get what they want and that it is only accidental that they do not. People think that accident is very rare and that most things are due to cause and effect. This is quite wrong. It is necessary to learn to think in the right way, then we shall see that everything happens and that we live under the law of accident. In relation to “doing,” it is difficult for us to realize, for example, that when people build a bridge that is not “doing”; it is only the result of all previous efforts. It is accidental. To understand this, you must think of the first bridge that Adam built and of all the evolution of bridges. At first it is accidental—a tree falls across a river, then man builds something like that, and so on. People are not “doing”; one thing comes from another. If you remember that you can do nothing, you will remember many other things. Generally there are three or four chief stumbling-blocs, and if you do not fall over one, you fall over another. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

“Doing” is one of them. In connection with this, there are some fundamental principles which you must never forget. For instance, that you must look at yourself and not at other people; that people can do nothing by themselves, but—if it is possible to chance—it is possible only with the help of the system, the organization, persona work and study of the system. You must find things like that and remember them. To remember these things, imagine yourself start to make plans to do something. It is only when you really try to do something differently from the way it happens that your realize that it is absolutely impossible to do differently. Half of the questions asked are about “doing”—how to change this, destroy that, avoid this and so on. However, enormous effort is necessary to change even one small thing. Until you try you can never realize it. You can change nothing except through the system. This is generally forgotten. Everything happens. People can do nothing. From the time we are born to the time we die things happen, happen, happen, and we think we are “doing.” This is our ordinary normal state in life, and even the smallest possibility to “do” something come sonly through the work, and first only in oneself, not externally. Even in oneself, “doing” very often begins by not doing. Before you can do something that you cannot do, you must not do many things which you did before. “Does one sometimes have a choice between two possible happenings?” Only in very small things, and even then if you notice that things are going in a certain way and decide to change them, you will find how awfully uncomfortable it is to change things. So you come back to the same things. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

“When one really begins to understand that one cannot “do,” one will need a great deal of courage. Will that come from getting rid of false personality?” One does not come to this understanding just like that. It comes after some time of work on oneself, so that when one comes to this realization one had many other realizations besides; chiefly that there are ways to change if one applies the right instrument at the right place and at the right time. One must have these instruments, and these again are only given by work. It is very important to come to this realization. Without it one will not do the right things; one will excuse oneself. Open collusion is, of course, a phenomenon observed frequently in mental wards. In the years 1776, the parish officers of Frindsbury applied to me for advice in the case of a maniacal patient confined in their workhouse. This unhappy object had been very desperate and had committed many acts of outrage and violence; was naturally of strong, muscular shape, and rendered much stronger by his present complaint. He had overpowered almost everyone before the could properly secure him, which was now effected in a very extraordinary manner. He was fastened to the floor by means of a staple and iron ring, which was tied to a pir of fetters about his legs, and he was hand-cuffed. The place of his confinement was a large lower room, occasionally made use of for a kitchen, and which opened into the street; there were wooden bars to the windows, through the spaces of which continual visitors were observing, pointing at, ridiculing, and irritating the poor maniac, who thus became a spectacle of public sport and amusement. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Just how does one go about generating a threat that involves a risk? In the past, we talked about mixing one’s moves, and suggested several random mechanisms that could be used when selecting one from the range of actions being mixed. We might try that same idea again. For example, suppose that during the Cuban missile crisis, one in six is the right risk of war for Kennedy to threaten. Then he might tell Khrushchev that unless the missiles were out of Cuba by Monday, he would roll a die, and if six came up he would order the U.S.A. missiles to be launched. Quite apart from the horror of this picture conjures up, it just will not work. If Khrushchev refuses to comply, and Kennedy rolls the die and six comes up, the actual decision is still in Kennedy’s hands. He still has the powerful urge to give Khrushchev just one more roll of the die (“let’s make it two out of three”) before Armageddon. Khrushchev knows this, and knows that Kennedy knows that, too. The credibility of the threat collapses just as surely as if the elaborate mechanism of rolling the die had never been mentioned. As essential insight is that when a sharp precipice is replaced by a slippery slope, even Kennedy does not know where safety lies. It is as if he is playing nuclear Russian roulette instead of rolling a die. One number leads to disaster but he does not know which one that is. If the number comes up, he cannot change his mind and roll again. With rational opponents, no one would ever cross the nuclear brink. However, it is possible to fall down a slippery slope by mistake. Brinkmanship deliberately hies the precipice by creating a situation that is slightly out of control. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The risk in brinkmanship is therefore fundamentally different from the element of chance in mixing your moves. If the best proportions of your tennis serve are 50:50 between forehand and backhand, and you toss a coin before a particular serve and it comes up heads, you have no reason to feel happy or sorry about the fact. You are indifferent as to your action on each occasion; it is only the unpredictability of individual occasions, and the right proportions of chance, that matter. With brinkmanship, you are willing to create the risk before the fact, but remain unwilling to carry out the threatened act if the occasion arises. To convince your rival that the threatened consequences will occur, you still need other devices. The most common is to take the actual action out of your control, It is not a matter of “If you defy me, then there is a risk that I will choose to do such and such.” Instead, it is “If you defy me, there is a risk that such and sch will happen, however much both of us may regret it then.” This the credibility of brinkmanship still needs a device of commitment; only that device contains within it a coin toss or a die that governs what happens. This conjures up the image of an automaton or computer that will act in response to the roll of a die—an unlikely scenario. However, many circumstances, a generalized fear that “things may get out of hand” serves the same purpose. Kennedy does not have to spell out exactly how a chance of Armageddon will be created. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Soldiers and military experts speak of the “fog of war”—a situation in which both sides act with disrupted lines of communication, individual acts of fear or courage, and a great deal of general uncertainty. There is too much going on to keep everything under control. This serves some of the purpose of creating risk. The Cuban missile crisis itself provided instances of this. For example, even the president found it very difficult to control the operations of the naval blockage from 500 miles out to 800 miles off the shore of Cuba in order to give Khrushchev more time. Yet evidence based on the order to give Khrushchev ore time. Yet evidence based on the first ship boarded, the Marcula (a Lebanese fighter under charter to the Soviets), indicates that the blockade was never moved. Nor did Defense Secretary McNamara succeed in persuading Chief of Naval Operations Anderson to modify the Navy’s standard operating procedure for a blockade. As recorded in Graham Allison’s book Essence of Decision, McNamara explained to Anderson: “By the conventional rules, blockade was an act of war and the first Soviet ship that refused to submit to boarding and search risked being sent to the bottom. However, this was a military action with a political objective. Khruschev must somehow be persuaded to pull back, rather than goaded into retaliation.” Allision continues with his portrait of the meeting: “Sensing that Anderson was not moved by this logic, McNamara returned to the lined of detailed questioning. Who would make the first interception? Were Russian-speaking officers on board? How would submarines be dealt with? #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

“What would he do if a Soviet captain refused to answer questions about his cargo? At that point the Navy man picked up the Manual of Naval Regulations and, waving it in McNamara’s face, shouted, ‘It’s all in there.’ To which McNamara replied, ‘I don’t give a damn what John Paul Jones would have done. I want to know what you are going to do now.’ The encounter ended on Anderson’s remark: ‘Now, Mr. Secretary, if you and your Deputy will go back to your offices, the Navy will run the blockade.’” The standard operating procedures for a naval blockade may have imposed a much greater risk than Kennedy desired. This is where it is important to realize that the crisis was not a two-person game; neither the United States of America nor the Soviet Union was one individual play. The fact that Kennedy’s decisions had to be carried out by parties with their own procedures (and sometimes their own agenda) provided a method for Kennedy to credibility commit to taking some of the control out of his hands. The ways in which a bureaucracy takes on a life of its own, the difficulty of stopping momentum, and the conflicting goals within an organization were some of the underlying ways in which Kennedy could threaten to start a process that he could not guarantee to stop. Speaking of threatening to start a process that one cannot guarantee to stop, President Vladimir Putin announced, on 21 February 2023, that he has suspended a landmark nuclear arms treaty with the United States of America because they are supporting Ukraine, while Russia is at war with them. Putin is threatening to resume nuclear tests. “The elites of the West do not hide their purpose. But they also cannot fail to realise that it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield,” he told his country’s political military elite. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

One of America’s funniest humorists, Art Buchwald, once imagined a meeting of spies in the Cade Mozart in East Berlin, including George Smiley, John le Carre’s famous fictional character. “Does anyone know who’d like to buy the plans for the Warsaw Pact defense of the northern corridor?” Buchwald has Smiley ask. “Forget it, Smiley,” comes the reply. “There’s no market for defense secret anyone. The Cold War is over and Moscow is giving away Warsaw Pact plans, not buying them. The Buchwald column was amusing, as usual. However, the loudest laugh must have come from the World’s real, as distinct from fictional spies. For among the boom businesses of the decades ahead, espionage will be one of the biggest. Spies are not only here to stay, we re about to see their entire industry revolutionized. As the entire society shifts toward a new system of wealth creation based on knowledge, informational functions of governments mushroom, and certain types of stolen knowledge, secret knowledge, are worth more, not less, to those who need them. In turn, this will challenge all conventional ideas about democracy and information. For even if we leave aside covert action and domestic surveillance, and focus instead on the “pure” work of the find a system emerging that goes beyond anything we have previously known as espionage. Just how far beyond become clear when we glance briefly backward. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

At times of conflict, it is especially important to have a health population. Did you know that medicine can be safer too? Drugs often have side effects that can do permanent damage or kill. Nanomedicine will offer alternatives to flooding the body with a possibly toxic chemical. Often, one wants to affect just one target: just the stomach, or perhaps the ulcer. An antibiotic or antiviral treatment should fight specific bacteria or viruses and not damage anything else. When medicine achieves the sophistication of immune machines and cell-surgery devices, this will become possible. However, what about medical accidents and side effects? Molecular manufacturing will make it possible superior sensors to tell medical researchers of the effects of a new treatment, thereby improving testing. Better sensors will also help in monitoring any negative effects of a treatment on an individual patient. With care, only a few cells would be damaged and only small concentrations of toxic by-products would be produced before this was noticed and the treatment corrected. The resources of nanotechnology-based medicine would then be available for dealing with the problem. With biostasis techniques available, even the worst medically induced illnesses could be put hold while a treatment was developed. In short, serious medical mistakes could be make far rarer, and most mistakes could be corrected. The conclusion that follows from these examples of oil spills, chemical plants, and the effects of medical treatments is straightforward. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Today, our comparative poverty and out comparative technological incompetence press us in the direction of building and using relatively dangerous and destructive devices, systems, and techniques. With greater wealth and technological competence, we will have the option of accomplishing what we do today (and more) with less risk and less environmental destruction: in short, being able to do more, and do it better. With better-controlled technologies, and with an ample measure of foresight and concern, we will even be able to do a better job of recovering from mistakes. It will not happen automatically, but with normal care we can arrange for our future accidents to be smaller and less frequent than those in our past. However, Nanotechnology also raises the specter of what have been termed “extraordinary accidents”: accidents involving runaway self-replicating machines. One can imagine building a device about the size of a bacterium but tougher and more nearly omnivorous. Such runaways might blow like pollen and reproduce like bacteria, eating any of a wide range of organic materials: an ecological disaster of unprecedented magnitude—indeed, one that could destroy the biosphere as we know it. This may be worth worrying about, but can this happen by accident? #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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They Out There in the Parking Lot Doing Something Unholy!

If one believes that satisfaction of all physiological needs is enough to provide for a feeling of well-being in an animal (and in man), their zoo existence should make them very content. However, this parasitic existence deprives them of stimuli that would permit an active expression of their physical and mental faculties; hence they often become bored, dull, and apathetic. This disposition can lead to deviance in man. When men are engaged in deviant behavior, they are often involved in criminal activity. There is much more to understanding criminal behavior than simply mapping out the pattered aspects of the behaviors in question. For starters, one must consider the thoughts and cognitions that underlie the behaviors. Appreciating how different criminals think is anything but exact science. After all, we are talking about trying to figuratively crawl inside the heads of criminals in an effort to tap their state of mind and decision-making process across whole categories of offenders. Nonetheless, there are important issues that must be considered. First, one must tackle the issue of criminal motivation. As mentioned, criminal definitions expressly indicate that the criteria must be satisfied before an act can be considered a crime. For the legal scholar, criminal motivation is a relatively simple concept referring narrowly to the individual’s state of mind (men reus) at the time of the crime. For the criminologist who seeks to better understand criminal behavior, criminal motivation is a broad and complex concept that speaks to the totality of the offender’s mental state, in that time period preceding the crime, during the actual commission of the crime, and in the post-offense aftermath. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Criminal motivation must thus be approached as a complex, situationally based phenomenon in need of careful consideration. Moreover, a full treatment of this concept must also take into account the ways that the expected victim and setting roles can shape the mindset of the offender. For example, the issue of criminal motivation, as it applies to the mindset of street thugs (id est, stick up artist). Criminal planning is yet another important part of the criminal thought process. Once the prospective criminal decides that it is beneficial to commit an offense, the individual must settle on what constitutes the most effective and efficient set of behavioral processes to achieve said act. Planning refers to the rational decision-making processes that map out target selection and the way in which the individual(s) intend to commit the crime. For instance, burglary crews often implement a system of planning that includes a clearly established division of labor, event simulations, and contingency plans. Whereas juvenile car thieves use limited amounts of pre-event planning with offenders engaging more haphazard target selection method and operate with little concern for police intervention. Having a clear conscience is a hallmark of the contemporary human psyche. We as Americans have developed a near instinctual desire or need to think of ourselves as good people. In effect, there appears to be no wrongful behavior that the human mind is unable to cognitively reconstitute as normal or acceptable. Normative neutralizations are part and parcel to the cognitive dimension of crime. When their behavior is called into question by themselves or others, criminals are compelled to generate a cognitive neutralization that excuses or justifies their actions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

In effect, when persons do wrong, they feel the need to convince themselves and others that it was not so bad. They make believe that victims of intimate partner violence deserved their abusive situation. Also, rapists often vilify their victims and downplay personal wrongdoing, and men and women of the evening come to think and talk about their careers and clients. All criminal events are social phenomena. As mentioned, they occur in a given social situation or what is termed a “situated criminal transaction.” The form of that transaction is often patterned for any given offense and may even appear to be scripted. While the habitual interactions of victims and audience members is worthy of notice, criminologists are also interested in the routinized behavior of the offender. We have come to realize that the patterning of offender attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors can be a by-product of the behavior and sentiments that exist in the larger criminal subculture. In a noncriminological context, we acknowledge that cultural-based learning is a force to be reckoned with. Few would question the influence that a place of employment, say a law firm, has on the attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of, say, a new attorney who seeks partner status. The same can be said of criminal subculture. A large part of a criminal’s normative and behavioral makeup can be fostered though interactions with fellow offenders. Significant relationships and scripted roles can be developed and these relationships often play a significant role in the way that the offenders think and behave. For example, there is often a complex web of roles and relationships that exist within the Sacramento sex-for-crack market. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

It is useful to conceive of a criminal subculture as having two central features: organizational alignment and socialization scripts. Organizational alignment refers to the networking or structuring of interactions that shape a given criminal subculture. Membership plays an importance in the roles and position in criminal outcomes. Criminals typically carry out their misdeeds within the context of one of the following organizational forms: loners, colleagues, peers, teams, and formal organizations. Loners work alone, relying on no one to assist them in their misdeeds. They manipulate and/or adapt the behavioral and cognitive aspects of their legitimate (noncriminal) Worlds as a means of developing and refining their criminal repertoire. When it comes to the term “therapeutic self-medicators” they are described as pharmacists who misappropriate their pharmacological expertise en route to developing their own private drug abuse patterns. These insolent professionals use drugs alone and slowly manipulate their legitimate training and professional roles until they have in effect taught themselves how to think and act as a drug addict. We term other drug-using pharmacists “recreational abusers.” These individuals often operate within a colleague-based organizational alignment. Colleagues offend alone but look to the misdeeds and rationalizations of other deviants to shape thoughts and behaviors associated with their illicit behavior. Those organizational alignment that fit into the peer category take on a slightly different social format. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Peers take on co-offenders and openly interaction with other perpetrators in a loose and transient social setting. For example, hard-core heroin addicts comingle and draw upon the collective experience of the junkie subculture to refine their drug-related skills and attitudes. Criminal subcultures can also take on an organizational alignment that is referred to as teams. A term structure is defined by its consistent and patterned interactions. Here, the offender comes to interact and offend with the same group of individuals. Consistent relationships are seen as mutually beneficial, s offenders gain proficiency from a patterned division of labor and loosely structure mentoring. For example, the loose social organization of marijuana grower in Kentucky blue grass country has a growth and distribution system that is held together by informal norms and behaviors. The mot advanced of criminal subcultures manifest itself as formal organizations. By operating in a membership-like format, these criminals serve fixed roles, with some sort of formal or informal mentoring system to recruit and retain the membership base. Organized crime “families” are the best example of this organizational form. An example of the organized crime family is demonstrated by the way in which Adolph Hitler used the Nazi regime to carry out the Holocaust. Organizational alignment represents the structural dimension of a criminal subculture as it describes the context in which criminal interactions occur. This structural, dimension gives way to a process-oriented aspect of criminal subcultures termed socialization scripts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

When it comes to socialization scripts, the actual content of subcultural messages and interactions is placed center stage as we seek to ascertain the process through which criminal learning occurs. There is evidence that the cultural message and cues within our nation’s universities can serve to shape the motives and behaviors of college men to engage in gang rape. We often find an illuminating way that the content and dynamics of the learning process comes to produce a socialization script that is somewhat unique to gang rapists. Criminal acts are, by definition, prohibited by law, and the laws of this democratic country are supposed to represent the collective conscious of the collective conscious of the populous. As such, in theory, that which is defined as a potential harm or offense to the state should be defined as a potential harm or offense to the average citizen. Reactions to criminal behaviors can take on one or two forms: formal or informal. Formal reactions to criminal events take the shape of institutional responses. In most cases, the institution in questions is the criminal justice system (id est, law enforcement, courts, and corrections). When a mother openly beats a child in public, law enforcement officials are quick to reference existing criminal statues and cite the mother with child abuse. This matter is then forwarded to the court system where the courtroom workgroup (id est, prosecutor, defense attorney, judge) sets out to determine if in fact a crime has been committed and, if so, what should be the appropriate punishment. Once a sentence has been handed down, members of the correctional system impose the prescribed punishment. To this end, a full understanding of crime begs consideration of the way that institutions such as law enforcement, the courts, and our correctional system respond to the various types of criminal offenses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Institutional (formal) contacts are not the only form of societal rection that can potentially shape the thoughts and behaviors of those involved in the criminal event. Informal reactions are also important. These are the perceived or real responses from audience members and/or valued relations that help shape criminal event. On a most fundamental level, audience members may intervene or choose not to intervene in a criminal event, thereby altering its existence. In fact, the mere existence of an audience changes the nature of the offense. For instance, the group dynamic plays an important role in the occurrence of gang rape on university campuses. Whereas the one-on-one dynamic of marital rape produces a significant different series of events. Informal reactions also serve as important precursors to a criminal event. Namely, the perceived responses of valued relations (id est, friends, family members, role models) can and do effect both the decision to commit a crime and the accounts and justifications that are constructed once the event has transpired. Scholars once again observe that these perceptions often become pattered for a given type of crime. This is even applied to audience roles in the murder event. There often times a subtle spirit of treachery in a system. Some crime families are suave and unctuously polite. As one man puts it: “If we wish to kill a man we approach him, we ear, drink, sleep, work and rest with him, it may be for several moons. We bide our time. We call him friend.” As a result, in the not infrequent cases of murder, suspicion falls on those who have tried to be friends with the victim. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

That is one reason some people do not trust others who start hovering around them, act as if they know them, or sit around watching one. When an individual is infrequently seen, and varies one’s times of outings, always seeing the same people in the vicinity is a sign to be cautious. It is not statistically probable that they all are on the same varied and infrequent schedule, so chances are these individuals are up to something unholy. Therefore, it is important to pay attention to engagement disloyalty. During an encounter of three or more participants, it is possible for a subset of participants to form a byplay, a noninclusive engagement that is carried on simultaneously with the first but in a way carefully calculated not to interfere with it too openly. These byplays may be carried on relatively openly when they appear to be in the interests of the business at hand—as when a speaker quietly asks some questions of the chairman before turning to speak—or relatively furtively when byplay is patently not in the interests of the dominant interaction. This kind of disaffection seems especially common in large engagements where the presence of manly loyal participants guarantees that the dominant engagement will be sustained. Disaffection is especially treacherous in clusters of three or four, where the participants remaining loyal may be in a numerical minority, subjected to pointed insult by the byplay of others. As might be expected, when an encounter must be sustained by persons unable to use their eyes to scan and monitor what is occurring, byplays employing physical acts become difficult to control and constitute a special threat to the integrity of the encounter. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

For instance, consternation was felt by visually impaired man in an engagement of three men and one woman, when he heard rustling and suppressed giggling that did not seem to arise from what was being stalked about by the full company at the time. In many instances, these subordinate byplays involve only members of the dominant encounter, and involve them in such a way as not to broadcast to the company at large—to the situation—that disloyalty is occurring. I do not propose to consider this phenomenon here, since it could just as well be considered solely in terms of the dynamics of the engagement itself. Relevant, however, as those byplays that draw some of their membership from persons officially excluded from the dominant engagement, for here disloyalty is made visible to bystanders, and the doings of the betrayed engagement are “opened up,” to at least some of the nonparticipants present. An extreme form of disloyalty is fond where an individual, in the process of being led into the role of the butt, is brought into an engagement maliciously, just so the instigator can be disloyal to the engagement that results. The perpetrator makes a pretense to the butt that he is treating him as a coparticipant, while at the same time openly using the interaction thus created as a source of amusement for oneself and others. The model here, perhaps, is the kind of baiting of animals that people engage in at a zoon, where one individual interacts with an animal until the animal responds, and then uses the animals response as a source of fun between himself and a second individual. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

People can spend their lives studying systems and system word and never come to real things. In fact, 90 percent of our ordinary knowledges does not really exist; it exists only in imagination. Realization of sleep is the only one thing. It is necessary to find ways to awaken, but before that you must realize that you are asleep. Compare sleep and waking. All ideas of the work begin with the idea of sleep and the possibility of waking. All other ideas—life ideas—may be clever or elaborate but they are all ideas of sleeping people produced for other sleeping people. Sleep is the result of many things: division of personalities, different “I”s, contradictions, identifications and so on. However, the first of all, just pure without any theory, is the realization of sleep. Currently, life is not long enough for changing our being if we work on it as we do at everything else in life. Something can be attained only if one uses a more perfected kind of method. The first condition is understanding. All the rest is proportionate to understanding. There must also be efforts in connection with emotions and will. One must be able to go against oneself to give up one’s will. First you must ask yourself: What is will? We have no will, so how are we to give up what we do not have? This mean, first, that you never agree that you have no will; you only agree in words. Secondly, we do not always have will but only at times. Will means a strong desire. If there is no strong desire, there is nothing to give up; there is no will. At another moment, we have a strong desire that it is against work, and if we stop, it means that we give up will. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

It is not at every moment that we can give up will but only at special moments. And what does it mean “against work”? It means against rules and principles of the work or against something you are personally told to do or not to do. There are certain general rules and principles of the work or against something you are personally told to do or not to do. There are certain general rules and principles, and there may be personal conditions for different people. “Should one ask for further personal directions?” Yes, but if one asks one must obey. One is not obliged to do anything if one does not ask, so before asking one must think twice. In common home accidents, a dangerous product is wrongly applied, spilled, or consumed. Homes today are full of corrosive and toxic materials, for cleaning drains, dissolving stains, poisoning insects, and so forth. All too often, children dink them and die. With advanced technology, none of these tasks will require such harsh, crude chemicals. Cleaning could be performed by selective nanomachines instead of corrosive chemicals; insects could be controlled be devices like ecosystem protectors that know the difference between a cockroach and a person or a ladybug. There will doubtless be room for deadly accidents, but with care and hard work, it should be possible to ensure that nanotechnologies for the home are safer than what they replace, saving many lives. It is, of course, possible to imagine safety nightmares: nanotechnology could be used to make products far more destructive than anything we have seen because it could be used to extend almost any ability further then we have seen. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Such products presumably will not be commonplace: even today, nerve gas would make a potent pesticide, but it is not sold for home use. Thinking realistically about hazards requires common sense. We have already seen how post-breakthrough technologies can eliminate oil spills by eliminating oil consumption. A similar story could be told of almost any class of industrial accident today. However, what about accidents—spills and the like—with the new technologies? Rather than trying to paint a picture of a future technology, of how it could fail and what the responses could be, it seems better to try a thought experiment. What could be done to deal with oil spills, if oil were still in use? This will show how nanotechnologies can be used to cope with accidents: If there were a spill and oil on the shore, advanced nanomechanisms could do an excellent job of separating oil from sand, removing oil from rocks, and cleaning crude oil from feathers on birds and the feathery legs of barnacles. Oil contamination is a pollution problem, and nanotechnology will be a great aid in cleaning up pollution. But why should the oil reach the shore? Economical production would make it easy to stockpile cleanup equipment near all the major shipping routes, along with fleets of helicopters to deliver it at the first distress call from a tanker. Oil cleanup equipment built with nanotechnology could surely do an excellent job of scooping oil from the water before it could reach the shore. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

But why should the oil leave the tanker? Economical production of strong materials could make seamless hulls of fibrous material far tougher than steel, with double, triple, or quadruple layers. Smart materials could even make punctures self-sealing. Hulls like this could be run into rocks at highway speeds without spilling oil. But why should anyone be shipping crude oil across the sea? Even if oil were still being pumped (despite inexpensive solar energy and solar-derived fuels), efficient molecule-processing systems could refine it into pure, fuels at the wellhead, and inexpensive tunneling machines could provide routes for deeply buried pipelines. Any one of these advances would shrink or eliminate today’s problem with oil spills, and all of them are feasible. This example suggests a general pattern. If nanotechnology can provide so many different ways to avoid or deal with an oil spill—one of the largest and most environmentally destructive accidents caused by today’s industry—it can probably do likewise for industrial accidents in general. The most direct approach is the most basic: the elimination of anything resembling today’s bulk industrial plants and processes. The shifts from messy frilling activities and huge tankers to small-scale distributed systems based on solar cells is characteristic of the style in which nanotechnology can be used. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The chemical industry today typically relies on plants full of large, pressurized tanks of chemicals. Not surprisingly, these occasionally spill, explode, or burn. With nanotechnology, chemical plants will be unnecessary because molecules can be transformed in smaller numbers, as needed and where needed, with no need for high temperatures, high pressures, or big tanks. This will not only avoid polluting by-products, but reduce the risk of accidents. Now, given that the United States of America wanted the Soviets to pull their missiles out of Cuba, during the Cuban missile crisis, why could Kennedy not have threatened that he would annihilate Moscow unless Khrushchev removed the missiles? This would be a compellent threat; it must specify the precise conditions of compliance (missiles back to Russia, or in crates on a ship in Havana harbor?) and a deadline for compliance. The problem is that in practice such a threat would not be believed, either by Khrushchev or by anyone else. The threatened action, surely leading to a global thermonuclear war, is simply too drastic to be credible. If the missiles were not out by the deadline, rather than annihilate the World, Kennedy would surely be tempted to extend the deadline by a day, and then another day. There are several ways of lending credibility to threats. The use of an automatic device seems the most promising in this context. (Reputation will not work, because after the threat is carried out there is no tomorrow. Contracts will not work, because everyone will face the overwhelming temptation to renegotiate. And so on.) #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

The use of an automatic device is an approach basis for the movies Failsafe and Dr. Strangelove. In Dr. Strangelove the Soviets have installed a “doomsday machine” that monitors American transgressions and automatically launches Soviet retaliation under circumstances specified in a tamperproof computer program. In Failsafe it is the Americans who have the doomsday machine. Those who have seen these movies (which we recommend highly) know why Kennedy should not use a similar device to make his threat credible. In theory, under ideal circumstances, everything works just as planned. The very knowledge that an automatic device is in place makes the threat credible. Khrushchev backs down, the threat does not have to be carried out, and all is well. If a threat is sure to succeed, it need never be carried out, and it does not matter how big or dire it is, or how much it would hurt you too to carry it out. However, in practice, you cannot be absolutely sure that it will work as planned. There are in fact two kinds of errors that can occur. First, the threat may not succeed. Suppose Kennedy has totally misjudged Khrushchev’s mindset. Then Khrushchev does not back down, and the doomsday device annihilates the World just as Kennedy is regretting having installed it. Second, the threat may be carried out even when it should not. Suppose the Soviets back down, but the news reaches the doomsday computer just too late. Because such errors are always possible, Kennedy does not want to rely on threats that are too costly to carry out. Knowing this, Khrushchev will not believe the threats, and they will not deter or compel him. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Kennedy may claim that an automatic launcher has the sole authority to fire at Moscow if the Soviet missiles are not out of Cuba by Monday, but Khrushchev can be sure that Kennedy controls and override button. Although the threat of certainty of war is not credible, one of a risk or probability of war can be credible. If Khrushchev fails to comply, there is a risk, but not a certainty, that the missiles will fly. The uncertainty scales down the threat. The scaling down makes the threat more tolerable to the United States of America, and therefore more credible to the Soviets. This is a lot like another device for credibility we mentioned in the past, namely moving in small steps. There we considered breaking up a large promise into a succession of small ones. If I am trying to sell you a valuable piece of information for a thousand dollars, I may not be willing to disclose it in return for your promise to pay, but may be willing to reveal installments one by one in return for corresponding payments. A similar principle applies to threats. And here the steps consist of degrees of risk. Each stage of escalation by the United States of America or the Soviet Union increases the risk of global war; each small concession reduces the risk. The calculation for each side is how far to proceed or retreat alone this route. If Kennedy is willing to go farther than Khrushchev, then Kennedy’s brinkmanship will succeed. Kennedy cannot credibly threaten an immediate all-out nuclear strike, but he can credibly raise the risks to some degree by taking some confrontational actions. For example, he may be willing to risk one chance is six of nuclear war to ensure the removal of the missiles. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Then Khrushchev can no longer conclude that Kennedy’s threat is vacuous; it is in Kennedy’s interest to expose himself to this risk if it will motivate the Soviets to remove the missiles. If Khrushchev finds this degree of risk intolerable, then the brinkmanship has accomplished its objective: to allow Kennedy to choose a more appropriately sized threat, one big enough to work and yet small enough to be believed. We still have to ask how Kennedy can go about threatening a risk of war, short of a certainty. Moving forward, in the spring of 1989, when Dr. James T. Hansen chief of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, prepared to testify before the U.S. Congress on the “greenhouse effect”—the overheating of the global climate—he submitted his text for clearance to the White House Office of Management and Budget (OBM). Hansen firmly believed that the time had come for the U.S.A. government to take significant action to prevent drought and other severe effects of climatic warming. When he got his text back, however, he discovered that the OBM had come for the U.S.A. government to take significant action to prevent drought and other sever effects of climatic warming. When he got his text back, however, he discovered that the OMB had added a paragraph throwing doubt on the scientific evidence about planetary warming, and considerably softening his position. He protested, lost the internal battle, and then made his personal views public through the press. Behind this collision between the administration and one of the government’s top scientists lay a little-noticed bureaucratic battle. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The U.S.A. Department and the Environmental Protection Agency both wanted the United States of America to take the international lead in combating the greenhouse problem. By contrast, the OMB and the Department of Energy backed a go-slow approach. When Hansen took his protest to the media, Senator Al Gore, one of the few technologically sophisticated members of the U.S.A. Congress, demanded that OBM “testify about the basis for their conclusions. I want to determine…the climatic models they have used.” This reference to “models” is a sure tip-off that the struggle would be waged at the meta-tactical level. For more and more government programs and policies are shaped by the assumptions and sub-assumptions buried inside complex computer models. Thus while Gore in the Senate was questioning the models relied on by the go-slow camp, Sununu in the White House was challenging the reliability of the models that provided ammunition for the other side. He was on top of the scientific literature and thought the computer models predicting significant warming were too primitive to form a reliable basis for action. Today, whether dealing with the economy, health costs, strategic arms, budget deficits, toxic waste, or tax policy, behind almost every major political issue we find teams of modelers and counter-modelers supplying the raw materials for this kind of political controversy. A systematic model can help us visualize complex phenomena. It consists of a list of variables, each of which is assigned a weight based on its presumed significance. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Computers make it possible to build models with much larger numbers of variables than the unaided intellect alone. They also help us to study what happens when the variables are given different weights or are interrelated in alternative ways. However, no matter how “hard” the final output may appear, all models are ultimately, and inescapably, based on “soft” assumptions. Moreover, decisions about how much importance to assign to any given variable, or its weighting, are frequently “soft,” intuitive or arbitrary. As a result, political in-fighters, skilled at meta-tactics, battle fiercely over weights, variables, and the way they are linked. Despite the political pressures that tilt and bias the outcome, the results of which conflicts normally come packaged in impressive, seemingly neutral and value-free computer printout. Models are used in developing and choosing policies, in evaluating program effectiveness, and in asking “what is…” questions. However, as we learn from Data Wars, a recent study of government modeling, they can also be used to “obscure an issue or two lend credence to a previously made policy position…to delay decision-making; to give symbolic rather than real attention to a decision; to confuse or obfuscate decision-making,” and so on. “Model use occurs as much for political and ideological need as for technical [substantive decision] need.” This, they note, is necessarily so because “computer models influence ‘who gets what.’” A study by the U.S.A. Congressional Research Service, for example, pointed out that government cuts in social programs during the 1980s, threw at least 557,000 Americans into poverty. The number provided ammunition to politicians who opposed such cuts. However, this figure was not based on counting the poor. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Instead, like an increasing number of other statistics, it was a result of politically contentious premises built into a model that attempted to show what might have happened had the budget cuts not taken place. Just how rarefied meta-tactics become as computer data spreads in government is illustrated by the controversy that broke out over missing people and what the Census Bureau technicians called “hot deck imputation.” In November 1988 the cities of New York, Huston, Chicago, and Los Angeles field a lawsuit against the U.S. Bureau of the Census to force a change in the way it counts. They were joined by civil rights groups, the Conference of Mayors, and other organizations. In any census, some groups are undercounted. Poor, transient, and homeless groups are harder to count. Undocumented aliens may not wish to be counted. Other escape the information net for other reasons. Whatever its reason, undercounting can have potent political consequences. Because Washington sends billions of tax dollars back to the cities and states, cities can be deprived of federal funds to which they might otherwise be entitled. Since seats in the House of Representatives are apportioned on the basis of population, states with large uncounted populations may be cheated of full representation. This, in turn, can cost them many other benefits. Inadequate information can thus shift power. To compensate for undercounting, the Census Bureau’s computers, on finding a house for which information is lacking, are now programmed to assume that the unaccounted-for people have characteristics similar to people who live nearby. The computers then fill in the missing data, as though it had been provided by the missing people. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

The result is that millions of persons, presumed to exist, are really a phantom population whose characteristics we are guessing at. Hot deck imputing may be a better way of compensating for the unknown than previously used statistical methods, but, as with all such techniques, its assumptions are open to challenge. On the strength of these assumptions—informed as they might be—voters in Indiana lost one member in Congress whose seat was reassigned to Florida instead. “Hot deck imputation” shifted political power. In sum, therefore, a new stage of political conflict is developing—a battle over the assumptions that lie behind still other assumptions, often embedded in complex computer software. It is a conflict over meta-questions. It reflects the rise of the super-symbolic economy. This new economy could not run for a second without human contact, imagination, intuition, care, compassion, psychological sensitivity, and other qualities we still identify with people rather than machines. However, it also requires ever more complex and abstract knowledge, based on vast avalanches of data and information—all of which is subject to increasingly refined political manipulation. What this look at info-tactics, and especially the new meta-tactics, teaches us is that laws set limits on governmental secrecy only touch the outermost skin of democracy’s knowledge problem. The new economy, by its very nature, requires a free exchange of ideas, innovative theories, and a questioning of authority. And yet…despite glasnost, despite “freedom of information” legislation, despite leaks, and the difficulty of today’s governments face in keeping things secret—despite all of these and more—the actual operations of those who hold power may well be growing more, not less, opaque. That is the “meta-secret” of power. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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I’m Going to Target

Love keeps the soul on the track of its fate and keeps consciousness at the edge of the abyss of the infinity that is the rage of the soul. However, as a result of the human condition, sometimes the soul becomes disjointed with its reality. This is why we need to understand how and why people commit different varieties of criminal behaviour, and use this tact to provide insights into what can be done to remedy the situation. That is why scholars adopt a crime typology or criminal behaviour system approach to crime. Typology scholars rely on logic-based conceptual frameworks to categorize and theorize about crime. In effect, he or she constructs ad defines a set of underlying dimensions that allows one to justify and substantiate a given typology of crime. Keep in mind that the differences or similarities on any or all of the theoretical dimensions need not be complete. Instead, it is tacitly implied that partial or conditional similarities or differences can exist across or with the framework of the typology. It is argued that this more focused approach to the study of criminal behaviour affords us a fuller understanding of the patterns and dynamics of criminal behaviour. It allows us to speak to the unique factors associated with a given category of crime. At the same time, we can identify similarities that exist between homicide and aggravated assault, rape, or even burglary. When speaking of criminal behaviour systems, it is useful to adopt the criminal events as the unit of analysis. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

The criminal event is the social context in which the crime occurs, with every criminal event being comprised of an offender, a victim (or target), and a setting. By way of example, the average date rape involves a male offender and a female victim, and takes place in a leisure setting such as the offender’s house. Too often, typology scholars focus exclusively on the offender (criminal) or offense (crime) and lose sight of the meaningful roles that the victim and/or contextual norms of a given setting play in the criminal outcome. Criminal events are best understood when viewed in light of four organizing principles or sensitizing concepts: behavioural aspects, cognitive aspects, cultural aspects and societal reactions. These sensitizing concepts specifically direct one’s attention toward common themes or criteria by which one can compare and contrast the offender, victim, and setting roles across different types of crime and thus serve as the underlying dimensions of the present seven-part classification scheme. In other words, these organizing principles stress the multifaceted aspects of the criminal event (id est, the offender, victim, situation, and legal distinctions) and allow for a more complete appreciation for the category or type of crime in question. Human beings have a knack for patterning and regimenting their behaviour over time. Crime is no different Much like the common behavioural components to swimming, there are common behavioural aspects to homicide. Swimming involves the act of propelling one’s self through water, whereas a homicide manifest itself as the unlawful killing of a human being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Likewise, there are different techniques, patterns, and skills that delineate the various swimming strokes (exempli gratia, breaststroke, backstroke). There are also different techniques, patterns, and skills associated with different subtypes of homicide (exempli, stranger homicide, intimate homicide, serial homicide). The concepts of crime and criminal behaviour have their humble beginnings in the legal definitions, or necessary conditions that are set forth by the criminal code. Most fundamentally, a crime is defined as an act committed or omitted in violation of a law or statue that expressly forbids or commands it and is accompanied by some form of state-sanctioned punishment. In order for the state to establish that said crime has occurred, it must be shown that the event in question satisfies the actus reus (guilty act) and the mens reus (guilty mind) aspects of a particular criminal statue. These two critical components detail the behavioural and mental states required for an event to be defined as criminal. For example, most jurisdictions define burglary as the unlawful entry of a structure (actus reus) with the intent to commit a felony or theft (mens reus). The behavioural aspects of a given type of crime also encompass the skills and techniques that are used by offenders. In the case of homicide, this means that one must speak to the manner in which the offender brings about the death of the victim (exempli gratia, strangulation, blunt-force trauma, gunshot wound). #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Many crime oblige or even require the offender to master the use of various mechanisms or tools that serve to assist in the commission of the offense. The “tools of the trade” for a murderer might include a wide variety of weapons (exempli gratia, guns, knives, toxins, bare hands). Burglar are often obliged to use deception or disguises, enlist the assistance of various power tools, or simply peer through windows en route to gaining entry into a targeted residence. Collectively, the patterned skills, techniques, and tools of the trade make up the “nuts and bolts” of how offenders effectively yet efficiently perpetrate their criminal acts. Recall all criminal events are comprised of an offender, a victim, and a setting. Criminal events do not occur when these three elements spontaneously combust. Instead, they occur in transactional manner whereby the offender, victim, and audience members negotiate the criminal outcome. Homicide event are “situated transactions” in which the pressure, volatility, and eventual lethal violence progresses through a series of interactional stages that are collectively negotiated by the offender, victim, and audience member. Criminal transaction often takes on a given “form.” For example, some transactions involve a lone offender and a lone victim in an isolated environment. Other criminal transactions involve multiple offenders, multiple victims, and interactive audience member. A full understanding of the patterned form of the criminal transaction is necessary if one is to comprehend the behavioural aspects of a given offense type. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

There also exists a patterned “process” to criminal transactions whereby stable actions and roles emerge among the offender, victim, and audience member. For example, there are patterned interactions that exist between burglars, illegitimate pawn shop operators (id est, fences), and the pawn shop customers. The behavioural aspects of criminal offending are patterned on yet another, more broadly defined level Namely, offenders tend to progress through what is called a criminal career. Criminal careers are measured in terms of recidivism rates (rates of re-offending) as well as career trajectories (offending routines that emerge as individuals enter into, persist through, and exit their criminal lifestyles). Criminals can specialize in a given type of crime or behave as generalists who engage in a wide variety of criminal behaviours. Both of these career variations, for example, show how female burglars tend to focus their offending in a select few offense categories, while their male counterparts tend to be less discriminatory and adopt more of a “jack of all trades” orientation. The severity of an offender’s wrongdoings may remain relatively stable or they may intensify. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Similarly, a criminal career can be short and erratic or it can be long and tightly routinized. The individuals may have frequent contact with the criminal justice system or might be able to allude suspicion and apprehension for extended periods of time. Past research suggests that there tends to be a patterned aspect of criminal career trajectory within a given criminal behaviour system. There are other types of behaviour that are important to focus on, that tend to be more conducive to society. Participation in an accessible engagement not only directly exposes the individual to linguistic and expressive communication with the other participants in the encounter but also opens up the possibility that they will expressively communicate something about one to bystanders. Seeking some degree of intimacy with potential fellow participants in the encounter, the individual can find oneself spurned or otherwise mistreated in a way that is visible to bystanders. Given these potential exposures, we find regulations to safeguard the individual. These constraints appear in two-person engagements as expressions of loyalty to the encounter. In both cases we deal with a participant’s obligation to stay within “his” engagement. One form of containment is found in the obligation of participants to withhold attention from matters occurring outside of the engagement. We can appreciate the operation of this norm by nothing the various context in which the norm is not adhered to. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Quite momentary and minor disaffection constantly occurs, as when an individual turns away from a moment to see who has entered the situation, or to find a suitable chair, expressing by one’s manner and by the arts of shielding involvement that somehow one’s spirit is still attached to the engagement. Where individuals do not have to worry about each other’s small slights because of a long-standing relation of familiarity and intimacy—as between some husbands and wives—one participant may hold the engagement together while the other scans the room in search of useful information. When a couple eats at what is for them a “good” restaurant, the member with one’s back to the assembled others may be annoyed to find one’s partner giving attention to the other tables instead of to the talk at hand. Such disloyalty can of course become excessive, by middle-class standards, suggesting a demoralization (or at least an altered understanding) regarding what is ordinarily owed one’s fellow participants. Hollywood restaurants provide good illustrations. There was a stir in Dave Chasen’s Restaurant in Beverly Hills when Dore Schary walked in. Chasen’s is run by the former stage comedian whose name it bears, and it is popular with people in the motion-picture industry…All the other patrons focused their attention of Schary. They seemed to be looking around at everybody except the people they were with and with whom they were managing to carry on conversations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Schary was not a bit self-concious…He was almost the only man in Chasen’s who was not at the moment looking around at someone other than the person he was talking to. More extreme forms of disloyalty are very commonly found among the mentally ill; it is often because of such delicts that persons are identified as mentally ill in the first place. For example, I observed a female psychotic, strongly attached to her mother and to her psychiatrist, who would, in the midst of a conversation, allow all of her steps. At the approach of either her mother or her therapist, the patient’s body would remain in the talk but her head and interest would turn elsewhere. After a few weeks, as she “recovered” from an “episode,” this interaction indelicacy gradually disappeared until it was possible for either of these figures to walk by without causing the patient visible perturbation. Although these figures no doubt still brained away some of her attention, she was able or willing to disguise the fact. The same patient, while “in” a psychotic break, would play ping-pong with one person while allowing her attention to rest openly on a nearby foursome of her age-mates playing bridge. Gradually, as weeks went by and she “came out” of the psychotic break, she increasingly paid deference to her ping-pong game by according it her cognitive and visual attention, and increasingly during play she exhibited civil inattention to neighbouring engagements. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

“Is there a place in the static triad where a group of ‘I’s unconnected with magnetic center is active and false personality passive?” Certain group of “I”s or personalities become active, and they are centered round magnetic center. First magnetic center itself, and then those “I”s that range themselves round magnetic center are opposed to false personality. Then, at a certain moment, magnetic center becomes active and false personality passive. Magnetic center is a combination of a certain group of interests. Magnetic center does not lead you, for leading would mean progress and you remain in one place. However, when things come, then with the help of magnetic center you will be able to see which is which or whether you are interested or not interested in a thing. You can make a choice. Before one comes into the work, magnetic center has reached a certain point which transforms it into a certain group of interests When one meets the work it becomes interested in school-work and then it disappears as magnetic center, because magnetic center is a weak thing. For instance, in the first triangle of the triad, it is composed of body, soul and essence (=), false personality (+), and “I”s (-). Now supposing that these “I” are already divided into certain groups, maybe not attached, but still not hostile to the magnetic center, which can exist and eventually develop into something better. The groups of “I”s which are always hostile and always harmful are false personality itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

Somebody asked whether the change from one form of the static triad to another depended on change being. Yes, every small change is a change of being although this expression is generally applied to bigger, more serious changes. When we speak about change of being we speak about change from men nos 1, 2, and 3 to man no. 4 for instance. This is change of being, but of course this big jump consists of many small jumps. The static triad represents you. It shows the state of your being, what you are at a given moment. One of the points, body and essence, is always the same, but the relation of the other two points changes. If body and essence are normal they are impartial and do not take one side or the other, but if there is something wrong in them they are on the side of false personality. When in a state of doubt remember to try and bring up other “I”s which have a certain valuation. This is the only way to conquer doubts. In order to develop you must have some capacity for valuation They only practical approach is to think of the different sides of yourself and to find the sides that can work and the sides that cannot. Some people have real values, some have false values and some have no values at all. It is the same with different “I”s; some value real things, some wrong things and some value nothing. People can spend their lives studying systems and system words and never come to real thing. Three-quarter or nine-tenths of our ordinary knowledge does not really exist; it exists only in imagination. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

In October 1962, the Cuban missile crisis brought the World to the brink of nuclear war. The Soviet Union, under its mercurial leader Nikita Khrushchev, had begun to install nuclear missiles on Cuba, 90 miles from the American mainland. On tographs of missile sites under construction. After a week of tense discussions within his administration, on October 22 President John F. Kennedy announced a navel quarantine of Cuba. Had the Soviet Union taken up the challenge, the crisis could have escalated to the point of all-out nuclear war between the superpowers. Kennedy himself estimated the probability of this as “between one out of three and even.” However, after a few anxious days of public posturing and secret negotiation, Khrushchev shied away from the confrontation. In return for a face-saving compromise involving eventual withdrawal of U.S.A. missiles in Turkey, he ordered the Soviet missiles in Cuba dismantled and shipped back. Khrushchev looked over the nuclear brink, did not like what he saw, and pulled back. The name “brinkmanship” seems apt for the strategy of taking your opponent to the brink of disaster, and compelling one to pull back. (Many people erroneously say “brinksmanship”—which sounds more like the art of robbing an armored truck.) Kennedy’s action in the Cuban missile crisis is generally accepted as an instance of successful exercise of brinkmanship. The rest of us also practice brinkmanship, but with less than global stakes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

A management team and trade union facing a devastating strike, stubborn spouses whose failure to compromise is leading toward divorce, and a divided Congress risking a government shutdown if it fails to ratify a budget are all engaged in brinkmanship. They are deliberately creating and manipulating the risk of a mutually bad outcome in order to induce the other party to compromise. Brinkmanship is a subtle strategy fraught with dangers, and if you want to practice it successfully, you must first understand it thoroughly. We aim to help your grasp the subtleties, using the Cuban missile crisis as a case study. Upon discovering that the Soviets had secretly places missiles in Cuba, the Kennedy administration contemplated a range of options: do nothing, take a complaint to the United Nations (in practice, almost the same thing as doing nothing); impose a quarantine or blockade (the course actually adopted); launch an air strike on the missile sites in Cuba; or—at the extreme end—make an immediate preemptive total nuclear strike on the Soviet Union. After the United States of America imposed a navel quarantine, the Soviets had many possible responses. They could back down and remove the missiles; stop their ships carrying missiles in mid-Atlantic (the course actually adopted); try to run the blockade either without or with navel support; or take the extreme step of launching a preemptive strike on the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

In this spectrum of moves and countermoves, some of the possible actions were clearly safe (such as the United States of America doing nothing or the Soviet removing the missiles) while others were clearly dangerous (such as launching an air strike on Cuba). However, in the large middle range, where does safety end and danger begin? In other words, just where was the brink in the Cuban missile crisis? Was there a borderline such that the World was safe to the one side of it, and doomed as soon as the line was crossed? The answer, of course, is that there was no such precise point, only a gradually increasing risk of uncontrollable future escalation. Had the Soviets tried to defy the blockage, for example, the United States of America was unlikely to launch its strategic missiles at once. However, events and tempers would have heated up another notch, and the risk of Armageddon would have increased perceptibly. The key to understanding brinkmanship I to realize that the brink is not a sharp precipice, but a slippery slope, getting gradually steeper. Kennedy took the World some way down this slope; Khrushchev did not risk going father, and then the two arranged a pullback to the safe ground above. This this was the effect of Kennedy’s actions, it is at least plausible that it was also his intention. Let us examine the strategy of brinkmanship in this light. The essence of brinkmanship is the deliberate creation of risk. This risk should be sufficiently intolerable to your opponent to induce him to eliminate the risk by following your wishes. This makes brinkmanship a strategic move. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Like any strategic move, it aims to influence the other’s actions by altering his expectations. In fact brinkmanship is a threat, but of a special kind. To use it successfully, you must understand it special features. Governments rely increasingly on computer-stored data bases. While Sununu’s withholding of access to data is an example of ordinary info-tactics at work, subtle tampering with the data base is an example of meta-tactics. Meta-tacticians attack the data base not by controlling access to it, but by determining what may or may not be included in it in the first place. The ten-year census questionnaire used in the United States of America must be approved by Congress. Says a senior Census official: “Congress puts various pressures on us. We do a sample survey on farm finance. We’ve been directed by Congress not to collect that data because it might have been used to cut federal support for farmers.” Companies in every industry also pressure the Census Bureau to ask, or to avoid asking, certain questions. For example, it has been asked to include a question about mobile homes in its housing survey to supply data needed by a company in that business. Since the number of questions that can be included in the questionnaire is always limited, lobbyists fight one another and apply fierce pressure on the Bureau. No matter how computerized and seemingly “objective,” data baes thus reflect the values and power relationships of society. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Controlling what goes on into today’s endlessly multiplying data base is, however, only the simplest of meta-tactics. Far more subtle are attempts to control the way data are broken into categories or classes. Well before the computer era, at a time when the U.S.A. government was concerned about overconcentration in the auto industry, General Motors employed a lobbyist who sat in a little-known body, the Federal Statistics Users Council. His job was to assure that figures for the industry were lumped together so they could never be publicly disaggregated—thus, the degree of economic concentration might be given in terms of how large a share of the industry was controlled by the “top three” companies, but never by the top company alone—General Motors. Today, advanced systems are used to index, classify, and categorize the data flowing into computer data bases. With the help of computers the same data can be “cut” or recategorized many different ways. Thus, intense political battles are waged over more and more obscure, abstract, seemingly technical questions. Many power struggles take place over the indicators used in data bases and the relative importance assigned to them. If you want to know how many angels can dance on the tip of a warhead, do you count their haloes or their harps? #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Hospital beds, which are easily counted, are sometimes presumed to be an indicator of the level of health services in a community. However, would the number of doctors per thousand residents be a better measure? Ans what do either of these reveal about the actual healthy of local residents? The number of beds may reflect government subsidy programs that reward or penalize hospitals based on bed-count, rather than on the provision of real services to the community. To get a true picture of the population’s health needs, should one count patients? Cures? Life expectancy? Infant mortality? The choice of an indictor or group of indicators will heavily affect the output. Meta-tacticians know the WYMIWYG Principle—What You Measure Is What You Get. Panels of experts, teams of government specialists, lobbyists, and others wrestle frequently with such questions. Whole some participants are not clever enough to ask deep-probing questions or to understand the hidden significance, others can and do. In so doing, they typically fight for their own commercial or departmental interest. While couched in highly technical jargon, the conflicts are often, in fact, strongly political. Most of this skirmishing takes place out of sight of the public, and well below the level of senior officials and Cabinet members, who rarely have the time or inclination to understand the hidden issues in any case. Lacking these and the training needed to cut through the barrage of facts and pseudo-facts themselves, decision-makers are forced to rely more on technical specialists. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

The monitoring of more variables, plus the enormous jump in data processing capacity made possible by computers changes the problem facing political decision-makers from information underload to information overload. This overload also means that interpretation becomes more important than simple collection. Data (of varying quality) are plentiful. Understanding is rare. However, shifting the emphasis to interpretation means more processing at higher levels in the mind-work hierarchy. This alters power relationships among the experts themselves. It also shifts the info-tacticians’ playing field to a much higher, meta-level. A perfect example has to do with the latest satellite observation systems used to monitor U.S.A.-Soviet arms control agreements. Recently launched satellites deliver such a deluge of data—from their locations in space they can detect objects as small as a few inches—that interpreter drown in the flood. In the past the problems have been mostly connected with sensing the data. Now, they are more in filtering and interpreting it. The sheer volume threatens to overwhelm even armies of analysts, leading to pressures to automate the interpretation function. This, in turn, encourages a reliance on artificial intelligence and other “knowledge engineering” tools. However, their use raises the level of abstraction still further, and buries the critical assumptions of the system under still heavier layers of inference. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

In business, corporations are looking to embed the inferencing capabilities of expert systems into their existing computer systems. Some 2,200 such expert systems are already opening in North America, doing everything from diagnosing factory tools that malfunction to analyzing chemical spills and evaluating applications for life insurance. Expert systems are spreading in government, too, where they have even been used by the FBI to help investigate serial murders. What this implies is a dependence on complex rules elicited from experts of various kinds, weighted, systematized, and installed in computers to support the making of decisions. We can expect the spread of similar technologies throughout government—including the political life itself, where decisions often have to be take on the basis of a mass complex, imprecise, cross-related, ambiguous facts, ideas, images, and proposals, and just plain deceits intended to produce power shifts. What these tools mean, however, is that the logic driving decisions is further “embedded” and, so to speak, invisibilized. Paradoxically, the very system that delivers clarifying information itself becomes more opaque to most of its end-users. This is no reason to avoid artificial intelligence and expert systems. However, it points to a deep process with important ramifications for democracy. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Politics were no purer in some earlier Golden Age. From China’s Lord Shang to the Borgias of Italy, those in power have always manipulated the truth to serve their needs. What is changing dramatically today is the level at which these mind-games are played. The World will face staggering new problems in the decades ahead—dangers of global ecological catastrophe, the breakup of longstanding military balances, economic upheavals, technological revolutions. Every one of these requires intelligent political action based on a clear apprehension of the threats and potentials. However, how accurate are the images of reality on which governments base their survival decisions? How accurate can they be when all the date and information on which they are based are vulnerable to repeated and invisible “meta-massage”? As countries have grown richer, their people have lived longer despite pollution and automobile accidents. Greater wealth means safer roads, safer cars, safer homes, and safer workplaces. Throughout history, new technologies have brought new risks, including risks of death, injury, and harm to the environment, but prudent people have only accepted new technologies when they are offered an improved mix of risks and benefits. Despite occasional dramatic mistakes, the historical record says that people have succeeded in choosing technologies that reduce their personal risks. This must be so, or we would not be living longer. Molecular manufacturing and its products should continue this trend, not as an automatic consequence, but as a result of continued, vigilance, of people exercising care in picking and choosing which technologies they allow into their daily lives. Nanotechnology will give better control of production and products, and better control usually means greater safety. Nanotechnology will increase wealth, and safety is a form of wealth that people value. Public debate, product testing, and safety regulations are standard parts of this process. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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Computer Output is Still Regarded as Gospel

Criminal behaviour is a topic that captures the attention of the average American. There is simply something about the darker side of human behaviour that peaks our interest. Consider the familiarity of the following scenarios. While involved in a manic run of high-speed channel surfing, an image of Charles Manson or Osama bin Laden suddenly flashes across the television screen. The image is gone as fast as it arrived and your eyes adjust to the next channel. Almost instinctively, you find yourself flipping back to the previous channel and you proceed to fixate upon what is being said about these individuals some people perceive as monsters of modern time. You are sitting alone in public place. Suddenly, you hear a nearby voice telling a friend how he broke the law the past weekend but presumes that he was lucky enough to evade suspicion…perhaps the person is describing how he filed a false tax return or got into fisticuffs at the local pub the night before. Your ears quickly perk up as you anxiously eavesdrop on the crime-related confessional. These anecdotes speak to the armchair criminologist that seems to exist in all of us. When we see or hear about criminal behaviour, we want to know more. When the topic comes up in conversation, we are always willing to add our proverbial two cents. Americans clearly have a healthy appetite for crime. Day in and day out, television viewers have a long list of reality-based/ crime drama network television shows (exempli gratia, SWAT, Chicago P.D., Criminal Minds, Blue Bloods, FBI, FBI International, FBI Most Wanted, CSI, X-Files, Law and Order, Law and Order SVU, Law and Order Organized Crime), or cable station documentaries (exempli gratia, Court TV, The Discovery Channel, A&E) from which to choose, as network executives scramble to quench our thirst for crime-related subject matter. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

What is more, it is rare to find a front page of a newspaper or popular magazine that does not flaunt a crime-related story prominently in the headlines. Even mainstream lifestyle magazines, such as women’s Cosmopolitan and Glamour or their male equivalents, GQ and Maxim, now include regular features on “true crime.” Having established that crime sells, the obvious question becomes, Why? The answer is simple—we are feverishly attracted to that which we do not fully understand. Like a puppy chasing its tail, we spin around and around searching for ever-elusive answers. The average citizen is not alone in this ongoing quest for enlightenment. Year in and year out, legions of scholars, criminal justice practitioners, and politicians spend billions of dollars, kill millions of trees, and exhaust countless hours trying to understand, explain, and prevent the exorbitant amount of criminal behaviour that exists in today’s society. Just think about how much written and spoken commentary has ever been directed toward understanding the behaviour and mindset of modern terrorists such as Timothy McVeigh or Osama bin Laden! Efforts to describe and explain crime and criminality overload shelves with books, journals, and reports that details various theoretical and policy initiatives. What is the net gain of this sustained investigation? Or, have we made any substantial progress toward solving this problem? The harsh reality is that we as “learned professionals” have not made nearly as much progress as we would like; and we certainly have not made anywhere near as much progress as the general public expects. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Part of the problem with the criminological enterprise is that it is difficult to come to grips with the parameters of our substantive discussion and approach. First, one must address two fundamental questions: (1) What is the subject matter that we should be studying? (2) What is the best way to study it? Surely, coming up with an acceptable definition of crime should be enough. After all, crime is a routine topic in our daily conversations, it is a mainstay in media reports, and serve as a popular topic for books. However, upon closer examination, we see that “crime” is a relatively slippery concept. By crime do we mean all those acts or omissions of act that are defined by criminal law? Many sociologists consider this sort of legally bound definition of crime to be overly constraining. The “collective conscience” of society can be far more offended by non-criminal acts of deviance (id est, social norm transgressions) than it is by some violations of the law. For example, although it may not be illegal to shout racial lurs in public, there tends to be a much more resounding public outcry against this form of behaviour than there is when a minor law violation such as speeding or littering takes place. Many scholars acknowledge this point, but opt instead to pursue the path of least resistance—they contend that the subject matter in question should include only violations of the criminal law. This definitional parameter is convenient because it immediately limits the discussion to a much more identifiable and manageable set of behaviours. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

More importantly, violations of the criminal law (id est, criminal act) are subject to formal, state-imposed sanctions, while violations of customs or norms (id est, deviant acts) are subject to informal, peer-imposed reprimands. This difference in the nature and process of social control efforts has long been seen as a critical issue that separates crime from deviance. The laws of the land are passed by a legislative body and recorded for dexterity purposes in a document knows as the criminal code. This is the document that police officers and prosecutors use to guide their daily activities. One must recognize, however, that a definition of “crime” that is based solely on existing criminal codes will still produce an exceedingly long list of offense. At the most basic level, one must content with the fact that there exists no single, definitive criminal code. Instead, each jurisdiction, ranging from the federal to the state to the thousands of local jurisdictions, has in place a slightly different criminal code that it calls its own. As such, an effort to compile an exhaustive list of every law violation that is currently “on the books” would result in a truly massive, unmanageable, and often conflicting list of criminal statutes. So let us assume that you could settle on a single criminal code, one from the federal, state, or local jurisdiction of your choice. Such a code would include high-profile offenses such as murder, rape, robbery, and theft. However, the complete list would be far more expansive, including thousands of law violations—everything from jaywalking to murder. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In addition, criminal codes routinely contain a host of obscure, outdated, and rarely enforced statutes. Seuling (1975) provides a long list of the more ridiculous examples, including: In Kansas City, Missouri, it is illegal for children to buy cap pistols, but not shotguns. Killing an animal with “malicious intent” can result in first-degree murder charges in Oklahoma. It is illegal to have a bathtub in your house in Virginia. Few people are willing to afford equal weight to all of the behaviours detailed in a given criminal code. Instead, one is inclined to set aside the “petty” and “outdated” offenses and focus the discussion on the more “serious” categories of crime. Most scholars follow suit Some turn to the Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) for direction. The UCR is an annual effort to document the number of reported and cleared (id est, a perpetrator has been identified) cases (and arrests) of murder, sexual assault, aggravated assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, auto theft, and arson that are encountered by the various law enforcement agencies across the United States of America. These eight offense types are called Part I offenses. The FBI asks all law enforcement agencies to provide  host of offense and offender data tht are then used to generate descriptive crime statistics (exempli gratia, demographic profiles and crime rates). #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

The difficulty of keeping in touch with the social occasion while at the same time becoming spontaneously involved in situated engagements is often reduced by the arts of concealment. Apparently one of the most significant involvement shields is that afforded by a conversational circle itself. In fact, there seem to be few conversational clusters in which control of facial and bodily expression is not employed to conceal either a deadness to the content of the encounter or an improper drift from the spirit of the occasion. A conversation occurring within a situation, then, is likely to present something of a collusion against the gathering at large; Mrs. Toplofty’s multiplication tables, previously cited, are merely an extreme instance. And yet, of course, the very possibility that conversational content can be shieled from the gathering as a whole removes some of the threat that such smaller circles might have for the larger inclusive one if the drift or deadness were open and visible. We can thus appreciate why some “informal” sociable gatherings are deemed “successful” when each cluster carries away its participants to the point where they can barely conceal their departure. The possibility of sustaining a concealed activity within conversations can become somewhat recognized and institutionalized, so that two different phases of a social occasion can simultaneously occur in the same place among the same participants, one phase being restricted to unfocused interaction and the other to matters that can be parceled out to conversations and concealed in them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

One phrase is likely, then, to be defined as dominant and the other subordinate. For example, in Lincoln, California it was obligatory for male neighbours and male extended kin to attend funerals dressed quite decorously in black, even to the point sometimes of wearing a black cap reserved only for such occasions. It was also obligatory for these male mourners to stand quietly and sedately outside of the cottage in which the deceased was laid out. However, while thus standing, it was quite permissible to carry on entertaining conversational chats with one’s fellow-mourners. To be sure, the sound level of these talks and the features of the talkers were respectfully modulated to fit funeral requirements, but the content of the talk went in another direction. In some cases it was even understood to be in bad taste to turn the topic from the ordinary pleasantries of neighbourly talk to the deceased; attendance and funeral garb were what one owed the other present. The involvement shield provided by a conversation is somewhat portable, because the participants can together move about a room and take their talk with them. Perhaps the most important recently developed portable shield for encounters is the automobile. The protection provided by the back seat has already made social history, and use of the front seat in drive-in movies has become a kind of inadvertent outdoor shrine for paying homage to our society’s use of shielding arrangements. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Mutual-involvement has been treated simply as one variety of situated involvement; the rules regulating situated involvements apply, in fact, with extra force. There are differences, however, between mutual-involvements and other kinds. For one thing, mutual-involvements improperly maintained by the individual necessarily involve others directly; further, of all objects of involvement, other individuals seem to be the most enticing and hence, in turn, the most in need of social control. However, further issues are also to be found. An unengaged individual may easily exhibit the kind of involvement which gives others the impression that one is indeed in a pathological state; the same consequence, however, is rarely possible for persons improperly involved together. Except for the very marginal phenomenon of folie a deux (or a trois, a quatre, etcetera), it seems to be assumed that as long as two individuals are in communication with each other—as long as they are joined in an encounter—whatever they are doing is not occult, however esoteric and opaque it may appear to be. This helps to explain why a person who is “with” another tends to feel free to engage in all kinds of antics, since one can assume one’s contact with the other will guarantee one’s sanity to bystanders. A parallel phenomenon has been observed in connection with the frame of reference by which criminality is imputed (as opposed to mental illness). Apparently there are depredations which can be interpreted as a game when committed by a group of youths, but which are viewed as crime when committed by a solitary offender. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Let us speak about the relation of false personality to other parts of man. In every man at every moment, his development proceeds by what may be called a static triad. This triad is called aa static triad because body, soul, and essence always stay in the same place and act as the neutralizing force, while the other force change only very slowly. So the whole triad is more or less in the same place all the time. There is Body, Soul, Essence at the top of the triangle, the “I” and the left, and False personality at the right. The first triangle forms the state of man in ordinary life; the second forms his state when he begins to develop. There are long period between the state of the first and the state of the second triangle, and still longer between them and the third triangle. Actually, there are many intermediate stages but these three are sufficient to form the way of development in relation to false personality. It is necessary to remember that none of these states is permanent. Any state may last for about half an hour and then another state may come, then again a different state. The triad is made by the body, the soul and the essence at the apex. At the second point if “I”; that is, the many “I”s which are the person, that is to say, all feelings and sensations which do not form a part of false personality. The third point of the triangle is held by false personality (id est, the imaginary picture of self). In an ordinary man false personality calls itself “I”, but after some time, if a man is capable of development, magnetic center begins to grow in one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

One may call it “special interests,” “ideals,” “ideas,” or something like that. However, when one begins to feel this magnetic center in one, one finds a separate part of oneself, and from this part of one’s growth begins. This growth can take pace only at the expense of false personality because false personality cannot appear at the same time as magnetic center. If magnetic center is formed in a man one may meet a school, and when one begins to work one must work against false personality. This does not mean that false personality disappears; it only means that it is not always present. In the beginning it is nearly always present but when magnetic center begins to grow it disappears, sometimes for half an hour, sometimes even for a day. Then it comes back and stays for a week! So all our work must be directed against false personality. When false personality disappears for a short time, “I” becomes stronger, only it is not really “I,” it is many “I”s. The longer the periods for which false personality disappears, the stronger the “I” composed of many “I”s becomes. Magnetic center may be transformed into deputy steward, and when deputy steward acquires control of false personality it really transfers all the unnecessary things to the side of false personality, and only the necessary things remain on the side of “I.” Then, at a still further stage, it may be that permanent “I” which will come on the “I” side with all that belongs to it. Permanent “I” has quite different functions, quite a different point of view from anything we are accustomed to. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The static triad shows that either personal work or degeneration is going on in relation to different manifestations of false personality, but that body, soul, and essence remain the same all the time. After some time they too will be affected, but they do not enter into the initial stages. Body will remain the same body, essence will change later, but it does not enter the beginning of the work. According to this system, essence enters only as much as it is mixed with personality. We do not take it separately because, as already explained, we have no means of working on essence apart from personality. “What is it,” someone asked, “that makes the real ‘I’ begin to develop and false personality to fade?” First of all it is a question of time. Say false personality in ordinary life is there for twenty-three hours our of every twenty-two hours only and magnetic center will be present for an hour longer than usual. Then, in time, all false personality will diminish and will become less important. (This is shown in the second stage of the where false personality has become passive and the man “I”s surrounding magnetic center have become active.) You cannot diminish false personality in the sense of size but you can diminish it in the sense of time. Somebody else said, “I had the impression until now that false personality was the collection of all the many ‘I’s. This concept has made things a little obscure to me.” Among these many “I”s there are many passive “I”s which may be the beginning of other personality. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

False personality cannot develop; it is all wrong. That is why I said that all work has to be against false personality. If one fails it is because one has to be against false personality. If one fails it is because one has not given enough attention to false personality, has not studied it, has not worked against it. False personality is made up of many “I”s and they are all imaginary. “I do not understand what you mean by passive ‘I’s.” “I” which are controlled by some other, active “I.” For instance, good intentions are controlled by laziness. Laziness is active, good intensions passive. The “I” or combination of “I”s in control is active. The “I”s which are controlled or drive are passive. Understand it quite simply. There are three different states of man beginning from the most elementary. In the most elementary state false personality is active and “I” is passive. Body, soul, and essence always remain neutralizing. When, after many stages, permanent “I” comes, then “I” becomes active, many “I”s become passive and false personality disappears. Many different examples can be drawn between these two extremes, and further than that there are several possibilities. In 1944, the Allies were planning an operation for the liberation of Europe, and the Nazis were planning their defense against it. There were two possibilities for the initial landing –the Normandy beaches and Pas de Calais. A landing would surely succeed against a weak defense, so the Germans would have to concentrate their attention on one of these two places. Calais was more difficult to invade, but more valuable to win, being closer to the Allies’ ultimate targets in France, Belgium, and Germany itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The payoffs are given on a scale of 0 to 100. The Allies count a successful landing at Calais as 100, a successful landing at Normandy as 80, and a failure at either place as 0 (and the Germans get the negative of these payoffs). Put yourself simultaneously in the boots of General Eisenhower, the Allied Supreme Commander, and Field Mashal Rommel, the German commander of their coastal defenses in France. What strategies would you choose? There is no equilibrium in the basic strategies, and we must look for mixtures. Allies should choose to land at Normandy or Calais with the odds of (100-20): (80-60), or 4:1, while the Germans should deploy their defenses at Normandy or Calais with the odds (80-20): (100-60), or 3:2. The average point score for the Allies when both use their best mixture is 68. The probabilities and point scores we chose are plausible, but it is hard to be precise or dogmatic about such matters. Therefore let us compare our results with what actually happened. In retrospect, we know that the Allies’ mixing proportions were overwhelmingly weighted toward Normandy, and that is what they in fact chose. For the Germans, it was a closer call. It is less surprising, therefore, that the German decision-making was swayed by the Allies’ double-agent trick, differences of opinion in their commanding ranks, and some plain bad luck, such as Rommel being away from the front at the crucial time. They failed to commit their reserves on the afternoon of D-Day when the Allied landings at Normandy seemed to be succeeding, believing that a bigger landing at Calais would come. Even then, the fate of Omaha Beach was in the balance for a while. However, the Allies gained and consolidated their foothold on Normandy. The rest you know. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

When it comes to voter fraud, the vulnerability is not just inside the computers, or at election times, but in the way computer-generated data, information, and knowledge are used and misused. Smart politicians and officials, of course, do what smart people in general have always done when presented with new information. They demand to know more about its source and the reliability of the data behind it; they ask how samples were drawn in polls and what the response rates were; they note whether there are inconsistencies or gaps; they question statistics that are too “pat”; they evaluate the logic, and so forth. Smarter power players also take into account the channels through which the information arrived and intuitively review in their minds the various interests who might have “massaged” the information in transit. The smartest people—a minority of a tiny minority—do al the above, but also question assumptions and even the deeper assumptions on which the more superficial assumptions are based. Finally, imaginative people—perhaps the fewest of all—question the entire frame of reference. Government officials are found in all four categories. However, in all the high-tech countries they are so harried, so pressured, that they typically lack the time and attention span, if not the brains, to think past the surface “fact” on which they are pressures to make decisions. Worse yet, all bureaucracies discourage out-of-frame thinking and the examination of root premises. Power-players take advantage of this fact. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

When David Stockman , who headed the U.S.A. Office of Management and Budget, proposed budget cuts to the President and White House staff, he carefully chose the reductions from programs accounting for only 12 percent of the total budget. In discussing these cuts with high higher-ups, he never provided context. Telling tells out of school, he later wrote: “What they did not realize—because I never made it clear—was that we were working in only a small corner of the total budget. We hadn’t even looked at three giant programs that accounted for over half of the domestic budget: Social Security, veterans’ benefits, and Medicare. Those three alone cost $250 billion per year.” (As of 2023, that figure is $1.8 trillion per year.) “The projects we had cut saved $25 billion. The President and White House staff were seeing the tip of the budget iceberg; they were not finding out about the huge mass which lurked below the waterline. No one raised any questions about what wasn’t being reviewed.” Were they willfully ignorant, too much in a hurry to ask or blinded by Stockman, a master of statistical legerdemain? Or were they just “snowed” by all the computer-generated numbers? A political speech is barely worth making these days unless it is stuffed with computer-derived statistics. Yet most decision-makers seldom question the numbers that have been crunched for the. Thus Sidney Jones, a former Under Secretary of Commerce, once proposed setting up a Council of Statistical Advisers to serve the President. Presumably they would have been able to tell the President how the notorious “body count” statistics during the Vietnam War were being massaged. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Or why the CIA and the Pentagon could not agree on how powerful Soviet nuclear tests were, and therefore on whether or not the U.S.S.R. was violating the Threshold Test Ban Treaty of 1975. Or why the Commerce Department figures on gross national output were wildly exaggerated at one time, then corrected down to show the economy in a near-recession. The reasons in every case were highly technical—but they were also, inevitably, political. Even the most objective-seeming numbers have been hammered into shape by the push and pull of political power struggle. The U.S.A. Census Bureau takes more pains than most agencies to make public its definitions and statistical procedures so that users can form their own judgments about the validity of its figures. Its top experts readily admit, however, that such reservations and footnotes are routinely ignored in Washington. Accord to one Census staffer: “The politicians and the press do not care. All they say is ‘Gimme a number!’” There are two reasons for this. One is mere naivete. Despite all we have learned in the past generation about the spurious quality of much seemingly hard computer data, according to the Census official responsible for automatic data processing and planning, “Computer output is still regarded as Gospel.” However, there is a deeper reason. For political tacticians are not in search of scholarly “truth” or even simple accuracy. They are looking for ammunition to use in the info-wars. Data, information, and knowledge do not have to be “accurate” or “true” to blast an opponent out of the water. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Some truisms: Almost any technology is subject to use, misuse, abuse, and accident. The more powerful a technology is when properly used, the worse it is likely to be when abused. Any powerful technology in human hands can be the subject of accidents. Nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing replaces modern industry, and if its nanotechnological products replace most modern technologies, then most future accidents will have to involve nanotechnology. Another truism: In a diverse, competitive World, any reasonably inexpensive technology with enormous commercial, medical, and military applications will almost surely be developed and used. It is hard to envision a scenario (short of the collapse of civilization) in which nanotechnology will not make its appearance; it seems inevitable. If so, then its problems, however tough, must be dealt with. Like trucks, aircraft, biotechnology, rockets, computers, boots, and warm clothes, nanotechnology has the potential for both peaceful and aggressive uses. In peaceful uses (by definition), harm to people occurs either by accident or as an unintended consequence. In aggressive uses, harm is deliberate. In a peaceful context, the proper question to ask is Can fallible people of goodwill, pursuing normal human purposes, use nanotechnology in a way that reduces risk and harm to others? In an aggressive, military context, the proper question to ask is Can we somehow keep the peace? Our answer to the first will be a clear yes, and to the second, an apprehensive maybe. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Throughout this discussion, we assume that most people will be alert in matters concerning World safety. During the 1970, people awakening to the new large-scale, long-term problems of technology was out of their control, in the hands of shortsighted and irresponsible groups. Today, there are still battles to be fought, but the tide has turned. When a concern arises regarding a new, obvious technology, it is now much easier to get a hearing in the media, in the courts, and in the political arena. Improving these mechanisms for social vigilance and the political control of technology is an important challenge. Current mechanisms are imperfect, but they can still give a big push in the right directions. Though we assume alertness, alertness can be a scarce resource. The total amount of concern and energy available for focusing on long-term problems is so limited that it must be used carefully, not squandered on problems that are trivial or illusory. Part of our aim is to help sort out these issues raised by nanotechnology so that attention can be focused on problems that must be solved, but might not be. For instance, fresh fruits, vegetables, meat and poultry products are potential vehicles for the transmission of human pathogens leading to foodborne disease outbreaks, which draw public attention to food safety. Therefore, there is a need to develop new antimicrobials to ensure food safety. Because of the antimicrobial properties of nanomaterials, nanotechnology offers great potential for novel antimicrobial agents for the food and food-related industries. The use of nano-antimicrobial agents added directly to foods or through antimicrobial packaging is an effective approach. As a result, the use of nanotechnology by the food and food-related industries is expected to increase, impacting the food system at all stages from food production to processing, packaging, transportation, storage, security, safety and quality. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18


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A Richter-8 Earthquake is Waiting to Happen in California!

Creativity may assume many different forms. It might at times be saturnine, so that a bout with depression, for example, might be understood as a particularly creative time. Brooding generates its own style of awareness and its own brand of insight, and out of depressive moods important elements of culture and personality can emerge. Some people’s interpersonal relationships are profound because they trust more, empathize and associate more with other person than the typical person, they seem to develop greater love. They are able to disclose themselves to others and break down the barriers that we all build up. Their love is warm and comfortable, seldom clinging and possessive. They have many acquaintances and casual contacts, but usually a small, select circle of deep friendships. They tend to select friends who exhibit similar traits. It has been suggested that those in an accessible encounter are obliged to keep their activity in tune with the ethos of the social occasion, being obliged to exhibit within the situation a degree of occasioned mood and involvement. However, it was also implied that each accessible encounter will properly carry its participants some distance from the mood prevailing in the situation. Indeed, should this fail to occur, the social occasion may be blamed for failing to provide a setting in which individuals can be brought into face engagements and caught up spontaneously in them. In the latter case, the encounter may have to draw on the standard supplies of the social occasion for all of its sustenance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Similarly, if an individual fails to let go of one’s concern about the gathering as a whole or the progress of the occasion enough to be caught up in a situated engagement, it may be felt one has failed to give oneself up to the social occasion. A nice balance is thus required between keeping in step and stepping lively. Of special interest in this connection is the phenomenon of drift. Jut as a social occasion as a whole is likely to manifest an “involvement contour,” carrying all of its encompassed encounters in a developing direction, so each particular encounter can manifest dynamic properties of its own, not only generating a World for its participants but carrying them further and further into it. It is this movement of drift of individual encounters away from the gathering at large and its social occasion that we shall now consider. Given the presence in a social situation of different face engagements—different clusters of persons engaged exclusively together in a talk, a game, or a joint task—how far may the participants of any one of these little circles allow their mutual involvement to carry them from the other persons in the situation? The problem of drift can perhaps be seen most clearly in those social occasions where a fairly high pitch of some kind of affect is defined as appropriate. This, at a wedding it is not proper for any cluster of individuals to become too serious or to quarrel in any way; obviously this would be out of keeping. Should a quarrel start, it must be quickly checked lest it carry the encounter past the range of variation permitted. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Similarly, in the case of funeral visits, knots of people not containing any of the immediately bereaved may begin a quiet chat, but find themselves getting gayer and gayer until their interaction becomes out of place and must be brought back to the sober tone of the surroundings. Drift, of course, occurs not only at ceremonials. Thus, in a surgery observed, the nurses scrubbing at the four scrub sinks just before the medical staff arrived would carry on the light sociable chatter that seemed fixed to the sink area. Sometimes, however, their talk would become louder and louder, more and more boisterous, until the charge nurse of the ward would have to come into the scrub area and shush them. So, too, there were moments when the anesthetist and his helper began a whispered conversation that carried them further and further away from the occasion, until a point was reached where the surgeon or the surgical nurse glanced up and across the barrier between operating field and anesthetic equipment with a look of amusement, wonderment, or disapproval, which was often followed by a “cutting back” of the drifting conversation. In considering the tendency for accessible encounters to drift, we should not overlook other problems of affective movement. During occasions such as social parties, wakes, and other celebrations, a mood of hilarity or sadness or grimness ma begin to develop, and soon may carry all participation units away from their emotional starting point. (Sometimes this developing contour of involvement may be assisted by means of pharmacological agencies such as spirits.) #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

When all the encounters in a situation begin to drift at the same time in the same direction, they may together move past the point of propriety implicit in the social occasion. It is thus that an etiquette manual can warn that liquor at a christening should not be of the kind to turn into a cocktail party. A second issue may be mentioned. When a social occasion has taken hold of its participants, and the engagements occurring within it have together moved in a particular affective direction, a latecomer to the occasion may find oneself out of step affectively with the prevailing mood and may have difficulty in catching up, in “getting with it.” A sober person coming to an inebriated gathering can have quite the same problem, and create the same offense, as an inebriated person arriving at a still sober occasion. Wakes are of special interest here, because persons longest on the spot will have “worked through” some of their affective concern about the deceased, while at the same time they are likely to have been the “closet” to the individua and to be therefore held most responsible for giving a worthy show of grief. A latecomer may find a certain callousness among those present, which they may in turn be forced to conceal b a kind of recapitulation of the mourning process performed within the confines of the face engagement in which the latecomer is welcomes to the place of mourning. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

“Does our capacity for work increase just so much as we are able to weaken false personality?” Everything one can get, one can get only at the expense of false personality. Later, when it is not present, one can get many things at the expense of other things, but for a long time one has to live, so to speak, off false personality. “Is false personality the main barrier to being aware?” First of all, yes. However, many mechanical habits besides. Sometimes even mechanical habits in other centers. “If you could eliminate false personality…” someone began. You cannot eliminate anything; it is just the same as trying to cut your head off. However, you can make false personality less insistent and less permanent. If at a certain moment you feel the danger of the manifestation of false personality and you can find a way to stop it, this is what you have to begin with. The question of elimination does not enter at all; that is connected with quite different things. You must learn to control manifestations. However, if people think that they can do something and at the same time refuse to work on acquiring this control, then things become bad for them. People can be enthusiastic about what they have to do until they know what they have to do. When they know, they often times become very negative and try to avoid it or explain it in some other way. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

This is what you must understand—that false personality defends itself. You must understand, too, that you cannot even begin to work such as you are, on your present level. First you have to change one thing or another thing. However, you can only find out what to change as the result of your own observations, and it is different for different people. Sometimes it becomes quite clear what has to be changed and then the fight begins, because false personality defends itself. In order to struggle with false personality always do something which false personality does not like and you will very soon find out what it does not like. If you continue, it will get more and more irritated and will show itself more and more clearly, so that soon there will be no question about it. However, if you can do nothing to check false personality, it grows. It cannot diminish by itself. Tastes may change and so on, but it grows. This is the only development that happens in mechanical life—nothing else. “Repression of the life force” is a diagnosis and it would fit most emotional problems. Throughout human history, the expression of individuality has been felt as a threat to the status quo. For all its expressed championing of the individual, our culture in many ways favours conformity. At each stage of live, there seems to be a necessity for choice. In the choice between staying at the level of safety and going onto the level of loving, the easiest choice is of safety, because it has already been experienced and is “known.” Loving and belonging involves a lot of risk. They involve putting oneself on the line, out on the limb of initiative. And that is scary! #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Notion of copying are central both to biology and to computer science, two disciplines that have contributed enormously to complex systems research. These two traditions do not have identical notions of copying, and the differences between them are reflected in our framework. The biological approach to making copies is much closer to our discussions of selecting at the level of agents. For most agent copying, material resources have to be assembled, and copies are made using the same materials that constitute the copied agents. By contrast, copies as conceived in computer science concentrate on preservation of abstract form. This view corresponds more closely to our discussions of selection at the level of strategies. This alternative view of copies reaches an impressive level of abstraction in binary-encoded information that preserves its essential character across arbitrary embodiments. A digital recording of a Bach fugue is a series of “ones and zeros” that can be represented as spots of magnetism, pits in an optical disk, or a series of voltage pulses or light waves. Both notions of copy have a place in our framework because the way copies spread through a Complex Adaptive System does not always conform to the patterns seen in natural selection. There can be adaptation, but through patterns that are not necessarily like those seen in biology. It was once thought that a computer virus could spread much faster than a successful physical virus. However, we have learned that both a physical virus and a computer virus, within hours, can infect thousands of humans and computers all over the World with copies of itself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Therefore, physical viruses and computer viruses are very similar with respect to both time and space. Being immaterial, it can spread incredibly rapidly, and it can spread though a space in which “nearby” machines are physically far away. A Complex Adaptive System framework needs to encompass much more than the biological cases, even if those have provided much of its inspiration. Just as the difference between copying strategies and agents matters, so too do the detailed differences among various copying processes. Imitating someone’s method for making telephone charity requests is not an identical process to passing along a photocopy of a fund-raising letter. Both involve copying, but the former involves far more integration of a pattern into one’s own behaviour. Setting an example that trigger imitation is very different when the population comprises nation-states than it is when the population is made up of schoolyard playmates. By calling many different processes “copying,” it has not been out intention to deny the important differences of detail. Indeed, details have to be studied very closely. Errors and recombining processes depend on those details. And the character of the variation in the system is shaped by them in turn. Making fund-raising calls using your friend’s method is much more of a recombination of strategies than is photocopying and forwarding of a funding request. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

While the detailed character of copying processes is of great significance, it is also important to discuss coping processes in the aggregate. That makes clear the deep similarities among Complex Adaptive Systems. Our aim in discussing “copying” in general is to guide designers and policy makers to ask questions about how copies are made, and how destruction happens, for the agents and strategies in the systems they work with. We want to simulate the recognition of many different kinds of processes as “copying,” from duplicating computer files to replicating fast-food franchises. Once copying mechanisms are identified, the questioner will have knowledge of the important details that we cannot have. In this way, the framework aims to suggest fruitful questions. Why would someone want to copy the visible behavior of a leader? In the ambiguous and hard-to-predict World of a Complex Adaptive System, agents often do not know what criteria of success they should use or how to evaluate the strategies they could select. This is especially important in an age of uncertainty and rapid change. When adaptive agents live in a rapidly changing environment, they tend to look to other agents to see which performance measures tend to work and which ones tend to fail. When agents are not able to predict the effects of various possible behaviour of agents who seem to be successful, or who at least have more experience with the new environment. Imitating others who are successful or experienced is a form of implicit attribution of credit that certainly has its disadvantages. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

When features that are copied are only superficially relevant, the results can be wasteful or even comical. Nevertheless, following the practices of those with more experience or success is often a good strategy in an uncertain World. There are three basic reasons a leader in a formal organization or other social system is especially likely to be copied. First, a leader can sometimes set standards that provide incentive for others to copy. Second, a leader’s actions or performance measures are typically seen to be successful and hence worth emulating. Third, a leader may set an example that helps establish beneficial norms in a community. Leadership in setting a standard can cause other to go along for their own reasons. Consider the case of Norway as a country that writes much of the World’s maritime insurance. When the standards body in Norway set certain regulations for insuring oil platforms, the makers of oil platforms had an incentive to build in ways that met those standards. Thereafter other marine insurers tended to gravitate toward similar regulations. Norway’s regulations helped shape the industry in ways that led other maritime insurers to copy their visible behaviour. The emulation of a leader need not be based on a full understanding of how the emulation will help. Other agents may wish to emulate the actions or performance measures of a visibly successful leader in the hopes that what worked for the leader will work for them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

A business leader who wishes to promote environmentally friendly production can, of course, make decisions that give high weight to environmental concerns. However, if the firm is highly visible and is able to show that it becomes more successful because of its environmental practices and reputation, then a much more powerful dynamic comes into play. Imitation of the firm’s performance measures by other firms creates a cascade that can transform an industry. Many forms of inspirational leadership work in this same fashion. For example, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s criterion of nonviolence was advanced throughout the World by the success its practitioners achieved in winning Civil Rights in America. Dr. King’s leadership was successful in large part because he visibly embodied the very values he was advocating. This led others to emulate not only his tactics but also his values. Visible leadership can also be exercised by setting an example that helps establish beneficial norms in a community. In Complex Adaptive Systems, norms are often important regulatory mechanisms. Central monitoring and control can be difficult when many agent interactions are widely distributed across physical or social alternative. Especially when they become internalized, norms regulate not through fear of consequences but through the belief that some actions are right and others wrong. This is extremely important when monitoring by central authorities is costly or intrusive. Moreover, once established, a norm can be reinforced and spread by dispersed agents who accept the norm and are willing to punish others who deviate from in. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The Internet is a vast example of opportunities for one agent to exploit another from afar. The eventual character of its culture will be established in large measure by decisions made in the next few years, as significant and highly visible leaders promote the norms they will exemplify and expect others to enforce. The major providers of e-mail and chat facilities provoke widespread debates when they announce or modify positions on how they will handle unwanted advertisements or offensive language. The dialogs that occur build communities of users who may well enforce standards among each other more effectively than central authorities could hope to do. It is very important, in business, and life to build networks of reciprocal interaction that foster trust and cooperation. Also, people take on big ideas, like ending corruption. However, it is best to look for shorter-term, finer-grained measures of success that can usually stand in for longer-run, broader goals. For instance, building a wall at the Southern Boarder, would not only fortify national security, but it would also be a form of immigration reform, save lives of patrol agents, reduce costs of court cases, and housing, weed out crime, and decrease voter fraud. Then one can move on to another segment of ending corruption. There has to be a coherent approach to designing interventions in a complex World. We all must intervene in Complex Adaptive Systems daily. We all face situations where the classical approach of formulating alternative actions and their likely consequences assume more understanding and predictive power than we actually have. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Our framework shows how the accumulating scientific insights into variation, interaction, and selection fit together and can be used to harness complexity. However, why are there so few instances of businesses using randomized behaviour out in the real World? First, it may be difficult to build in the idea of leaving the outcome to chance in a corporate culture tht wants to maintain control over the outcome. This is especially true when things go wrong, as they must socially when moves are chosen randomly. While some people understand that a football coach has to fake a punt once in a while in order to keep the defense honest, a similarly risky strategy in business can get you fired if it fails. However, the point is not that the risky will always work, but rather tht it avoids the danger of set pattens and predictability. One application in which mixed strategies improve business performance is price couponing. Companies use price discount coupons to build market share. The idea is to attract new customers, and not just to give a discount to your present market. If competitors simultaneously offer coupons, then customers do not have any special incentive to switch brands. Instead, they stay with their current brand and take the discount. Only when one company offer coupons while the others do not are new customers attract to try the product. The price coupon strategic game for competitors such as Coke and Pepsi is then quite analogous to the coordination problems of Sarah and William. Both companies want to be the one to give coupons. However, if they try to do this simultaneously, the effects cancel out and both are worse off. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

One solution would be to follow a predictable pattern of offering coupons every six months, and the competitors could learn to alternate. The problem with this approach is that when Coke predicts Pepsi is just about to offer coupons, Coke should step in first to preempt. The only way to avoid preemption is to keep the element of surprise that comes from using a randomized strategy. There is some strong statistical evidence that Coke and Pepsi reached a cooperative solution for their couponing. There was a span of 52 weeks in which Coke and Pepsi each offered 26 price promotions and there was no overlap. The chance that this would occur by luck if the two companies were acting independently and each offered 26 weeks of couponing is 1/495918532948104—or less than 1 in 1,000 trillion. There are other case in which businesses must avoid set patterns and predictability. Some airlines offer discount tickets to travelers who are wiling to buy tickets at the last minute. However, they will not tell you how many seats are left in order to help you estimate the chances of success. If last-minute ticket availability were more predictable, then there would be a much greater possibility of exploiting the system, and the airlines would lose more of their otherwise regular paying customers. The most widespread use of randomized strategies in business is to motivate compliance at a lower monitoring cost. This applies to everything from tax audits to drug testing to parking meters. It also explains why the punishment should not necessarily fit the crime. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

The typical fine for illegal parking at a mete is many times the meter fee. If the meter rate is a dollar per hour, would a fine of $1.01 not suffice to keep people honest? It would, provided the traffic police were sure to catch you each time you parked without putting money in the meter. Such enforcement would be very costly. The salaries of the traffic wardens would be the largest item, but the cost of administering the collection mechanism needed to keep the policy credible would be quite substantial, too. The authorities have an equally effective and less costly strategy, namely to have larger fines and relax the enforcement efforts. When the fine is $25, a 1 in 25 risk of being caught is enough to keep you honest. A much smaller police force will do the job, and the fines collected will come closer to covering the administrative costs. This is another instance of the usefulness of mixed strategies. In many ways, it is similar to the tennis example we used in the past, but it is also different in some respect. Once again, the authorities choose a random strategy because it is better than any systematic action: no enforcement at all would mean misuse of scarce parking places, and a 100 percent enforcement would be too costly. However, the other side, the parking public, does not necessarily have a random strategy. In fact the authorities want to make the detection probability and the fine large enough to induce the public to comply with the parking regulations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Random drug testing has many of the same features as parking meter enforcement. It is too time-consuming and costly to test every employee every day for evidence of drug use. It is also unnecessary. Random testing will uncover those who are unable to work drug free and discourage others from recreational use. Again, the probability of detection is small, but the fine when caught is higher. That is one of the problems with the IRS audit strategy. The penalties are small given the chances of getting caught. When enforcement is random, it must be that the punishment is worse than the crime. The rule should be that the expected punishment should fit the crimes, where the expectation takes into account the chance of being caught. Those hoping to defeat enforcement can also use random strategies to their benefit. They can hide the true crime in the midst of many false alarms or decoys, and the enforcer’s resources become spread too thin to be effective. For example, an air defense must be able to destroy nearly 100 percent of all incoming missiles. A cost-effective way of defeating the air defense is for the attacker to surround the real missile with a bodyguard of decoys. It is much cheaper to build a decoy missile than the real thing. Unless the defender can perfectly distinguish among them, one will be required to stop all incoming missiles, real and fake. The practice of shooting dud shells began in World War II, not by the intentional design of building decoy missiles, but as a response to the problem of quality control. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

The elimination of defective shells in production is expensive. Someone got the idea then of manufacturing duds and shooting them on a random basis. A military commander cannot afford to have a delayed time bomb buried under one’s position, and one never knew which was which. The bluff made one work at every unexploded shell that came over. When the cost of defense is proportional to the number of missiles that can be shot down, attackers can make this enforcement cost unbearably high. This problem is one of the major challenges facing those involved in the “Star Wars” defense; it may have no solution. In Seoul, South Korea, in December 1987, after sixteen years of military rule, a general election took place. The results of this bitterly fought three-way contest were ultimately accepted and the country got on with its business. However, in the immediate aftermath, political observers noted certain peculiarities in the balloting. The winner’s percentage of margin, established in the earliest returns, remained strangely unchanged throughout the night and across regions. A highly popular opposition candidate cast doubt on the size of his own victory in Kwangju Province, saying he could not believe that he had actually garnered 94 percent of the votes. At best, he claimed, he should have won a maximum of 80 percent. The suspicion grew that someone was tampering not with the ballot boxes, but with the computers that complied the results. This suspicion was never confirmed, but it would have been extremely easy to draw up a computer model of an acceptable decision result. This could be adjusted for people’s perceptions of voter choice, regional, class, and age background, and events during the campaign. Such a model could design the size of the majority. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Such a model could also, presumably, be used to tailor the results so subtly in key districts as to provide a victory without leaving an overt trail. This is possible if a sophisticated programmer, gaining access to the right password, instructs the computer to credit some percentage of the votes of one candidate to another and then to spring a “trapdoor”—which, in effect, erases any record of what has been done. The Election Watch project of the Urban Policy Research Institute, basing itself in part on work done by two Princeton University computer scientists, Jon R. Edwards and Howard Jay Strauss, concludes that “the advent of computerized vote counting over the past two decades has created the potential for election fraud and error on a scale previously unimagined.” Therefore, it looks like President Donald Trump was right about voter fraud and being cheated out of the election. Many current election officials disagree, but Election Watch gains support from Willis H. Ware, a senior researcher at the Rand Corporation. Ware puts it even more dramatically: The vulnerability of electronic voting systems is such that “there is probably a Chernobyl or a TMI [Three Mile Island] waiting to happen in some election, just as a Richter-8 Earthquake is waiting to happen is waiting to happen in California.” Given these admittedly speculative scenarios a further twist. Imagine what might be done if the computer were “fixed” by technicians, programmers, or systems integrators working for a multinational corporation that wants a particular senator, say, driven from office. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Or imagine that the election ballot box is under the indirect, secret control not of a party or corporation but of a foreign power, which may suspect is that case with the Democratic Party and President Biden, California Governor Newsom, and Sacramento Mayor Steinberg. An election, may have been swung by adding or subtracting a tiny—unnoticed—number of votes from each precinct. And no one ever knows because they refuse to investigate, make claims seem outlandish by calling a person crazy or saying it is a conspiracy theorist. Caveat Candidate! With all the corruption, crimes, health crisis, energy crisis, inflation, food costs, housing costs, and changes in employment, along with the wide open boarders, and riots on the streets in America, the average person is feeling what it means to suffer from future shock. People have not even had a chance to catch their breath because there is so much going on in the nation and around the World. However, when more nanotechnology arrives, will it bring more future shock? Some segments of society today are already getting practice in dealing with rapid technology advance. Those getting the most vigorous workout are in the computer field, where a machine two years old and regarded as obsolete, and software must be updated every few months to keep abreast of the new development. The rapid increase of computer speed had helped make computers easier to use. Some people will learn to adapt to technology, but in the future technology will learn to adapt to us. The most effective government and private agencies will endure. More options will continue to be invented. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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What Do You Mean By Crystallizing?

The soul needs an intense, full-bodied spiritual life as much in the same way the body requires food. Each person defines beauty, spiritual life, love, pleasure, pain and all the other experiences in a way that makes sense for them. Human beings are tremendously influenced by many things in the cultural experiences. The restrictions against exposed mutual-involvements can sometimes be seen not as a restriction against involvement that withdraws the participants from gathering. Indeed, the individual may at times be obliged to open oneself up for mutual-involvements, as implied in the rule of accessibility. However, one must do this not merely on the grounds of prior relationship but on the basis of the present occasion. (Here we catch another glimmer of the trouble caused by newlyweds or those deeply engaged in courting, who, unlike persons whose relationship is more settled and seasoned, find it awkward to give up their mutual-involvement for the kind of courtesy involvement with a sequence of others that the social occasion often requires.) Thus we find a special kind of exemplary situational conduct when two persons with a long-standing, exclusive relationship manage to treat each other at a sociable gathering with courtesies owed on the basis simply of participation in the occasion; two bitter enemies show a similar regard for the occasion by being “civil.” The same type of courtesy is exhibited by a teacher who addresses her child in class as though he or she were just another student, this being describable not merely as role segregation but also as a gesture of regard for the occasion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Interestingly enough, in the natural history of some social parties, certain forms of fleeting play involving pleasures of the flesh may be a sign that the spirit of the occasion has lifted everyone up with it, not that the party has collapsed into separate pieces. Indeed, should the interactions involving pleasures of the flesh occur between persons brought together only at and for the occasion, it may be a sign of the high degree to which participants have given themselves over to the gathering. The extreme of this, in fact—for example, the kind of interaction involving pleasures of the flesh said to occur at the annual Beaux Arts ball in Paris—can represent not a collapse of duties in regard to the situation, as might at first seem the case, but rather some kind of profane worship of them. Were husbands to engage their wives in this manner, the obligations to the occasion would indeed be threatened. In noting the rule obliging individuals to sustain an occasioned mutual-involvement, we have perhaps a better means of accounting for our response to improper involvements than for predicting actual conduct, for these situational niceties are often ill-sustained. Resistance to the spirit of an occasion, as expressed in a refusal to sustain occasioned mutual-involvements, is apparently so useful a device for conveying so many things that someone in a gathering can usually be counted on to employ it. At public dances in the chief city of Utah, for example, one could usually find a slightly resented handful of couples, solidly middle-class in social status, who withheld themselves from the plebeian pleasures sustained by second-generation crofters. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This alienation was expressed by dancing in half-time to the vigorous music and sustaining quiet engrossing talk while doing so, conduct that was obtrusively out of mood with the prevailing ethos. We see, then, that there will be ties when the success of a social occasion such as a party is expressed through the success of a social occasion such as a party is expressed through the success of the participants in finding congenial encounters in which to engross themselves. This engrossment provides proof that each person present is a desirable companion, and that each finds the social occasion significant enough to provide one with grounds for opening oneself up to others. Given these assumptions, we can understand that a person caught for too long between encounters—caught “unengaged”—may cause anxiety to oneself and the hostess, and that the latter may try to anchor one in a convenient port, which particular port being of only secondary significance. And we can also understand why an individual may feel that what one owe the gathering at large can at times override what one owes oneself and one’s fellows in an encounter, providing us with additional evidence that the individual’s engagement in a focused interaction is a fact available to all others in the situation, and hence a part of the unfocused interaction in the situation. Here we have the situational reason for one type of tact, namely, giving the appearance of being spontaneously involved in some occasioned encounter when in fact one is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Even if you are placed next to some one with whom you have had a bitter quarrel, consideration for your hostess, who would be distressed if she knew you have been put in a disagreeable places, and further consideration for the rest of the table which is otherwise “blocked,” exacts that you give no outward sign of your repugnance and that you make a pretense, at least for a little while, of talking together. At dinner once, Mrs. Winchester, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, “I shall not talk to you—because I do not care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication table. Twice one are two, twice two are four—” and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her. As soon as she politely could she turned again to her other companion. Another instance of the obligation to sustain an occasioned involvement with others may be cited from Utah. At a “progressive” whist of twenty tables during a social, the deep engrossment of a member of the gentry in his particular table of whist was likely to be taken as a sign of how thoroughly he was participating in the social occasion. By getting caught up in the spirit of one of the tables, he showed regard for the room as a whole. Had he disdained to invest himself thus, and insisted on wandering from one table to another, making gracious comment to players at all the tables in turn, he might well have tendered the common folk—the crofters—less of a compliment. (And yet if an ordinary crofter became so much involved in a particular hand of whist as to delay appreciably the finishing time for his table, this disregard for the necessity of shifting tables at the end of each game was likely to be considered an affront to the whole social occasion.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

If social occasions can be assessed according to their capacity to bring all participants into one occasioned encounter or another, then we can expect that rules will be found obliging those within any encounter to admit entrants. (This corresponds to the previously discussed obligation of the individual to make oneself accessible, the difference being that while an individual may be inaccessible to others because of organic capacity, this excuse is hardly available to encounters.) There are many occasions, as on public streets, where those in an encounter need acknowledge few rights of other to enter. One the other hand, as already suggested, it I characteristic of occasions such as social parties that participants have a right not only to initiate face engagements but also to enter ones that are already in progress. Here participants, in order to demonstrate how thoroughly they have been lifted up and brought together by the party, may feel obliged to admit newcomers to their conversation easily. “Open” topics of conversation may thus be maintained in preparation for newcomers. A conversation that by its tone forbade the entrance of new members would be improper. Consequently, we can understand the strategy sometimes employed by those who would converse about intensely involving private matter in a public place: instead of huddling together in a furtive conspiratorial way, they affect a style of matter-of-fact openness. [Somebody spoke about a useless personality which she enjoyed although she knew that it was useless.] In such a case you can struggle with this personality by strengthening other personalities opposed to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Suppose you have a certain definite feature you want to struggle with, and try to find some other feature incompatible with it and which may be useful. If in your present equipment you find nothing sufficiently strong to put against it, look in your memory. Suppose you find some feature that is incompatible with the one you want to get rid of, and that can be useful, then just replace one by the other. However, it may happen that even then they can both live happily together. One may present in the evening, the other in the morning, and they may never meet. There is only one real danger. If, for a long time, one goes on without making sufficient efforts or without doing anything seriously, then, instead of becoming one, one becomes divided into two so that all features and personalities are divided into two group—one part useful to the work and helping personal work, and another part either indifferent or even unfriendly. This is a real danger because if two parts begin to form like this, the indifference of one spoils the result of the work of the other. So it is necessary to struggle very quickly and very strongly against that, otherwise it may lead to double crystallization. “What do you mean by crystallizing?” We use the word in a particular sense. Any feature may become crystallized just as buffers crystallize. This term came from the theosophical terminology; it is sometimes a useful term. I think everybody here has heard about higher bodies, the astral, mental and causal. The idea is that man has only one physical body, and development consists in the development of higher bodies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

So man no. 5 corresponds to the crystallization of the astral body, man no. 6 to the crystallization of the mental body, and man no. 7 to the crystallization of the causal body. However, speaking of the crystallization of features, one person may have very good and very beautiful features and yet behind them he may have one small feature of false personality which makes work very difficult for him, more difficult perhaps than it is for somebody else who has not got such brilliant features. False personality may pretend to take an interest in the work, may take things for itself and call some negative and mechanical action “self-remembering” or something of that sort. However, it cannot do any useful work; it can only spoil the work of personalities which can do some work and get some results. The system in the light of false personality is quite a different system; it becomes something that strengthens false personality and weakens the real system for you. The moment false personality takes the system to itself, it adds one word here and another word there. You cannot imagine how extraordinary some of these ideas are when they are repeated back to me. One word omitted from some formulation makes quite a different idea; and false personality is fully justified and can do what it likes and so on. The problems of inferring proper lessons (attributing credit) based on limited experience occur in almost every sphere of human activity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Because military organizations only rarely obtain feedback from actual combat, their circumstances make adaptation especially difficult. Since credit attribution has long been so problematic in warfare, military organization have a rich history of refining various forms of simulation, including many forms of gaming and field exercises. The techniques used by the military to cope with the problems of credit attribution when feedback is scarce are therefore particularly illuminating. For these organizations the problem of determining what works well is especially vexing. Large-scale fighting is infrequent—and much work goes into keeping this true. That means that opportunities to try new weapon systems or tactical concepts, or to test officer capabilities, come rarely. Learning only from real combat experience is an unacceptably slow strategy for improvement. This is a price society happily pays for peace, but it leaves military organizations facing a difficult learning problem. Where a firm might have several different versions of a consumer product tested in the field within a few months, a military organization might not accumulate the equivalent amount of useful experience in several decades. For n extreme example, there has never been any full combat experience for our intercontinental ballistic missile hardware, operational concepts, and crews. (This field is the only branch of science where success is achieved by never having any data.) A large portion of what military organizations learn about new technology and operational concepts must come from various forms of experience. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

This experience may be war games, field exercise, small-scale engagements, mental experiments, computer models, or even imaginative reconstructions of military history. The Information Revolution is providing computer tools that dramatically expand simulation possibilities. The United States of America military now routinely employs simulated aircraft, tanks, ships, and soldiers in its investigations of combat possibilities. Mobilizations of large forces for field exercises incur substantial resource costs, and even without live ammunition, there are inevitable injuries and deaths from the risky movements of personnel and heavy equipment. Such exercises cannot be repeated many times in minor variation of multiple factors may reveal large consequences. The value of these new possibilities is also becoming evident in the business World. Although useful experience is not as scarce as in the military case, there are many situations in which exploratory trials with the real system are not possible, Major reorganizations or changes of corporate strategy are like this. They often have huge costs, and if they do not work, they risk the bankruptcy of the entire firm. In response to this need, simulation tools for business decision making are beginning to appear. Firms are arising that specialize in building such simulation models. Some are spin-offs of computer gaming companies, while others have arisen from consulting practices. There are limitations, of course. One shortcoming is that simulations often place sharp and arbitrary limits on improvisation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

While it is an extremely important source of military and business innovation, improvisation is generally not realistically supported in computer simulations, which often insist that the “players” obey rules and constraint that in real activities they might decide to violate. Although they may fall short of realism in significant ways, computer simulations provide the kind of rapidly assessed measure of success we have discussed previously. They generate only surrogate experience, but they can improve learning in an experience-poor domain if they are used wisely, with clear attention to their limitations. So far, our applications of randomized strategies have focused exclusively on games in which the players’ interests are strictly opposed. Somewhat more surprising is the possibility of finding an equilibrium with random behaviour even when the players have common interests. In this case, mixing one’s plays leads to an inferior outcome for all parties. However, just because the outcome is inferior does not mean the strategies are not an equilibrium: equilibrium is a description not a prescription. The reason for mixing one’s moves arises from a failure of coordination. This problem only arises when there is not a unique equilibrium. For example, two people disconnected during a phone call do not always know who should call back. Without the ability to communicate, the players do not know which equilibrium to expect. In a loose sense, the equilibrium with randomization is a way of playing a compromise between the coordinated equilibra. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Sarah and William are the sort of couple you read about in fiction, O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, to be precise. “Nobody could ever count” their love for each other, and each was willing, even eager, to make any sacrifice to get a really worthy Christmas gift for the other. Sarah would sell her hair to get Willian a chain for his heirloom watch, and William would sell the watch to buy a comb for Sarah’s beautiful hair. If they know each other well enough, they should both reorganize the possibility that each will sell his or her one treasure to buy the other a gift, and the result will be a tragic mistake. Sarah should pause and consider whether it would be better to keep her hair and await William’s gift. Likewise, William should consider not selling his watch. Of course, if they both refrain, neither gives a gift, which would be a different mistake. The couple’s strategies interact even though their interests largely coincide. For each, both kinds of mistake would be a bad outcome. For concreteness, we give this a point of score of zero. As between the two outcomes in which one gives a gift and the other receives it, suppose each thinks it better to give (2 points) than to receive (1 point). The situation in which Sarah keeps her hair and William sells his watch is  possible equilibrium; each spouses strategy is the best response to the other’s. However, the situation in which Sarah sells her hair and William keeps his watch is also an equilibrium. Is there a mutually understood convention to select one equilibrium over the other? Surprise is an important aspect of a gift; therefore they cannot communicate in advance to establish a convention. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Mixing can help preserve the surprise, although at a cost. It is easy to check that the strategies in which each chooses to give with probability 2/3 and receive with probability 1/3 also constitute an equilibrium. Supposed Sarah uses such a mixture. If William sells his watch, there is a 1/3 chance that Sarah has kept her hair (2 points) and a 2/3 chance that she has sold it (0 point). The average outcome is 2/3 point. A similar calculation shows that if William keeps his watch, the average outcome is again 2/3 point. So William has no clear reason to choose one strategy rather than another, or indeed any mix. Once again, note that the function of Sarah’s best mix is to keep William willing to mix, and vice versa. The probabilities of mistakes are quite large: 4 times in 9 the couple finds that each has sold the item for which the other has bought the gift (an in the O. Henry story), and 1 time in 9 neither gets any gift. Because of these mistakes, the average score (2/3 point for each) is worse than that of either of the two equilibra in which one gives and the other receives (2 points for the giver and 1 for the receiver). This is unlike the tennis example from the past, in which each could actually raise one’s success rate by mixing. Why the difference? Tennis is a zero-sum game, in which the players’ interests are strictly opposed. They do better when they choose the mixing probabilities independently. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

In our account of The Gift of the Magi, the couple’s interest are largely aligned. They need, therefore, to coordinate their mixing. They should toss one coin, and depending on the outcome decide who gives and who receives. The couple has a slight conflict of interest; William prefers the top left outcome, and Sarah the bottom right. Coordinated mixing can offer them a compromise, splitting the difference. When a common coin toss decides who gives and who receives, the average outcome for each becomes 1.5 points. Of course the element of surprise is lost. Major shift in demographics always cause disruptions. Even when we know they are coming, we never prepare for them. Our plans are based on expectations of what will happen. If things do not go as expected, we find that we have “malinvested.” Huston real estate was valuable and looked to become even more so when times were good for the oil business there; when the fortunes of the oil business changed, Houston real estate was found to have been overbuilt, overpriced, and many millions of dollars were lost. Lengthening life spans push people toward taking a longer-term perspective, but rapid rates of change force a shorter-term perspective in investments. Turbulence in technology and in governmental monetary policy have already shortened time horizons. Businesspeople once routinely built plants with a thirty-year useful life. Today, the rate of change is so fast, and uncertainty regarding inflation and potential changes in tax laws is too great for such investments to make sense. Faster change will shrink time horizons further. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Governments have taken on themselves the burden of looking a lifetime ahead, and the Social Security Administration is in for some rough times. When Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s Iron Chancellor, came up with the notion of a guaranteed old-age pension, it was a cynically clever and low-cost way to gain popular goodwill. So few people lived to age sixty-five that the amounts paid out in pension were a pittance. After watching the German experiment for a handful of years, other governments began following suit. None of them expected a World likes ours where a baby girl born in the United States of America today has an average life expectancy of 82 years—more than double that of Bismarck’s time—and even this estimate is based on the faulty assumption that her medical care will be no better than her great-grandmother’s was. At present, the Social Security Administration has two models: one they call “positive” and one they call “negative.” In the “positive” model, people work like slaves until old age, retire, and promptly die—presumably before they have had a chance to collect substantial social-security or medical benefits. In the “negative” model, people retire early, develop illnesses that require medical intervention, and then live a long time making doctor visits and hospital stays during those years. Plans based on these models deserve to be disturbed. A better, more realistic scenario would have people living and able to support themselves for a long time, with illnesses that can be handled easily and inexpensively. Present social-security are enough to provide a certain standard of living—food, housing, transportation, and so forth. In a future of great material wealth, these benefits will be easy to provide, and present projections of economic woe resulting from an aging population seem quaint. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

A rapidly accumulating international literature tells lurid stories about computer crime—about bank swindles, espionage, viruses sent from one computer to destroy the contents of others. Movies like WarGames have dramatized the dangers from unauthorized entry to the computer and communication systems that control nuclear weapons. According to a published report in France, the Mafia has kidnapped an IBM executive and cut off his finger because it needed his fingerprint to breach a computer security system. The U.S.A. Department of Justice has defined a dozen different methods used in computer-based criminal activity. They range from switching or altering data as they enter the computer, to putting self-concealing instructions into the software, to tapping the computers. Widely publicized cases of “computer viruses” have illustrated the potential for sabotage of military and political communications and computation. However, relatively little thought has been given so far to the ways in which similar techniques might alter political life. One day in 1986, Jennifer Kuiper, a staff aide of Congressman Ed Zschau, saw her computer screen go blank. When she got her machine up and running again, two hundred letters had disappeared. Four days later hundreds of letters and addresses disappeared from the computer of Congressman John McCain. Capitol Hill police, claiming to have eliminated the likelihood of staff error, launched criminal investigations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

According to Zschau, himself, the founder of a computer software firm before entering politics, “Every office on Capitol Hill can be broken into in this way…It can bring the work that a member of Congress does to a complete halt.” With 250,000 word processors being used in the offices of American lawyers, it becomes feasible for a lawyer’s unscrupulous opposing counsel to glean compromising information by illegal access to his or her computer—and that this can be accomplished with inexpensive electronic equipment purchasable in the corner of Radio Shack. Politicians and officials, however, may be even more vulnerable. Thousands of computers, many of them linked in networks, are now found in congressional offices, the homes of elected officials and lobbyists, as well as on the desk tops of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who regulate everything from soybean quotas to air travel safety standards. Unauthorized and secret entry could cause endless troubles and shift power in unexpected ways. Computers also increasingly populate election campaign headquarters. Thus new, virtually undetectable games can be played in the ballot box itself. As you know, voter fraud is real. For example, an Iowa woman was arrested 12 January 2023, in Sioux City for her role in an alleged voter fraud scheme during the Iowa 2020 primary and general elections. Kim Phuong Taylor, 49, of Sioux City allegedly perpetrated a scheme to generate votes in the primary election in June 2020, when her husband was an unsuccessful candidate for Iowa’s 4th U.S.A. Congressional District, and subsequently in 2020 general election, when her husband was a successful candidate for Woodbury County Supervisor. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Taylor allegedly submitted or caused others to submit dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot request forms, and absentee ballot containing false information. For instance, although these documents required the singer to affirm that he or she was the person named in them, Taylor singed them for voter without their permission and told other that they could sign on behalf of relatives who were not present. Taylor is charged by indictment with 26 counts of providing false information in registering and voting, three counts of fraudulent registration, and 23 count of fraudulent voting. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each count. Secure elections are the cornerstone of a thriving republic. A key priority for any Attorney General is to investigate and prosecute the increasing allegations of voter fraud to ensure election integrity within the United States of America. In Texas, since 2005, the office of the Attorney General successfully prosecuted election fraud offense against 155 individuals, out of 534 cases suspected. The number of pending offenses against 43 defendants is 510, and currently pending prosecution. There 386 case of active election fraud investigations in Texas. Voter fraud is a reason so many people are demanding Voter ID laws are employed and enforced. However, the objection is that millions of Americans lack ID. In fact, 11 percent of U.S.A. citizens—or more than 21 million Americans—do not have government-issued photo identification. The enforcement of voter ID laws is considered to be discriminatory because obtaining an ID costs money. Even if ID is offered for free, voters must incur numerous costs (such a paying for birth certificates) to apply for a government-issued ID. The combined cost is estimated to range from $75 to $175. However, not requiring voter ID is consider a national security threat. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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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

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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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