Randolph Harris II International Institute

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You Have No Idea What it Meant to be Listened to Like that

The scientist of science-fiction and horror films, whose experimentation leads to disastrously unforeseen consequences, is a more anxious representation of the awareness that the most future-oriented nation in the World shows a deep incapacity to plan ahead. We are, as a people, perturbed by our inability to anticipate the consequences of our acts, but we still wait optimistically for some magic telegram, informing us that the tangled skein of misery and self-deception into which we have women ourselves has vanished in the night. Within the walls of a social establishment, formal rules about important status line in industry can be drawn at the point where employees can be explicitly enjoined to “get to work.” (An extreme is seen, apparently, in some Alabama work camps, where “indifference to work” may be punished by the lash or by “cutting up.”) It is well known that “make-work” occurs in these circumstances; namely, an outward show of task activity, an affection of occasioned main involvement performed at an affectation of occasioned main involvement performed at moments of inspection. This activity can be purely situational since it often accomplishes nothing but show. The problem of maintaining an appropriate main involvement has special bearing on street behavior. The act of purposefully going about one’s business, of looking “…as though [one] is coming from some place or going to some place,” involves a dominating objective that leaves the actual focus of attention free for other things; one’s destination, and therefore one’s dominant involvement, lie outside the situation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

Where the subordinate main involvements that can result become intense, as in a heated quarrel or a warm caress, the individual may be seen by others as delinquent in the regard that he owns the gathering at large. In addition to giving the impression of having been diverted from what ought to be the business in mind, individuals may give the impression of having no business at al to get to. Being present in a public place without an orientation to apparent goals outside the situation is sometimes called lolling, when position is fixed, and loitering, when some movement is entailed. Either can be deemed sufficiently improper to merit legal action. On many of our city streets, especially at certain hours, the police will question anyone who appear to be doing nothing and ask him to “move alone.” (In London, a recent court ruling established that an individual has a right to walk on the street but no legal right merely to stand on it.) In Chicago, an individual in the uniform of a less affluent person can loll on “the stem,” but once off this preserve he is required to look as if he were intent on getting to some business destination. Similarly, some mental patients owe their commitment to the fact that the police found them wandering on the streets at off hours without any apparent destination or purpose in mind. An illustration of these street regulations is found in Samuel Beckett’s description of the plight of his fictional disabled hero, Molloy, who tries to manage his bicycle, his crutches, and this tiredness all at the same time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

“Thus we cleared these difficult straits, my bicycle and I, together. However, a little further on I heard myself hailed. I raised my head and saw a policeman. Elliptically speaking, for it was only later, by way of induction, or deduction, I forget which, that I knew what it was. What are you doing there? he said? I’m used to that question, I understood it immediately. Resting, I said. Resting, he said. Resting, I said. Will you answer my question? he cried. So it always is when I am reduced to confabulation, I honestly believe I have answered the question I am asked and in reality I do nothing of the kind. I will not reconstruct the conversation in all its meanderings. It ended in my understanding that my way of resting, my attitude when at rest, aside my bicycle, my arms on the handle bars, my head on my arms, was a violation of I do not know what, public order, public decency.” [Molloy is then taken to jail, question, and released.] What is certain is this, that I never rested in that way again, my feet obscenely resting on the Earth, my arms on the handlebars, and on my arms my heard, rocking and abandoned. It is indeed a deplorable sight, a deplorable example, for the people, who so need to be encouraged, in their bitter toil, and to have before their eyes manifestations of strength only, of courage and of joy, without which they might collapse, at the end of the day, and roll on the ground. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

Lolling and loitering are often, but not always, prohibited. In societies in which café life is institutionalized, much permitted lolling seems to exist. Even in our own society, some toleration is given to “lolling groups,” in which participants open themselves up to any passing momentary focus of attention and decline to maintain a running conversation unless disposed to do so. These clusters of persons passing the time of day may be found on slum corners, outside small-town stores and barber shops, on the streets during clement whether in some metropolitan wholesale clothing districts, and, paradoxically, on the courthouse lawns of some small towns. The rule against “having no purpose,” or being disengaged, is evident in the exploitation of untaxing involvements to rationalize or mask desired lolling—a way of covering one’s physical presence in a situation with a veneer of acceptable visible activity. Thus, when individuals want a “break” in their work routine, they may remove themselves to a place where it is acceptable to some and there some in a pointed fashion. Certain minimal “recreational” activities are also used as covers for disengagement, as in the case of “fishing” off river banks where it is guaranteed that no fish will disturb one’s reverie, or “getting a tan” on the beach—activity that shields reverie or sleep, although, typically with the less affluent lolling, a special uniform may have to be worn, which proclaims and institutionalizes this relative inactivity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

As might be expected, when the context firmly provides a dominant involvement that is outside the situation, as when riding in a train or airplane, then gazing out the window, or reverie, or sleeping may be quite permissible. In short, the more the setting guarantees that the participant has not withdrawn from what he ought to be involved in, the more liberty it seems he will have to manifest what would otherwise be considered withdrawal in the situation. Here is useful to reintroduce a consideration of subordinate involvements such as reading newspapers and looking in the shop windows. Because these involvements in our society represent legitimate momentary diversions from the legitimate object of going about one’s business, they tend to be employed as covers when one’s objective is not legitimate, as the arts of “tailing” suspects have made famous. When Sam Spade affects to be examining a suit in a store window, his deeper purpose is not to try to suggest that he is interested in suits but that he has the same set of purposes as a person in a public street who diverts himself for a moment in going about his business to gaze in a window. Similarly, as an former person without a home tells us, when one’s appearance and real purpose put one outside of the current behavior setting, then a pointedly correct subordinate involvement is essential to convince others that one’s dominant involvement is of the kind that is associated with these subordinate involvements. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

One idiosyncrasy that he [a friend] has discovered but cannot account for is the attitude of station policemen toward book readers. After seven-thirty in the evening, in order to read a book in Grand Central or Penn Station, a person either has to wear horn-rimmed glasses or look exceptionally prosperous. Anyone else is apt to come under surveillance. On the other hand, newspaper readers never seem to attract attention and even the seediest vagrant can sit in Grand Central all night without being molested if he continues to read a paper. Some time ago, I attended a bridge party, I do not play bride—and there was a woman there who did not play bridge either. She had discovered that I had once been Lowell Thomas’ manager before he went on the radio and that I had traveled in Europe a great deal while helping him prepare the illustrated travel talks he was then delivering. So she said: “Oh, Mr. Winchester, I do want you to tell me about all the wonderful places you have visited and the sights you have seen.” As we sat down on the sofa, she remarked that she and her husband had recently returned from a trip to Japan. “Japan!” I exclaimed. “How interesting! I have always wanted to see Japan, but I never got there except for a twenty-four-hour stay once in Tokyo. Tell me, did you visit Tokyo Tower? Yes? How fortunate. I envy you. Do tell me about Japan.” That kept her talking for thirty minutes. She never asked me where I had been or what I had seen. She did not want to hear me talk about my travels. All she wanted was an interested listener, so she could expand her ego and tell about where she had been. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

Was she unusual? No. Many people are like that. For example, I met a distinguished botanists at a dinner party given by a New York book publisher. I had never talked with a botanist before, and I found him fascinating. I literally sat on the edge of my chair and listened while he spoke of exotic plants and experiments in developing new form of plant life and indoor gardens (and even told me astonishing facts about the humble potato). I had a small indoor garden of my own—and he was good enough to tell me how to solve some of my problems. As I said, we were at a dinner party. There must have been two dozen other guests, but I violated all the cannons of courtesy, ignored everyone ese, and talked for hours to the botanist. Midnight came. I said good night to everyone and departed. The botanist then turned to our host and paid me several flattering compliments. I was “most stimulating.” I was this and I was that, and he ended by saying I was a “most interesting conversationalist.” An interesting conversationalist? Why, I had said hardly anything at all. I could not have said anything if I had wanted to without changing the subject, for I did not know any more about botany than I knew about the anatomy of a penguin. However, I had done this: I had listened intently. I had listened because I was genuinely interested. And he felt it. Naturally that pleased him. That kind of listening is one of the highest compliments we can pay anyone. Few human beings are proof against the implied flattery of rapt attention. I was hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

I told him that I had been immensely entertained and instructed—and I had. I told him I wished I had his knowledge—and I did. I told him that I should love to wander the fields with him—and I have. I told him I must see him again—and I did. And so I had him thinking of me as a good conversationalist when, in reality, I had been merely a good listener and had encouraged him to talk. What is the secret, the mystery, of a successful business interview? There is no mystery about successful business intercourse…Exclusive attention to the person who is speaking to you is very important. Nothing else is so flattering as that. Listening is not a science, but a form of activity. Face your interlocutor and hear with your mind and attentively consider what you have to say whole you say it. At the end of an interview the person who has talked will feel they have explained themselves well. Self-evident, is it not? You do not have to study for four years in Harvard to discover that. Yet I know and you know department store owners who will rent expensive space, buy their goods economically, dress their windows appealingly, spend thousands of dollars in advertising and then hire clerks who have not the same sense to be good listeners—clerks who interrupt customers, contradict them, irritate them, and all but drive them from the store. Even the most violent critic will frequently soften and be subdued in the presence of a patient, sympathetic listener—a listener who will be silent while the irate fault-finder dilates like a king cobra and spews the poison out of one’s system. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

For instance: The New York Telephone Company discovered a few years ago that it had to deal with one of the most vicious customers who ever cursed a customer service representative. And he did curse. He raved. He threatened to tear the phone out by its roots. He refused to pay certain charges that he declared were false. He wrote letters to the newspapers. He filed innumerable complaints with the Public Service Commission, and he started several suits against the telephone company. At last, one of the company’s most skillful “troubleshooters” was sent to interview this stormy petrel. This “troubleshooter” listened and let the cantankerous customer enjoy himself pouring out his tirade. The telephone representative listened and said “yes” and sympathized with his grievance. “He raved on and I listened for nearly three hours,” the “troubleshooter” said as he related his experiences before one of the author’s classes. “Then I went back and listened some more. I interviewed him four times, and before the fourth visit was over I had become a charter member of an organization he was starting. He called it the ‘Telephone Subscribers’ Protective Association.’ I am still a member of this organization, and, so far as I know, I am the only member in the World today besides Mr. Ed. I listened and sympathized with him on every point that he had made during these interviews. He had never had a telephone representative talk with him that way before, and he became almost friendly. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

“The point on which I went to see him was not even mentioned on the first visit, nor was it mentioned on the second or third, but upon the fourth interview, I closed the case completely, he paid all his bills in full, and for the first time in the history of his difficulties with the telephone company he voluntarily withdrew his complaints from the Public Service Commission.” Doubtless Mr. Ed had considered himself a holy crusader, defending the public rights against callous exploitation. However, in reality, what he had really wanted was a feeling of importance. He got this feeling of importance at first by kicking and complaining. However, as soon as he got his feeling of importance from a representative of the company, his imagined grievances vanished into thin air. To become successful, it often pays to talk to successful people and find out about their childhood and how they got their start in business and became a success. When you have successful people that want to listen to you, talk to you, and give you guidance these experiences will imbue you with confidence that is invaluable. These people will fire in an individual a vision and ambition that shapes one’s life. And all this is made possible by taking the time to care about others. However, some people are so concerned about what they are going to say next that they do not keep their ears open. Very important people have told me that they prefer good listeners to good talkers, but the ability to listen seems rarer than almost any other good trait. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

Since our contacts with others are increasingly competitive, unanticipated, and abrasive, we seek still more apartness and accelerate the trend. When many people call the doctor, all they want is a good audience. They often feel better after they have a conversation. So many people merely want a friendly, sympathetic listener to whom one can unburden oneself. That is what we all want when we are in trouble. That is frequently all the irritated customer wants, and this dissatisfied employee or the hurt friend. If you want to know how to make people shun you and laugh at you behind your back and even despise you, here is the recipe: Never listen to anyone for long. Talk incessantly about yourself. If you have an idea while the other person is talking, do not wait for him or her to finish: bust right in and interrupt in the middle of a sentence. Conversely, if you aspire to be a good conversationalist, be an attentive listener. To be interesting, be interested. Ask questions that other persons will enjoy answering. Encourage them to talk about themselves and their accomplishments. Remember that the people you are talking to are a hundred times more interested in themselves and their wants and problems than they are in you and your problems. A person’s toothache means more to that person than a famine in California which kills a million people. A boil on one’s neck interests one more than forty Earthquakes in Texas. Think of that next time you start a conversation. The desire to be somehow special inaugurates an even more competitive quest.  Be a good listener. Encourage others to talk about themselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

The core of the old culture is scarcity. Everything in it rests upon the assumption that the World does not contain the wherewithal to satisfy the needs of its human inhabitants. A semi-permeable barrier is anything that prevents some kinds of interactions while permitting others. Often people can make an existing barrier or boundary selectively permeable. In fact, many walks have gates and guards who exercise selective control on comings and goings. Nations have immigration rules enforced at their boarders; religions permit conversions on specific conditions; there are systems of e-mail filters that let in some messages and screen out the rest. Indeed, the rise of the Internet has powerfully directed our attention to the design of semi-permeable barriers. There are such low costs to the movement of information in this medium that there is little indirect filtration of the kind accomplished by costs of movement in physical space. To move a letter to your house promptly, someone must pay first-class postage, which discouraged first-class broadcasting on trivial communications. Even at low rates, postage charges on advertisers serve to filter out many messages, most of them unwanted. However, as we all now realize, plummeting costs of all forms of electronic transmission are contributing to monumental volumes of low-value or even harmful communications. The result is a boom in semi-permeable systems such as sophisticated network firewalls, V-chips for televisions, and the PICS metadata standard that facilitates advance and blocking in selection of Web sites. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

As Information Revolution reduces the cost of moving information in “cyberspace,” we lose a fundamental property of networks embedded in physical space. Those who are “near” you are not necessarily “near” each other. The classical character of conventional social structures is undone, as the mix of connections for each agent contains more relations that lead outside local, mutually connected clusters. This increase of out-group connections changes the spread of rumor and disease and reduces the correlation among the knowledge bases of interacting groups of agents. It also means that many who are near you, or be liked by you. The demand for selective permeability is great when an overwhelming number of interactions that consume time and resources are possible, and the other agents are not well known to you or to those you know well. The introduction of sophisticated filters to achieve semi-permeable barriers in cyberspace is just the most recent episode in a long history of devices that add greater selectivity to simple barriers, whether those barriers are physical or conceptual. Our choice of the label “semi-permeable” reflects some of the earliest inventions of the biological realm, such as members that are able to admit some substances while screening out others. Not only do they function to increase proximity by establishing high concentrations of key resources inside the membrane; in some cases they also affect activation patterns by altering their selectivity as concentrations go above or below key thresholds. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

Beyond such fundamental biological cases, there are many examples of semi-permeability in the social World. To the guards and immigration officers mentioned earlier we can add the secretaries who control access to their boss’s calendar; the boards that test, accept, and expel members of professions such as law and dentistry; the automatic gates that lock entry to a parking lot when it is estimated to be full; and the priests who enforce rules of religious “immigration.” In all these cases a barrier is conditionally opened or closed to an agent wishing to move through it. It is no accident that many of the examples involve delegating a person to make those choices. The selectivity is important and not easy to automate well—as anyone knows who has looked wistfully at an empty parking place lying just beyond a blocking automatic gate that “thinks” the lot is full. The great advantage of semi-permeable barriers is the increased precision of blocking and permitting movement in physical or social spaces. Crude physical restrictions may amount to “no one may pass.” Conceptual barriers can be more selective, providing more complex rules that allow desirable types to pass. Semi-permeable barriers can allow passage where admission should be governed by momentary conditions, such as parking lot fullness, or in situations where rules cannot cover well all the circumstances that may arise—as may happen at the door of a highly popular discotheque. The great disadvantage is the possible mismatch between the riles or criteria governing the selective admission and the long-term welfare of the system behind the barrier. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

A religious community may have too few children born or surviving, but the priests may stick to strenuous tests for converts, driving membership below viable levels. The automatic gate may have an error-prone method of estimating the occupancy of the parking lot. Cell walls may admit virus particles with a shape that resembles a needed protein. Both conceptual and semi-permeable barriers may admit the wrong agents or block the right ones. It is also interesting that some viruses are more infections right after a person catches them, than we they have had time to ravage the body. And vaccines and pills do not permit all persons from passing viruses on, they may not work on some people. It is easy to produce examples of the many ways in which Americans attempt to minimize, circumvent, or deny the interdependence upon which all human societies are based. Such large unnoticed changes will also force us to rethink the very functions of the firm. If much of the value added derives from relationships in the mosaic system, then the value a firm produces and its own value comes, in part, from its continually changing position in the super-symbolic economy. Accountants and managers who attempt to quantify added value and assign it to specific subsidiaries or profit centers are compelled to make arbitrary, often quite subjective judgments, since conventional accounting typically ignores the value-generating importance of “organizational capital” and all these like “good will” only crudely and inadequately reflect the mounting importance of such assets. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

Management theorists are belatedly beginning to speak of “organizational capital.” However, there is also what might be called “positional capital”—the strategic location of the firm in the overall web-work of mosaics and meta-mosaics. In any given industry, a crucial position in one of these wealth-producing systems is money in the bank—and power in the pocket. To be frozen out or forced to the periphery can be disastrous. All this suggests that the big corporation or company is no longer necessarily the central institution for the production of material wealth in the capitalist World and the advanced economies generally. What we are seeing is the divorce of the big corporation from the key material processes of wealth creation. These are performed by small and medium-sized business or by the subcorporations called profit centers. With so much of the hands-on work done in these units, the functions of top management in the large corporation have less and less to do with enduring production and more to do with setting very general strategic guidelines; organizing and accounting for capital; litigating and lobbying; and substituting information for all the other factors of production. This delegation or contracting-out of many of the functions of the large corporation—once the central production institution in the economy—has a historical precedent. The industrial revolution stripped away many of the functions from the traditional family—that other key institution of society. Education went to the schools, care of the elderly went to the state, work was transferred to the factory, and so forth. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

Today, since many of its former functions can be carried out by small units armed with high-powered information technology, the large business firm is being similarly stripped of some of its traditional reasons for being. The family did not disappear after the industrial revolution. However, it became smaller, took on more limited responsibility, and lost much of its power vis-à-vis other institutions in the society. The same is happening to the large corporation as we transit out of the smokestack era dominated by Brobdingnagian business. In short, even as big corporations expand, the significance of the corporation, as an institution, contracts. It is still too early for any of us fully to understand the power-mosaics that are now rapidly taking form and the long-term destiny of the corporation. However, once thing is certain: The notion that a tiny handful of giant companies will dominate tomorrow’s economy is a comic-book caricature of reality. In 1981, Ronald Regan was a newly elected president with tremendous popular appeal. However, could he carry his vision for tax reform through Congress? The battle lines were drawn in the fight over his first budget proposal. The Democrats wanted Reagan to compromise, sacrificing part of the tax cut for the sake of a smaller deficit. The Republicans wanted the full dose of supply-side economies. The outcome would depend on how the two parties played game. In the Senate, the Democrats went along with Reagan’s budget, hoping to induce some Republican compromise in return for the bipartisan support. However, the Republicans held firm to the original plan. Thus the scene turned to the House of Representatives. Was there some better strategy for the Democrats? #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

A pair of New York Times columns by Leonard Silk neatly laid out the strategic possibilities. As he described the negotiations, each party had two choices and there were four possible outcomes. Republicans triumph, Democrats avoid blame. Republicans win, but vex Reagan; Democrats share credit. Republican program blocked in House; Democrats incur blame. Republicans lose much of program; Democrats look fiscally responsible. The Democrats regard as best the outcome where they attack Regan and the Republicans compromise, because the Democrats can claim the credit for fiscal responsibility while implementing their favored budget. For the Republicans, the best outcome occurs in the top left, where Reagan’s budget gets bipartisan support. When the Democrats attack while the Republicans hold firm, the result is a stalemate and both parties lose. The Democrats would be willing to moderate their attack if the Republicans would compromise; both parties would get their second-best outcome. The Democrats’ main problem is that the Republicans have a dominant strategy: support Regan completely. If the Democrats mainly support Reagan, the Republicans should support Reagan completely to attain their top outcome. If the Democrats attack Reagan, the Republicans should support Reagan to avoid their worst outcome. Whatever the Democrats do, it is always better for the Republicans to support Reagan completely. Reagan completely leaves the Republicans in a better position than the Democrats, no matter what strategy the Democrats choose. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

Thus the Republican strategy seems easy to predict. The Democrats should expect the Republicans to support Reagan completely, and then the Democrats do best by following suit and mainly supporting Reagan. This is exactly what happened in the Senate. So far, the outcome greatly favors the Republicans. To improve their position, the Democrats need to make some type of strategic move. They must turn the situation into a sequential move game, moving first and then letting the Republicans respond to their strategy. Since the Republicans are already at their most preferred outcome, there is nothing they can do to improve their position. Their goals is simply to maintain the status quo. It is in their interest to prevent the Democrats from making any strategic move that changes the outcome of the game. Thus we consider what type of threats, promises, or other moves shift the outcome in favor of the Democrats. None of the basic strategies seem to work for the Democrats. Unconditional moves, promises, even threats all fail. Only the combined use of a threat and promise can induce Republican compromise. The problem with unconditionality is that it does not influence the Republican position. The Democrats are currently expected to support Reagan. Committing themselves to this action does not alter the Republicans’ perception and thus leads to the same outcomes. The only strategic possibility is for the Democrats to attack Reagan unconditionally. In this case, they can look forward and reason that the Republicans will still respond by supporting Reagan completely. (The Republicans always prefer to support Reagan completely—it is their dominant strategy.) #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

However, the combination of Democrats attacking with the Republicans giving complete support is worse for the Democrats than the alternative of both parties supporting Reagan. The Democrats want to induce the Republicans to move from completely supporting Reagan to compromise. Therefore, they might promise to support Reagan if the Republicans agree to compromise. If the Republicans agree, the Democrats will have an incentive to renege on the deal. This promise must be irreversible in order to have an effect. However, the promise will not help them. The Republicans know that if they ignore the promise and choose to support Reagan completely, the Democrats’ best response is to support Reagan. The effect of the Democrats’ promise is that they end up unconditionally supporting Reagan. The Republicans appreciate this gesture and proceed to support Reagan completely, maintaining the best outcome. The promise is pointless. The Republicans can safely ignore it. The Democrats have only one threat that they can use to stop the Republican support of Reagan. They can threaten to attack Reagan is the Republicans support him completely. However, the threat is not enough. The effect of the threat is tht the Democrats have unconditionally committed to attack Reagan. If the Republicans support Reagan, the Democrats carry out their threat and attack Reagan; if the Republicans compromise, it is the Democrats’ best interest to attack Reagan. Since the Democrats attack Reagan whatever the Republicans do, the Republicans support Reagan completely, making the best of the two possibilities. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

A promise ends up being equivalent to unconditional Democrat support for Reagan, while a threat is equivalent to an unconditional Democrat attack on Reagan. Neither is effective in changing the Republicans’ actions. If the Democrats combine a promise with a threat, they can achieve a better result for themselves. They should promise to support Regan if the Republicans compromise and threaten to attach Reagan if the Republicans support Reagan completely. This strategy achieves the Democrats’ goals. With this threat and promise in place, the Republicans must choose between compromising and getting the Democrats to mainly support Reagan, or supporting Reagan completely and thereby provoking the Democrats to attack Reagan. Between these two alternatives, they prefer the compromise. What actually happened was that Republicans supported Reagan completely in both the Senate and in the House. The Senate Democrats went along with the Republicans. In the House, the Democrats’s initial resistance quickly gave way to a third strategy: they out-Reaganed Reagan in the tax-cutting game. The result was a bipartisan “Christmas-tree” tax cut. The economic bills for tht are just coming due, and the negotiations to get out of the difficulty are developing into new strategic games. New problems require thinking beyond the edges of the known, and no problem needs new thinking more than the ever-worsening global energy crisis. Today it is clear that our existing energy system is heading toward a climatic crash, not merely because of the amount of energy required but because of its centralized infrastructures and overconcentrated ownership. Both of these were, and perhaps are still, appropriate for industrial economies. However, they are decidedly inappropriate for dispersed knowledge-intensive economies increasingly based on intangibility. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

The economic rise of countries such as China and India heightens demand for energy at a time when it costs more and more to extract crude oil from the Earth, when growing reliance on fossil fuels exacerbates ecological problems and when oil comes from some of the most politically unstable regions on the planet. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, approximately 4000 quadrillion Btu of energy per year were bought and sold in World energy markets. They mainly came from oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear sources, with oil in the dominate source, providing approximately 40 percent of the total. The U.S.A. Department of Energy forecast that by 2025 the total would climb to 623 Btu, a rise of 54 percent. Despite this increase in demand, the DoE assured us that fossil-fuel process are “projected to remain relatively low” and that alternative energy sources “are not expected to become competitive” unless government policies to reduce greenhouse-gas emission, as called for under the Kyoto Protocol, are implemented—at which time “nuclear power and renewable energy sources such as hydroelectricity, geothermal, biomass, solar and wind power could become more attractive.” In short, expect nothing too exciting. Contrast this with forecast of pessimist-in-chief Matthew R. Simmons, an influential energy-industry investment banker. Simmons, using oil as a proxy for the energy picture as a whole, tells us that many of the World’s most important oil fields are in “serious decline,” that we cannot trust the industry’s estimates of underground reserves and that finding new oil more and more expensive. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

Add the fact that tankers, refineries, drilling rigs and people are all “nearing 100 percent capacity,” he says, and this is a problem that “will take a decade(s?) to correct.” Worse yet, he notes, oil companies and electric utilities, like other industries that have sifted to just-in-time operations, have minimized their backup supplies, setting the stage for catastrophe. The energy crisis is, at least in part, a radical consequence of de-synchronization at work—the rise of Asian demand coming much faster than the industry and the market anticipated. That helps explain why there may not be enough new tankers built in time, enough refineries or enough inventory stored for emergencies. Having made his compelling case, Simmons steps back from doomsday, saying, more cheerfully, that “man’s creativity seems at its best at times of great crisis.” However, none of these projections takes adequate account of many possible developments that could change the picture for better or worse: Social upheavals and economic slowdowns in China, India, or both; regional epidemics causing massive populations of declines; Chinese control of the Malacca Strait and sea lanes by which oil reaches Asia from the Middle East; or little-noticed technological changes that may well reduce energy requirements—for example, the continued miniaturization of products, reducing weight, transport and storage requirements. Even more important is the approaching demise of the internal combustion engine and its replacement by hydrogen-powered fuel cells. Within a few years we will see a million fuel-cell cars on the roads in China, where they do not have as big a legacy gasoline distribution system as we do. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

We will have cars whose 110-kilowatt fuels cells can also serve as an auxiliary power source. So, in rural areas, where there is no electricity, you can drive to a village, plug it into the car, and provide energy for fuel cells or other proposes. Clearly, while there will be many false steps and failures along the way, we are edging out of the fossil-fuel era. Another area of concern is the human body. Assaults from outside the body turn it into a battlefield where the aggressors sometimes get the upper hand. From parasitic worms to protozoa to fungi to bacteria to viruses, organisms of many kinds have learned to live by entering the body and using their molecular machinery to build more of themselves from the body’s building blocks. To meet this onslaught, the body musters the defenses of the immunes system—an armada of its own molecular machines. Your body’s own amoebalike white blood cells patrol the bloodstream and move out into tissue, threading their way between other cells, searching for invaders. How can the immune system distinguish the hundred of kinds of cells that should be in the body from the invading cells and viruses that should not? This has been the central question of the complex science of immunology. The answer, as yet only partially understood, involves a complex interplay of molecules that recognize other molecules by sticking to them in a selective fashion. These include free-floating antibodies—which are a bit like bumbling guided missiles—and similar molecules that are bound to the surface of white blood cells and other cells of the immune system, enabling to recognize foreign surfaces on contact. First the immune system does not respond to all invaders, or responds inadequately. Malaria, tuberculosis, herpes, and other illnesses have their strategies for evading destruction. Cancer is a special case in which the invaders are altered cells of the body itself, sometimes successfully masquerading as healthy cells escaping detection. Second, the immune system sometimes overresponds, attacking cells that should be left alone. Certain kinds of arthritis, as well as lupus and rheumatic fever, are caused by this mistake. Between attacking when it should not and not attack when it should, the immune system often fails, causing suffering and death. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24

MAGNOLIA STATION AT CRESLEIGH RANCH

Rancho Cordova, CA |

Coming Soon!

Large Lots with mix of Single Story and Two Story homes
2,200 – 3,700 square feet | 3 – 7 Bedrooms | 2 – 5.5 Bathrooms | up to 4-car garage

Like the Looking-Glass Country

Many of the problems being faced in America can be linked to a tendency to avoid confrontation of chronic social problems. This avoiding tendency often comes as a surprise to people from other nations, who tend to think of Americans as pragmatic and down-to-earth. In many social situations, a particular main involvement will be seen as an intrinsic part of the social occasion in which the situation occurs, and will be defined as preferential if not obligatory. At a card playing party, for example, participants may be expected to focus their attention on cards, justifying this allocation of involvement by reference to the nature of the social occasion. As suggested, we can therefore speak of occasioned main involvements. The significance of maintaining an occasioned main involvement can be seen, in relief, by examining what happens when an individual is insufficiently knowing to “catch” the meaning of what is going on. At such times he will have great difficulty in sustaining attention and hence proper involvement within the situation. This is problem is faced by international students in a classroom lecture or by persons not British at a cricket match. Similarly, when an amateur examining his car engine to determine why his car has stalled feels uncomfortable under the gaze of the other passengers, this discomfort may arise not only because he has cased them an inconvenience and is demonstrating incompetence, but also because he must act involved in his task and may not know enough about motors to become sincerely caught up in examining one for failings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Insufficient experience is not the only cause of such a predicament. When guests at a small occasion of sociability are momentarily left by their host to their own devices, a similar problem occurs: expecting to be guaranteed sociable interaction, they may find nothing available as a legitimate main involvement and hence no means of being at ease. Interestingly enough, if an individual is insufficiently schooled in a subject matter to participate in it from within, as it were, and attempts to compensate for his alienation by wearing exactly the right clothes, employing exactly the right equipment, or assuming exactly the right stance, those around him may say that he is “overinvolved in the situation.” In fact, however, it might be more accurate to say that he is insufficiently involved in the occasioned main involvement and overdependent on selected signs of being at one with this activity. In this way we might try to account for the slight uneasiness caused others by a woman not closely related to the deceased who appears at the funeral in a very modish, very complete, black ensemble. The main involvement sustained by an individual within a social situation can express his apparent purpose in being present; and obligation to have an appropriate main involvement is an obligation to have a particular purpose. As suggested, however, there are social situations in which those present do have a purpose, even an obligator one, that does not in itself require or even allow a main involvement, for example, when an individual in a vehicle of public transportation sits or stands while awaiting his destination. At such times the individual may sustain quite absorbing main involvements which are patently subordinated to a dominant involvement that cannot yet occur. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Whether an occasioned main involvement is prescribed or not, the participant in a social gathering—at least in a middle-class gathering—may be obliged to sustain at least a certain minimal main involvement to avoid the appearance of being utterly disengaged. This is one reason why waiting rooms, club cars, and passenger airplanes in our society often are supplied by management with emergency supplies such as magazines and newspapers, which serve as minimal involvements that can be given weight (when there is nothing but waiting to do) yet can be immediately discarded when one’s turn or destination arrives. Newspapers, in particular, play an important role here, providing a portable source of involvement, which can be brought forth whenever an individual feels he ought to have an involvement but does not. In our society meals provide an interesting problem in involvement allocation. In public restaurants eating is defined as the dominating involvement, and yet it is also seen as something that perhaps ought not to engage very much of the individual’s attention. Often, therefore, subordinate involvements will be sought out to drain off some unusable involvement capacity. Thus, when an individual finds he must eat alone without the cover of conversation with an eating partner, he may bring along a newspaper or a magazine as a substitute companion. Interestingly enough, should the individual read from a scholarly tome in these situations, he may be considered too absorbed for public propriety, too distracted from the dominating activity, and incidentally too little available in the situation at large should he suddenly be called upon to direct his attention to something. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

It may be added that pocket books, serious though they may be in content, tend to scout this ruling because of their appearance and cost; this may be one reason for their popularity. And should he have nothing to read, he may elect to sit at the counter and, by having a quick and simple meal, exhibit that some of his involvement is lodged in other affairs to which he is rushing. Facing away from the gathering and toward the counter, he can correct for his exposure in the situation by being located at its edges if not outside it. Interestingly enough, there are situations in which certain minor involvements are explicitly demanded, the implication being that the occasion is not important enough to justify a complete absorption in the occasioned main involvement. In Shetland Isle, young women participating in evening family conversation were sometimes obliged to knit at the same time, this side involvement being an important source of household income. Similarly, in one convent we learn that nuns understood that: You came to the recreation with your workbag…In the bag you carried the work your hand must do while you sat in the circle, for no hands might lie idly folded in the lap. The work, moreover, had to be something manual like darning or knitting. It could not be anything self-absorbing like letter-writing, sketching or reading which would take your attention from the sisters sitting around you. These illustrations of the balance required between main and side involvements may seem to touch on trivial aspects of behavior, but there are circumstances in which the seriousness of the issue becomes very evident. For example, a constant complaint of patients on the admission wards of mental hospitals is that there is literally nothing to do. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Not only does the medical treatment that would seem to constitute the occasioned involvement fail to materialize, but all the usual safety devices for providing subordinate involvements, previously mentioned, may be unavailable, or, if available, may have to be relied upon for a greater period of time than they were apparently designed to manage. Here, improper management of involvement within the situation must be displayed in just those circumstances where its observation by others may be very threatening. The patient, in short, is forced to act oddly just at a time and in a place where the one thing uppermost in his mind may be to demonstrate that he is normal. Should the patient take strong exception to his circumstances, he may be shifted to a “seclusion room,” where, quite literally, there may be nothing at all available to provide an acceptable main focus of attention. Alone in a stripped room, it will be nearly impossible for him to act suitably engaged and hence nearly impossible to act sane, and so the patient may try to cover up the judas-hole in the cell door in order to prevent passers-by from transforming a private predicament into a social situation. Failure to sustain a required degree and kind of main involvement does not occur merely because of a lack of appreciative understanding of what is going on or because of an impoverished environment. While present in a gathering, the individual may find that his concerns and interest lie outside it, being the kind that can be satisfied within an actual social situation but not the current one. The expressed impatience that may result, the sense of straining at the situation’s bonds, is something everyone has witnessed and displayed. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Common, too, are those conditions that lead an individual to say he is bored and to feel phlegmatic and affectless to engage in a suitable main involvement. It is worth commenting on another possibility, namely, that an individual can apparently feel too anxious and excited to participate properly. Whatever the acceptable main involvements available in the situation, the individual may find himself too agitated to give the required part of himself up to any of them. The kind of preoccupation has been memorialized for us in the expectant father cartoon. Persons who fidget and pace approach this condition; and in mental hospitals, manic patients realize it. One of the most poignant mental hospital scenes is that of a patient too excited or distraught to settle into what is available in the situation, yet desperately attempting to do so. Thus, one famous ex-patient, describing his efforts to control himself during periods of excitement, records: “I have often felt this [unhealthy mental excitement] and felt also that it could be often controlled by a determined exercise of the will. Often I have risen and walked firmly through the room or field, holding myself in as I would rein in a horse which was striving to break away in spite of curb-chain, bridle, or bit.” Sometimes the patient gives the impression that he knows he cannot hope to contain himself in the situation and is now concerned merely with giving others some impression of being properly present. In Central Hospital I observed one patient who would walk from one end of the day-room to the other, where there was a doorway leading out to the porch, bravely attempting to give the impression that there was something on the porch he had to see to, and then, without entering the porch, retrace his steps and repeat the cycle. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

Another patient, a young psychotic woman, with the incredibly rapid tempo of a patient with motor excitement, seemed to attempt to squeeze herself back into the situation by dumping one ashtray into another, one bowl of water into another, one plate of food into another, apparently in the vain hope that it would look as though she were doing something acceptable and meaningful. Another, in repeatedly leaving her cafeteria seat, going to the doorway, and then coming back, would try to cover this anxious action by keeping on her face the studied look of someone who had to be somewhere at a particular time. There are many social situations where individuals can be found who affect to be caught up in the occasioned proceedings but who in fact have their own special business to pursue and hence their own allocation of involvement. The phrase “to mix with the crowd” tends to be reserved for criminals, detectives, reporters, and other heroes of dissimulation, but the process is in actuality quite a common one. Thus, in some urban public libraries, the staff and the local people without homes may reach a tacit understanding that dozing is permissible as long as the dozer first draws out a book and props it up in front of his head. In Central Hospital an interesting example of this dissimulation occurred in regard to well-liked attendants who would participate in the organized recreational activity of the parole patients and be quite fully accepted by the patients while doing so. Yet when a fight occurred among the patients at these times, or an attempted escape, the attendant often seemed to be on the scene even before some of the patients present realized anything untoward had happened. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

At such moments some patients became a little disillusioned, realizing that the attendant’s participation was in part merely a show, that his spirit had not been caught up by the occasion, and that all along he had been alertly standing guard. It is in cases such as these, when the show of proper involvement is given away, that we obtain a clear outline of the constraints that are unusually unfelt and invisible. Now, while it is important for people to like it, it does not mean that we have to desperately seek their approval. However, it is crucial to be likeable. Other than being civil and treating people with respect, another way to show you care for them is to remember their names. Also, when doing business with other people, it may be a good idea to find out his or her complete name and some facts about his or her family, business and political opinions. Fix all these facts well into your mind as part of the picture, and the next time you met that person, inquire after the family, and ask about yacht and polo match. You will develop a following! One would do well to discover early in life that the average person is more interested in his or her own name than in all the other names on Earth put together. Remember that name and call it easily, and you have paid a subtle and very effective compliment. However, forget it or misspell it—and you have placed yourself at a sharp disadvantage. For example, I once organized a public-speaking course in Paris and sent form letters to all the American residents in the city. French typists with apparently little knowledge of English filled in the names and naturally they made blunders. One man, the manager of a large America bank in Paris, wrote me a scathing rebuke because his name had been misspelled. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

The bigger a corporation becomes, the colder they become. One way to warm it up is to remember people’s names, and even if you are having a series of bad days, try to be nice and make it seem that your life is perfect. When an executive says he or she cannot remember names, it usually means he or she cannot remember a significant pat of one’s business and is operating on quicksand. People love personalized treatment, it makes them feel special and important. People are so proud of their names that they strive to perpetuate them at any cost. President Donald Trump built towers and hotels, William Randolph Hearst built castles and mansion, Sarah L. Winchester built one of the largest in most unique Queen Anne Victorian mansion in the World. Libraries and museums owe their richest collections to people who cannot bear to think that their names might perish from the memory of the race. The New York Public Library has its Astor and Lenox collections. The Metropolitan Museum perpetuates the names of Benjamin Altman and J. P. Morgan. And nearly every church is beautified by art-glass windows commemorating the names of the donors who contributed large sums of money for this honor. Most people do not remember their names, for the simple reason that they do not take the time and energy necessary to concentrate and repeat and fix names indelibly in their minds. They make excuses for themselves; they are too busy. However, remembering a name could make a person feel you are sincere and they are important to you and that could land you a huge account at work. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

One time I had to meet with a client for an open house, and the event was to be catered. This particular client had an allergy to egg products and was interested in purchasing several homes as investment properties that he would rent out to his family. So, we made sure to remove any items that had eggs in them from the menu. He was so impressed that we took the time to accommodate his special needs that wrote a note to the manager and told him, “Your staff knows a lot about the fine art of handling people.” Later he signed the deal. Half the time we are introduced to a stranger, we chat a few minutes and cannot even remember his or her name by the time we say goodbye. One of the first lessons a politician learns is this: “To recall a voter’s name is statesmanship. To forget it is oblivion.” If you do not hear the name distinctly, say, “So sorry. I did not get the name clearly.” Then, if it is an unusual name, as them, “How is it spelled?” During the conversation, take the trouble to repeat the name several times, and try to associate it in your mind with the person’s features, expression, and general appearance. If the person is someone extremely important, leave a note of their name in your mobile phone. All this takes time, but good manners are made up of petty sacrifices. The importance of remembering and using names is not just the prerogative of kings and corporate executives. It works for all of us. Sometimes if you remember a person’s name, smile at them, and then tell them what you want, you may get a little extra roast beef on your sandwich. We should always be aware of the magic contained in a name and realize that this single item is wholly and completely owned by the person with whom we are dealing…and nobody else. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

The name sets the individual apart; it makes one unique among all others. The information we are imparting or the request we are making takes on a special importance when we approach the situation with the name of the individual. From the waitress to the senior executive, the name will work magic as we deal with others. Remember that a person’s name is to that person the sweetest and most important sound in any language. In contemporary life the book of experience is filled with blank and mysterious pages. Conceptual spaces are used by the agents themselves to make distinctions. Accompanying these distinctions there are usually boundaries. Movement in a conceptual space is not free of restriction. An agent in a hereditary caste system cannot simply pick up and move to another cast. Nor can an employee just move to a better-paying job at will. The barriers to movement are part of what defines the “location.” Supervisory jobs that pay more have specific qualifications and may be subject to a competitive selection process. Castes are defined by socially maintained rules of entry and exit. Conceptual barriers are among the most extraordinary human inventions for accomplishing goals. There are clan identities, club, and fraternity membership criteria, citizenship rules, ethnic groupings, religious affiliations, and a host of other socially defined categories with hard boundaries. These conceptual barriers place much more refined filters on patterns of interaction. Because they are conceptual rather than physical, their effects on interactions can be much more selective. Clan identity may dictate one kind of restriction on material interactions (such as marrying within your religion), another kind of restriction on commercial ones (such as borrowing money from outside the clan), and none at all on relations such as who can be employed. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Moreover, the members of the clan may be dispersed in space. Although no physical boundary could effectively contain all the members and only the members, the concept of the clan can contain them and structure their interactions with each other and with other agent types. Interaction determined simply by coresidence within a common physical region cannot be so finely differentiated by types of agents. This is an enormous advantage for conceptual barriers as a means of shaping interaction patterns. As always, there are disadvantages. Conceptual barriers, like their physical counterparts, can be causes of underexploration because they restrict interactions to homogeneous and familiar pools of other agents. Members of commercia firms often find that they have fallen into a pattern of talking about the business only with other members of the firm. The opportunities for learning about markets not being served are diminished when this happens. Arguments for diversity of religious and cultural types in public institutions often make the underexploration point, that there is much to be leaned from interactions that are more heterogeneous. It is against these revolutionary changes in our uses of time, space, and knowledge that another unanticipated historical event is unfolding—the resurgence, as we have seen, of what we have termed prosuming. We know that in ancient times our ancestors fed, clothed and sheltered themselves long before the invention of money. They produced what they needed to consume. We also know that gradually, over the millennia, people prosumed less and relied more on money and markets. The common assumption of those who bothered to think about this was that prosuming would continue to diminish—that people creating unpaid value outside the market would shrivel into irrelevancy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Yet exactly the opposite is happening. While shrinking in its First Wave forms, prosuming is rapidly expanding in new, Third Wave ways. It is producing more economic value, feeding more “free lunch” into the money economy and doing so through more channels. It is actually increasing productivity in the money sector and, as the World Wide Web and Linux have shown, it is challenging some of the biggest and most powerful governments and corporations in the World. Prosuming could even, ultimately, transform the ways in which we deal with problems like unemployment. Since the Great Depression of the 1930s and the rise of Keynesian economics, part of the textbook solution for unemployment has been the injection of public funds into the money economy to stimulate consumer demand, and, through that, make jobs. The reasonable assumption was that if a million workers were out of jobs, the creation of a million jobs would solve the problem. In a knowledge-intensive economy, however, that assumption is false. First, the United States of America and other countries no longer even know how many unemployed there are, or what that terms means when so many people combine their “job” with self-employment and/or create unpaid value by prosuming. More important, even creating five million jobless workers lack the particular knowledge or skill sets required by the new labor market. The problem of unemployment thus becomes qualitative rather than merely quantitative. Nor is conventional retraining as useful as it sounds, since, by the time new skills are learned, the economy’s knowledge requirements may well have shifted again. In short, unemployment in knowledge economies is different from that in assembly-line economies. It is structural. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The largely overlooked reality is that even the unemployed are employed. They are busy, as all of us are, creating unpaid value. This is yet another reason to reexamine the entire relationship of money and non-money sectors of the wealth system—the two lobes, as it were, of the brain-based economies of tomorrow. New, more powerful technologies will increase prosumer productivity. How can that be used more effectively to stimulate the money economy? Are there better ways to channel value back and forth between these two parts of wealth system? Are Linus and the Web the only models? Are there ways to remunerate the unremunerated for their contributions—perhaps with computer-assisted, multi-participant barter systems or even new “paracurrencies” of one kind or another? A generation ago, mosaics had a different structure. Typically, they looked like pyramids or wheel-and-spoke arrangements. A big company was surrounded by a ring of suppliers and distributors. The giant dominated the other firms in its grouping, dealers and suppliers alike serving essentially as it satellites. Customers and labor unions were also weak in comparison with the jumbo company. It goes without saying that large firms today still carry tremendous clout. However, things are rapidly changing. First, suppliers today are no longer just selling goods or services. They are also supplying critical information and, conversely, sucking information out of the buyer’s data bases. They are, as the buzzword has it, “partnering” with their clients. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Many corporations are able to rely on an independent network of third-party business partners—independent software developers, makers of peripheral equipment, dealers, and retailers….Some critical wrongly assert that such arrangements have led to the emergence of the “hollow corporation,” a vulnerable shell whose survival is dependent on outside companies. However, it is believed that this mosaic arrangement permits corporations to be lean, fleet, and adaptive, and that especially in times of crisis it is the “partners” who help corporations pull through. In fact, for every dollar of revenue in the catalyst company, the external infrastructure may generate three to four additional dollars of sales…Of far greater import is the enhanced flexibility to turn change and chaos into opportunity. In the past, companies often mouthed the rhetoric of partnership. Today they are finding themselves thrust into it. By tracing information patterns in a power-mosaic, we gain a clue to where real power and productivity lie. For example, communication flows might be densest between a parts supplier and manufacturer (or more accurately between a specific unit of each). The shipping operation of one and the stock-intake operation of the other form, in effect, a single organic unit—a key relationship. The fact that for accounting purposes, or for financial reasons, one is part of Company A and the other a part of Company B is increasingly divorced from the productive reality. In fact, the people in each of these departments may have more common interest in and loyalty to this relationship than to their own companies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

At Matsushita in Japan the partnering process has been formalized into something called “high productivity through investment of total wisdom.” Matsushita meets with its subcontractors at an early stage of product’s design and asks them to help improve it, in order to shorten time lags and get the product to market faster. Kozaburo Sikata, chairman of Kyoei-kai, the association of Matsushita subcontractors, expects this system to become standard practice. Sharing previously unshared information at the start is not something Matsushita does out of the goodness of its heart, but because competition demands it. And one can be sure that, as big as Matsushita is, its executives listen carefully when its 324 organized suppliers speak. Beyond this, suppliers these days are not just linked electronically to the big company, like spokes to a wheel-hub; they are, and increasingly will be, linked to one another a well, which means they are in far stronger position to form coalitions when necessary to apply pressure on the big firm. There is still another reason why the emerging mosaics no longer necessarily consist of dominators and dominated. With the breakup of the monolithic corporation into profit centers smaller and often weaker than themselves. The size of the parent firm, once a major factor, is increasingly irrelevant. It is, therefore, no longer sensible, as power shifts from monoliths to mosaics, to take for granted that giant firms dominate the mosaics of which they are a part. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Indeed, the large firm is also pressured from the other side, by customers who are increasingly organized into “users councils.” Ostensibly these groups are in business to exchange technical data. In reality, they are a new form of consumer lobby. Proliferating rapidly and arming themselves with high-powered legal, technical, and other expertise, users’ organizations represent countervailing power, and can often compel their supplier firms, regardless of size, to meet their demands. Such groups are especially active in the computer field, where, for example, users of VAX and Lotus software are organized. IBM customers are organized into many groups, joined in a single international council that represents some 10,000 companies, including some of the biggest in the World. IBM now boasts that it listens to its users. It better. Members of these groups may at one and the same time be customers, competitors, and joint venturers. Business life is becoming confusingly poly-relational. The idea, therefore, that few monolithic giants will command the economy of the future is simple-minded. In the new there is always an admixture of the old, and this is true of the protean counterculture now burgeoning in the United States of America. For over sixty years, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) sought a credible deterrence to any Russian attempt to invade Western Europe. A conventional defense by NATO forces was not likely to succeed. A primary component of the NATO deterrence was based on the U.S.A. nuclear forces. Yet, a nuclear response would be devastating for the whole World. How could this work? #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The Russians have the first move. If they do not attack, we have the status quo; score move. If they attack, we have the status quo; score this 0 for each side. If they attack and NAO attempts a conventional defense, suppose the Russians have the payoff 1 and the United States of America has -1. A nuclear response gives -100 to each side. In this game, the Russians look ahead and forecast that their aggression will not bring forth a nuclear response. It is not in the U.S.A. interest after the fact. Thus attacking will give them the payoff 1; not attacking, 0. Therefore they will attack. If you think this is an unlikely scenario, the European members of NATO thought it all too likely that the United States of America would desert them in their time of need in just this way. They wanted the United States of America to commit credibly to a nuclear response. Let us leave aside the issues of credibility for now and examine the mechanics of how such a threat could work. Now the United States of America has the first move, namely the response rule it puts in place. The pertinent rule is the threat: “If the Russians attack Western Europe, our response will be nuclear.” If the United States of America does not make the threat, the rest of the game unfolds as before. With the threat in place, the choice of a conventional defense no longer exists. Once the U.S.A. threat is in place, the Russians loo ahead and recognize that aggression will meet a nuclear response and result in a Russian payoff of -100. They prefer the status quo, and so do not invade. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Now the United States of America in its first move looks ahead to all this and sees that its payoff is 0 with the threat and 1 without. Therefore U.S.A. interests dictate making the threat. Once again, observe that the U.S.A. response rule requires doing something that is not the best response after the fact. Therein lies the strategic purpose: by credibly altering the Russians’ perception of the U.S.A. response after the fact, the United States of America can change “the fact” –namely, the Russian decision whether or not to invade Western Europe. The rule must be in place before the other party has already taken the action you want to influence. After the fact, neither an unconditional move nor threats and promises have any relevance. This first move must be either observed or inferred by the rival, or else you cannot use it for strategic effect. In the film Dr. Strangelove, the Russians install their sure deterrent, the doomsday device, on a Friday, but delay telling the Americas until Monday. Over the weekend, U.S.A. Air Force General Jack D. Ripper orders his squadron of planes to launch a nuclear attack. The deterrent fails by being unobservable. Observability is not as straightforward as it seems. One need not actually observe the other person’s actions if the action can be inferred from the consequence. If I am allergic to shellfish, I can tell that you cooked with shrimp even if I did not actually observe you in the kitchen. Just as your unconditional move must be observable if it is to influence your rival, his actions must be observable if you are to influence them by threats or promises. Otherwise you cannot check his compliance, and he knows this. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Now that you have seen how credible unconditional moves and threats have their effects, you will be able to analyze most simple situations of this kind without drawing a game tree in all its detail. A verbal argument will usually suffice. If ever it does not, and you doubt if the prose has covered all the cases correctly, you can always check the reasoning by drawing an outline. We can make war on poverty but shrink from the extensive readjustments required to stop breeding it. The body is a type of workyard. Molecular machines do the daily work of the body. When we chew and swallow, muscles drive our motions. Muscle fibers contain bundles of molecular fibers that shorten by sliding past one another. In the stomach and intestines, the molecular machines we call digestive enzymes break down the complex molecules in foods, forming smaller molecules for use as fuel or as building blocks. Molecules to the bloodstream. Meanwhile, in the lungs, molecular storage devices called hemoglobin molecules pick up oxygen. Driven by molecular fibers, the heart pumps blood laden with fuel and oxygen to cells. In the muscles, fuel and oxygen drive contraction based on sliding molecular fibers. In the brain, they drive the molecular pumps that charge nerve cells for action. In the liver, they drive molecular machines that build and break down a whole host of molecules. And so the story continues. The body is also a construction site. In growing, healing, and renewing tissue, the body is a construction site. Cells take building materials from the bloodstream. Molecular machinery programmed by the cell’s genes uses these materials to build biological structures: to lay down bone and collagen, to build whole new cells, to renew skin, and to heal wounds. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

With the exception of tooth fillings and other artificial implants, everything in the human body is constructed by molecular machines. These molecular machines build molecules, including more molecular machines. They clear away structures that are old or out of place, sometimes using machinery like digestive enzymes to take structures apart. During tissue construction, whole cells move about, amoebalike: extending part of themselves forward, attaching, pulling their material along, and letting go of the former attachment site behind them. Individual cells contain a dynamic pattern of molecules made of components that can break down but can also be replaced. Some molecular machines in the cell specialize in digesting molecules that show signs of damage, allowing them to be replaced by fresh molecules made according to genetic instructions. Components inside cells form their complex patterns by self-assembly, that is, by sticking to the proper partners. Failures in construction increase as we age. Teeth wear and crack and are not replaced; hair follicles stop working; skin sages and wrinkles. The eye’s shape becomes more rigid, ruining close vision. Younger bodies can knit together broken bones quickly, making them stronger than before, but osteoporosis can make older bones so fragile that they break under minor stress. Sometimes construction is botched from the beginning due to a missing or defective genetic code. In hemophilia, bleeding fails to stop due to the lack of blood-clotting factor. Construction muscle tissue is disrupted in 1 in 3,300 male births by muscular dystrophy, in which muscle are gradually replaced by scar tissue and fat; the molecule “dystrophin” is missing. Sickle-cell anemia results from abnormal hemoglobin molecules. Paraplegics and quadriplegics know that some parts of the body do not heal well. The spinal cord is an extreme—and extremely serious—case, but scarring and improper regrowth of tissues result from many accidents. If tissues always regrew properly, injury would do no permanent physical damage. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Your Facial Expression is More Important than the Clothes You Wear

A knowledge worth understanding is not less important than a teacher worth seeking. Subordinate involvements—side and main—express, by definition, at least a surface respect for what is agreed should be the controlling business at hand, however demanding they may be in fact. It is implied that such subordinate involvements ought to catch only the individual’s lesser and unimportant self. It is understandable, then, that when an individual wishes to give weight to these subordinate activities one will conceal and cover them with a show of their being merely distractions. It is also understandable that these involvements will be a constant threat to obligatory behavior, ever ready to absorb more of the individual’s concern that is felt proper. This is especially the case with involvements, defined and described as “minor” in everyday terms, will never be entirely prohibited in the situation, and hence a few will always be available as beginning points for defection. The idiom of subordinate involvements differs widely from one cultural group to another. Even between the English and American patterns we find a difference, as Dickens reminds us in his British response to an American custom: “As Washington may be called the headquarters of tobacco-tincture salvia, the time is come when I must confess, without any disguise, that the prevalence of those two odious practices of chewing and expectorating began about this time to be anything but agreeable, and soon became most offensive and sickening. In all the public places of America this filthy custom is recognized. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

 In the courts of law the judge has his spittoon, the crier has his, the witness has his, and the prisoner has his; while the jurymen and spectators are provided for, are so many people who in the course of nature must desire to spit incessantly. In the hospitals the students of medicine are requested, by notices upon the wall, to eject their tobacco juice into the boxes provided for that purpose, and not to discolor the stairs. In public buildings visitors are implored, through the same agency, to squirt the essence of their quids, or “plugs,” as I have heard them called by gentlemen learned in this kind of sweetmeat, into the national spittoons, and not about the bases of the marble columns. But in some part this custom is inseparably mixed up with every meal and morning called, and with all the transactions of social life.” Dickens said in 1842, of course, what many Americans would say now, so it should be apparent that involvement idiom can change through time within the same nation. Thus, some signs, such as whittling, taking snuff, or toying with one’s key chain, are largely passing out of currency as part of the available vocabulary; others, such as spinning, have disappeared altogether in our American society; others, such as keeping an ear cocked to the radio or phonograph, have come into being within living memory; still others, such as smoking, have changed their meaning and have ceased to connote the degree of situational license they once did. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Different social groupings, too, will have different subordinate involvements available to them. At Central Hospital, for example, during breaks in the rehearsal for the patient stage production, a few of the middle-class female patients would “doodle” with the entire body by means of practice ballet movements; this idiom was not available to the lower-class females present. In our society, knitting is a subordinate involvement ordinarily prohibited to men, just as pipe smoking is to women. And, as in all matters of involvement allocation, age-grade differences in permissible subordinate involvements are very marked. In many America movie houses, for example, there is a daily and weekly cycle of civic order, the day, and especially Saturday and Sunday afternoons, being defined as a time when a wide range of subordinate involvement is tolerated, while the other times are defined as occasions when few subordinate involvements are allowed. In Chicago, there are, in fact, movies houses that specialize in the kind of social order maintained by children: The theater is characterized as showing old films. Only little kids can be enthralled by dated pictures. Therefore the theater is classified as for little kids. Since it is not a place to be taken seriously, it can serve as a kind of indoor recreation hall for the older children, a place where they can devote more attention to each other than to the screen. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Similarly, it may be permissible for a child on the street to such his thumb, or lick a sucker, or inflate chewing-gum bubbles until they burst, or draw a stick long a fence, or fully interrupt his main line of activity to take a stone from his show. However, the adult mental patients in Central Hospital who were observed conducting themselves in some of these ways were felt by staff to be acting “symptomatically.” For any specific class of social gatherings, we may expect to find regulations concerning the kinds of subordinate involvement that will be tolerated. As has been suggested, this selection seems to be based on an assessment of the amount of one’s attention and self that would be absorbed through these activities and the amount, therefore, that would be left over for the dominating involvement. For example, it is reported that, during a group therapy session conducted by and for the staff of a child residential treatment center, it was considered acceptable for a participating member of the staff to hold a cat on her lap; to give the animal more than occasional parts, however, was felt to be a sign of withdrawal from the session. As with other aspects of involvement structure, there is an ecology regarding subordinate involvement. It has been said, for example, that between the wars in London there were districts such as Bond Street where a lady did not walk while holding anything more than gloves, a leash, or a walking umbrella, and where similar restrictions applied to gentlemen. A small parcel carried under the arm was not comme il faut, for such an involvement in visible muscular activity apparently implied a threat to the kind of finished poised appearance deemed proper. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

From this extreme, a continuum could be traced in the same city to places where people properly went about struggling under shoulder harness or heavy objects such as boxes or large tools. In those peasant societies where persons are used to working all through the waking hours, instead of during a special time of day as in our society, a very great amount of side involvement seems to be tolerated and even enjoined, at least from the point of view of our own involvement idiom. For example, we are told of South American Indians: It is held to be typical of Indian women to be occupied with spinning while walking along the road, while selling in the market, and while gossiping with each other, and men are similarly seen engaging in some braiding or cording work, or even spinning, as they walk. Prohibitionary rules about subordinate involvements, unlike many other kinds of involvement regulation, are frequently made quite explicit. The settings of many gatherings present posted rules, for example, about not smoking or not chewing gum. In disciplinary settings such as jails, these rules can extend to the prohibition of talk during meals. In some convents these rules may even govern the “conduct of the eyes” during meditation and prayers, so that the act of merely looking around the room may constitute an unacceptable subordinate involvement. Nuns are apparently trained to maintain greater withdrawal from the situation at large than laity, this being an important part of their socialization into their calling and a brake upon quick adaptation to the secular World should they leave the sisterhood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

There are interesting historical changes in regard to permissible and impermissible subordinate involvements in particular situations. In many university classrooms in the last two decades, for example, knitting and smoking have become permissible, signifying, perhaps, a downgrading of the dignity of the occasion and an upgrading of the status of the students relative to the faculty. A somewhat similar change in idiom and involvement rulings can be found among American adolescents. This group seems to have greater license in regard to informal conduct in public places than it has a generation ago. At the same time, the vogue of the portable transistor radio has guaranteed a source of absorbing subordinate involvement that can be carried into a multitude of different situations. Given the fact that a subordinate involvement provides a diversion of self from a dominant involvement, even if this diversion is felt to be a minor kind, we may expect that when a dominant involvement seems to threaten the security of an individual and one’s self-control within the situation, one may initiate or affect a subordinate involvement in order to show that one is in command of one’s circumstances. Tactful persons who are sources of threat may initiate this defense for one: their offering one a cup of coffee, is an example. The easiness expressed by drinking coffee can be balanced by the tremor an individual may display in obtaining a cup adding cream and drinking the coffee. Thinking ahead, one may not know whether drinking coffee or not drinking coffee is the safer course. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

At a dinner party in New York, one of the guests, a woman who had inherited money, was eager to make a pleasing impression on everyone. She had squandered a modest fortune on sables, diamonds and pearls. However, she had not done anything whatever about her face. It radiated sourness and selfishness. She did not realize what everyone knows: namely, that the expression one wears on one’s face is far more important than the clothes one wears on one’s back. Paris Hilton’s smile is worth a million dollars. For Hilton’s personality, her charm, her ability to make people like her, are almost wholly responsible for her extraordinary success; and one of the most delightful factors in her personality is her captivating smile. Actions speak louder than words, and a smile says, “I like you. You make me happy. I am glad to see you.” That is why babies are so popular. They are so glad to see us that they cannot hold back their joy. So, naturally, we are gad to see them. Have you ever been in a doctor’s waiting room and looked around at all the glum faces waiting impatiently to be seen? Well, on a typical winter day, the waiting room was full of patients waiting to have their checkups. No one was talking to anyone else, and all were probably thinking of a dozen other things they would rather be doing than “wasting time” sitting in that office. He told me of our classes: “There were six or seven patients waiting when a young woman walked in with a nine-month-old baby. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

“As luck would have it, she sat down next to a gentleman who was more than a little distraught about the long wait for service. Then next thing he knew, the baby just looked up at him with a great big smile that is so characteristic of babies. What did that gentleman do? Just what you and I would do, of course; he smiled back at the baby. Soon he struck up a conversation with the woman about her baby and his grandchildren, and soon the entire reception room joined in, and the boredom and tension were converted into a pleasant and enjoyable experience.” An insincere grin? No. That does not fool anybody. We know it is mechanical and we resent it. I am talking about a real smile, a heartwarming smile, a smile that comes from within, the kind of smile that will bring a good prince in the marketplace. People who smile tend to manage, teach, and sell more effectively, and to raise happier children. There is far more information in a smile than a frown. That is why encouragement is a much more effective teaching device than punishment. The effect of a smile is powerful—even when it is unseen. Telephone companies throughout the United States of America have a program called “phone power” which is offered to employees who use the telephone for selling their services or products. In this program they suggest that you smile when talking on the phone. Your “smile” comes through your voice. While many companies think that sarcasm and rudeness are great ways to run a business, other have different ideas. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

When an executive from a computer science firm was looking for a new career, he was asked by the hiring manager why he chose their company over others, seeing how highly qualified he was. He said, “It was because managers in the other companies spoke on the phone in a cold, businesslike manner, which made me feel like just another business transaction. Your voice sounded as if you were glad to hear from me…that you really wanted me to be part of your organization.” People rarely succeed at anything unless they are having fun doing it. There are people who succeed at work because they love what they do. Whereas others, who do not enjoy what they are doing, lose motivation, they grow dull and unimaginative, and they fail. You must have a good time meeting people if you expect them to have a good time meeting you. If your goal is to set out to annoy or try to control someone, likely you will succeed in turning them off and you will make them want to avoid you because being in your presence will likely make them feel unwell. However, even if people are truly seeking help and come to you with complaints or grievances, be sure to treat them in a cheerful manner. Smile as you listen to them and adjustments will be accomplished much easier. Smiles bring in the dollars, many dollars every day. For instance, if a supermarket loses a customer because their employees are odd, consider this. The average single adult male spends between $250 to $500 a month on food. So, if he stops shopping at your store, you lose about the same amount. If he talks to his friends, who have all had unpleasant experiences, your store could lose thousands of dollars every month. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Sometimes it is important for us to eliminate criticism from our system. Be sure to give appreciation and praise now instead of condemnation. Stop talking about what you want. Take the time to see the other person’s viewpoint. And these things will literally revolutionize your life. You will be a totally different person, a happier person, a richer person, richer in friendships and happiness—the only things that matter much after all. You do no feel like smiling? Them what? Two things. First, force yourself to smile. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy. Actions seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if your cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. Everybody in the World is seeking happiness—and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness does not depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions. It is not what you have or who you are or where you are or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about it. For example, two people may be in the same place, doing the same thing; both may have about an equal amount of money and prestige—and yet one may be miserable and the other happy. Why? Because of a different mental attitude. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

I have seen many happy faces among the less affluent toiling with their primitive tools in the devastating heat of Sacramento as I have seen in air-conditioned offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Beijing and Shanghai. Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be. Working all by oneself in a closed-off room in an office not only is lonely, but it denies one the opportunity of making friends with other employees in the company. Some people envy the shared comradeship of other people at their jobs because they hear their chatter and laughter, and they shyly look away when they pass the in-crowd. However, if you want people to come to you, you have to show an interest in them.  Smile and say, “Hello,” and ask them, “How are you doing?” and you will be surprised. Smiles and hellos will be returned, the hallway will seem brighter, the job friendlier. Acquaintanceships develop and some ripen into friendships. (But I also recommend to remember, these are people you work with and they are not your family. You may want to keep your personal business to yourself, they could be trying to pry and make you look unstable so they could get you fired.) People also need to remember boundaries. You will find others do not see you the same way you think they may. Especially with “group-think,” or “pack mentality,” others may not mentally be in the same space as you and your group and so they may find you intrusive behavior and oversharing a bit offsetting. And people strongly dislike it when you cyberstalk them and think you know them. It is a big way to scare a person and turn them off. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Keep your mind on the great splendid things you would like to do, and then, as the days go flying away, you will find yourself unconsciously seizing upon the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your desire, just as fish swing with the tide. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful person you desire to be, and the thought you hold is hourly transforming you into that particular individual…Thought is supreme. Preserve a right mental attitude—the attitude of courage, frankness, and good cheer. To think righteously is to create. All things come through desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on which our hearts are fixed. Your smile is like the sun breaking through the clouds. The flesh of a smile can be a memory that lasts forever. We can see examples of barriers to interaction that have been erected all through our social World. These include city walls, national borders, prisons, monasteries, private clubs, computers that are deliberately isolated from outside networks, and middle schools that isolate those facing the onset of adolescence from others who are either younger or older. The essential effect of a barrier to movement is to make some agents more proximate—more likely to interact with each other—and other less. Direct changes in physical space are the most obvious ways to accomplish this: walks and moats. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

However, one can also alter technology moving through physical space. Not maintaining a road between two villages reduces the traffic between them. “Grounding” teenagers by taking away their mobile phones and Internet access increases their interactions within the household and decreases their interactions beyond it. All these devices have opposites, of course. For walls, moats, bad road maintenance, and grounding we can substitute doors, bridges, good maintenance, and car privileges. Time can also be altered by controlling the technology for moving through it. Writing is a way of interacting with the future (as well as across space). Destroying written records is a way of depriving heretics of interactions with future agents. Reading is technology of interacting with the past as well as with distant places. Preventing agents from learning to read can alter activation of agents by blocking interactions over time. Many earlier information technology “advances” can be understood as reducing barriers to interactions across space and/or time. The technology of writing had this effect. In turn, it was greatly advanced by printing with moveable type. This dramatically reduced the costs of the pattern of interaction in which the idea of one source are communicated to many recipients across time periods and distances that were previously prohibitive. Other “broadcast” media, such as radio and television, have this one-to-many property as well. These technologies made major contributions to the formation of the large nation-states that dominated nineteenth- and twentieth-century World politics. Especially when controlled by central authorities, they had enormous power to make diverse and dispersed populations more homogeneous in their knowledge, loyalties, and even language. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

A major limitation of imposing and removing barriers and of other simple manipulations or proximity and activation is their imprecise selectivity. Crude physical boundaries rarely cluster together all the agents who would benefit and only those agents. Technological interventions that remove barriers often increase both wanted and unwanted interactions—as the World Wide Web brings us close both to groups we admire and to groups we despise. Two further classes of mechanism for modifying interactions patterns are extensions of the basic barrier approach that achieve greater selectivity. They involve barriers that are conceptual rather than physical and barriers that are “semi-permeable.” Watching a new civilization encroach on an old one inescapably calls for comparisons between the two. Those who have benefited from the past, or who have come to terms with it, form a nostalgia brigade, praising or romanticizing yesterday and contrasting it with the as-yet-ill-formed, incomplete tomorrow. Suffer from the death of the familiar, future-shocked by the pace of change, millions in the West are watching the remnants of their industrial economies decay. Worried about jobs and watching Asia rise, they—especially the young—are bombarded by dystopian images of the future in films, TV series, games and online messages. Media-manufactured stars are presented as role models in the form of models, musicians, and athletes. They hear religious assurances that the end is nigh. And they are showered by apocalyptic messages from a vast, once-progressive environmental movement whose dominant slogan has become “Live your best life.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Yet the period ahead is about to explode with surprises of all kinds that will escape the either-or dichotomy of good versus bad. And the biggest surprise of all may be that the revolutionary wealth system and civilization described here will, despite everything, open enormous opportunities for billions of us to live better, healthier, longer and more socially useful lives. We have emphasized that emerging wealth system cannot be understood within the framework of conventional economics, and that, to even glimpse its future, we need to look at the deep fundamentals that lie behind all wealth creation from the ancient past to today—and tomorrow. As we have seen, these include types of work, division of labor, exchange systems, energy supplies, a particular family structure and a characteristic physical environment. However, the deep fundamentals most unexamined, yet among the most relevant to our future, are time, space, and knowledge—each of which could easily justify a library of its own. It is clear that the everyday sound-bite economics that is the subject of so much chatter in Econo-Land focuses on only a tiny fraction of economic reality. Indeed, given the constraints of a single report, even our attempt to expand the common view of what is involved in wealth creation provides a far-from-complete picture. We have shown why millions today feel excruciatingly time-squeezed both at work and at home—how we are irregularizing our daily schedules and how companies steal our time and impose on us an unpaid “third job.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

We have seen how we are changing the rates at which items are put up for sale and then withdrawn. And we have show how, by synchronizing some of our activities, we necessarily de-synchronize others at unknown cost. We are revolutionizing the time component of wealth. That revolution is paralleled by dramtic shifts in the spatial location of wealth and of the enterprises and technologies that produce it. And we have seen why, even if all of today’s anti-globalists packed their knapsacks and went home, we could expect economic integration to slow while other dimensions of global integration speed up—another case of de-synchronization as changes in time and space interact. Only when all these changes are viewed against the backdrop of revolution in the knowledge system, however, can we glimpse the full transformatory power of what is happening today. These developments do not affect just the economy, and business cannot just install a “knowledge-management system” and move on. Today’s changes affect how we all make decisions, right down to the very truth and/or lies on which we base them. We are living through a period when our long-standing criteria for separating truth from falsehood are themselves under fire. And the branch of knowledge most necessary for economic advance—science—is under widespread attack. Science, as suggested earlier, is in more trouble than most suspect. It is in a crisis that goes far beyond immediate issues like the decline in financing for basic research. Science survives by the grace of its host culture. And that culture is turning hostile, as seen in the growing attack on evolution by creationists (a battle once though tot have ended with the Scopes trial in 1925) and the so-called intelligent-design movement. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Science now faces a blinding dust storm of subjectivism—fed by fading postmodernism and flourishing New Age “spiritualism.” Its influence is also undercut by cases of corruption linking scientists t pharmaceutical firms and other industries, by repeated media portrayals of science as evil, by fear of oncoming biological breakthroughs that threaten traditional definitions of humanity. More important, science method itself is under attach by “truth managers” who prefer decisions based on other criteria, from mystical revelation to political or religious authority. The ongoing battle over truth is part of the transformation in our relationship to the deep fundamental of knowledge. Our bodies are filled with intricate, active molecular structures. When those structures are damaged, health suffers. Modern medicine can affect the workings of the body in many ways, but from a molecular viewpoint it remains crude indeed. Molecular manufacturing can construct a range of medical instruments and devices with far greater abilities. The body is an enormously complex World of molecules. With nanotechnology to help, we can learn to repair it. To understand what nanotechnology can do for medicine, we need a picture of the body from a molecular perspective. The human body can be seen as a workyard, construction site, and battleground for molecular machines. It works remarkably well, using systems so complex that medical science still does not understand many of them. Failures, though, are too common. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

In the bustling city of Atlanta, Georgia, the single largest enterprise employs some 37,000 workers. This mainstay of the economy has a payroll of over $1.5 billion a year. Its key facilities occupy 2.2 million square feet of space. This massive service enterprise is not, however, a company or corporation. It is the Atlanta airport. It is a giant mosaic consisting of scores of separate organizations—everything from airlines, caterer, cargo handlers, and car rental firms to government agencies like the Federal Aviation Administration, the Post Office, and the Consumer Service. Employees belong to many different unions, from the Air Line Pilots Association to the Machinists and Teamsters. That the Atlanta airport creates wealth is not doubted by hotelkeepers, restaurants, real estate interests, auto dealers, and others in the city, not to mention the 56,000 other employees in Atlanta whose jobs are indirectly generated by the airport operations. Little of this wealth results from the effort of any individual firm or agency. The wealth flowing from this meta-mosaic is precisely a function of relationships—the interdependence and coordination of all of them. Like advanced computerized data bases, the Atlanta airport is “relational.” Though relationships have always been important in the creation of wealth—being implied in the very concept of the division of labor—they become far more important as the number and diversity of “players” in the mosaic system increase. As this number rises arithmetically, relationships increase combinatorially. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Moreover, these relationships can no longer be based on simple command, in which one participant imposes behavior on the others. Because of interdependence, the players increasingly rely on consensus, explicit or otherwise, which takes account of the interests of many. As knowledge itself is organized relationally or in hyper-media form—meaning that it can be constantly reconfigured—organization, too, must become hyper-flexible. This is why an economy of small, interacting firms forming themselves into temporary mosaics is more adaptive and ultimately more productive than one built around a few rigid monoliths. The common feature to all threats and promises is the: the response rule commits you to actions that you would not take in its absence. If the rule merely says you will do what is best at the time, this is as if there is no rule. There is no change in others’ expectations about your future actions and hence no influence of the rule. Still, there is an informational role for stating what will happen without a rule; these statements are called warnings and assurances. When it is in your interest to carry out a “threat,” we call this a warning. For example, if the president warns he will veto a bill not to his liking, this is simply an indication of his intensions. It would be a threat if he were willing to sign the bill, but strategically committed to veto it in order to induce Congress to offer something even better. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

A warning is used to inform others of the effect of their actions. A parent who warns a child that a stove-top is hot, makes a statement of fact, not strategy. When it is in your interest to carry out a “promise,” we call this an assurance. A child who ignores the warning that the stove-top is hot and gets burned assures the parent that he will not do this again. We emphasize this distinction for a reason. Threats and promises are truly strategic moves, whereas warnings and assurances play more of an informational role. Warnings or assurances do not change your response rule in order to influence another party. Instead, you are simply informing them of how you will want to respond based on their actions. In stark contrast, the sole purpose of a threat is to change your response rule away from what will be best when the time comes. This is done not to inform but to manipulate. Because threats and promises indicate that you will act against your own interest, there is an issue of credibility. After others have moved, you have an incentive to break your threat or promise. A commitment is needed to ensure credibility. An unconditional move is a response rule in which you move first and your action is fixed. Threats and promises arise when you move second. They are conditional moves because the response dictated by the rule depends on what the other wise does. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

A strategic move is always a preemptive action. The response rule must be in place before the other side moves. That means that whatever strategic move is made, the game should be analyzed as one with sequential moves. When you are intransigent, others respond to your unconditional action. With threats and promises, you first lay down a response rule, then others move and you respond according to your response rule. As a result, commitment to an action or response rule transforms an otherwise simultaneous-move game into a sequential-move game. Although the payoffs remain unchanged, a game played with simultaneous moves in one case and sequential moves in another can have dramatically different outcomes. The different outcomes are due to the different rules of play. All human beings differ in some respects and in mind as well as in body. Each is unique. Each needs to find one’s own individual path. For in each aspirant there exists a certain direction, tendency, capacity, attribute, or gift alone which line the possibility of his spiritual development can open up more quickly, freely, and easily than along any other. It is on this line that one should concentrate more effort and so take advantage of what Nature has given one. However, to detect and recognize what is one’s best potentiality requires exploration and search, not only by one’s ordinary faculties but also and especially by one’s more sensitive and intuitive ones. It will not be found all at once but only after much groping around and feeling one’s way. Time is needed because this hidden possibility does not exist at the surface level. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21


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Addressed to Haydon

Great spirits now on Earth are sojourning; he of the cloud, the cataract, the lake, who on Helvellyn’s summit, wide awake, catches his freshness from Archangel’s wing: he of the rose, the violet, the spring, the social smile, the chain for Freedom’s sake: And lo!—whose steadfastness would never take a meaner sound than Raphael’s whispering. And other spirits there are standing apart upon the forehead of the age to come; these, these will give the World another heart, and other pulses. Hear ye not the hum of mighty workings?–Listen awhile ye nations, and be dumb. By John Keats

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I Heard About it at the Time Square

There are as many ways to the union with the Overself as there are human beings. The orthodox, the conventional, and the traditional ways can claim exclusiveness or monopoly only by imperiling truth. Involvement refers to the capacity of an individual to give, or withhold from giving, one’s concerted attention to some activity at hand—a solitary task, a conversation, a collaborative work effort. It implies a certain admitted closeness between the individual and the object of involvement, a certain overt engrossment on the part of the one who is involved. Involvement in an activity is taken to express the purpose or aim of the actor. To discuss involvement, we can begin with common-sense distinctions institutionalized in our American society and presumably in others. Men and animals have a capacity to divide their attention into main and side involvements. A main involvement is one that absorbs the major part of an individual’s attention and interest, visibly forming the principal current determinant of one’s actions. A side involvement is an activity that an individual can carry on in an abstracted fashion without threatening or confusing simultaneous maintenance of a main involvement. Whether momentary or continuous, simple or complicated, these side activities appear to constitute a kind of fuguelike dissociation of minor muscular activity from the main line of an individual’s actions. Humming while working and knitting while listening are examples. Along with the distinction between main and side involvements, we must make another that can easily be confused with the first. We must distinguish between dominant and subordinate involvements. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

A dominating involvement is one he is ready to recognize; a subordinate involvement is one he is allowed to sustain only to the degree, and during the time, that his attention is patently not required by the involvement that dominates him. Subordinate involvements are sustained in a muted, modulated, and intermittent fashion, expressing in their style a continuous regard and deference for the official, dominating activity at hand. Thus, while waiting to see an official, an individual may converse with a friend, read a magazine, or doodle with a pencil, sustaining these engrossing claims on attention only until his turn is called, when he is obliged to put aside his time-passing activity even though it is unfinished. Typically, it is expected that a main involvement will be a dominating one and a side involvement a subordinate one, as when a worker smokes a cigarette unthinkingly but only when and where the job allows. This relationship, however, is by no means invariable. Many dominating involvements, such as work tasks, can be sustained automatically and unthinkingly for long periods, allowing the individual to devote his main focus of attention to pursuits and talking about sports or business, which, however involving, will be put aside when the task requires attention. A telegrapher, for example, can tap out messages while sustaining a conversational byplay with a fellow worker. Once we see that an undemanding but socially dominating activity can be sustained while the individual’s main focus of attention is temporarily drawn to another issues, we can go on to see that while thus engaged he can sustain additional side involvements, like praying, which are themselves subordinated to the temporary and unofficial main involvement. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

We should also see that claims upon the individual can suddenly change, and that what had been a dominant involvement can suddenly be demoted in status and become subordinated to a new source of involvement now considered properly to be the one of first priority. In our society, it is recognized that certain activities are to be carried on only as main and dominating involvements; many social ceremonies are instances. It is also recognized that certain other activities are to be carried on only as side involvements and subordinate ones, as, for example, chewing gun. (These slight involvements are not to be accorded main attention even when no main involvement is required.) Within these limits, however, what is defined as a dominating involvement at one time be defined as subordinate at another. Thus, on the job, the drinking of a cup of coffee may be a subordinate involvement; during official coffee breaks, it may be the dominating activity. Did you know that you may be about to make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you typically can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you? Yet I know and you know people who blunder through life trying to wigwag other people into becoming interested in them. Of course, it does not work. People are not interested in you. They are not interested in me. They are interested in themselves—morning, noon, and after dinner. The New York Telephone Company made a detailed study of telephone conversations to find out which word is the most frequently used. You have guessed it: it is the personal pronoun “I.” “I.” “I.” It was used 3,900 times in 500 telephone conversations. “I.” “I.” “I.” I.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

When you see a group photograph that you are in, whose picture do you look for first? If we merely try to impress people and get people interested in us, we will never have many true, sincere friends. Friends, real friend, are not made that way. Napoleon tried it, and in his last meeting with Josephine he said: “Josephine, I have been as fortunate as any man ever was on this Earth; and yet, at this hour, you are the only person in the World on whom I can reply.” And historians doubt whether he could rely even on her. It is the individual who is not interested in his fellow men who has the greatest difficulties in life and provides the greatest injury to others. It is from among such individuals that all human failures spring. Remember, if you want to be successful in any career, you have to be interested in people. Some of the most successful people even fake emotions. They really put their personality across the footlights. They know human nature. Everything they do, every gesture, every intonation of one’s voice, every lifting of an eyebrow is carefully rehearsed in advance, and their actions are timed to split seconds. However, in addition to that, these individuals have a genuine interest in people. They do not look at others and say, “They are all crazy. They are all trash. They are a bunch of suckers, a bunch of hicks; I will fool them all right.” The method of successful people is much different. Every time they come across another human being, they say: “I am grateful because these people are amongst me. They make it possible for me to make my living in a very agreeable way. I am going to give them the very best I possibly can.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Some successful people tell themselves “I love these people, I love these people,” over and over before they leave the house each day. Ridiculous? Absurd? You are privileged to think anything you like. This just has been a tendency of some of the most successful people. Taking up a hobby is another way to meet people. Do not take up a hobby just to get to know someone. Take up a hobby you like and be truly interested in it, and then expand your area of interest into groups of people who have the same interest. Eventually, by sustaining an interest in other people, you will create a new life for yourself. One can win attention and time and cooperation of even the most sought-after people by becoming genuinely interested in them. If we want to make friends, let us put ourselves out to do things for other people—things that require time, energy, unselfishness and thoughtfulness. For instance, remembering people’s birthday can be a good way to show that you are interested in them. If we want to make friends, let us greet people with animation and enthusiasm. When somebody calls you on the telephone use the same psychology. “Say, “Hello” in tones the bespeak how pleased you are to have the person call. Many companies train their telephone operators to greet all callers in a tone of voice that radiates interest and enthusiasm. The caller feels the company is concerned about them. Let us remember that when we answer the telephone later today. Showing a genuine interest in other not only wins friends for you, but may develop in its customers a loyalty to your company. When tend to be interested in others when they have an altruistic interest in us.  #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

A show of interest, as with every other principle of human relations, must be sincere. It must pay off not only for the person showing the interest, but for the person receiving the attention. It is a two-way street—both parties benefit. Sometimes when people go above and beyond that call of duty to make a customer comfortable, by having dinner with them and stay after hours to sooth their fears and concerns and talk to them, this may be away to win a new buyer, and they will never forget you. They will always remember the warmth and tenderness of a stranger who made getting through the feelings of fear, frustration and loneliness possible. If you want others to like you, if you want to develop real friendships, if you want to help others at the same time as you help yourself, keep this principle in mind: Become genuinely interested in other people. It is useful to examine a fundamental property of gents, the fact that they are located in space and time. When they interact, they are either co-located, or they interact via technology which is itself located. So interactions also can be said to be located. “I heard about it at the town square.” “Please call me at my daytime phone number.” “He bought it from a mail-order catalog house.” It follows that the movement of agents in physical space and time changes their proximity, and this in turn affects their ease of interaction. (I will be in my office tomorrow morning. Can you drop by then?”) Moreover, actions that alter possibilities for movement in space and time will alter proximity. (“I cannot make the 10 A.M. meeting, because the airline we are required to use does not have an early flight.”) #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

So far, we are considering how interaction patters are affected by physical time and space: the coordinates of latitude, longitude, altitude, and Greenwich mean tie that a precise global positioning device can read out. Indeed, the Information Revolution will bring many more artifacts into our futures designed to “know where they are” in space-time. Already most cars and computers and your telephone can obtain their location by means of global positioning signals from satellites. Your strategies, and theirs, can take their locations into account, thereby changing patterns of interactions. While our discussion began from the idea of physical space, we can use the idea as an analogy and talk about the location of agents and interactions in conceptual spaces as well. For example, an organization chart provides a map of conceptual space. A person may be appointed director of purchasing. This is a definite location in a company’s hierarchy of job responsibilities. It places the occupant of the job “near” the people who do purchasing, in the sense that these people are likely to interact with the director. Their proximity is increased. They may be nearby in organizational space even if the purchasing officers are distributed around the World and do not have offices at the headquarters where the director sits. At the same time, the organizational structure may place the director “far” from someone working in marketing, although that office is just one floor down in the headquarters building. The logic of their two roles in the business may make them less likely to interact. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

The weekly senior staff meeting in this purchasing organization is thus a location in conceptual space and time. Moving up the organizational job hierarchy is a movement in conceptual space and corresponds to changes in interaction patterns. The patterns can change even when the promoted people keep their old offices (and hence their locations in physical space). Indeed, one useful way of thinking about organizations is as deliberately designed conceptual spaces that will “organize” the interactions of agents toward some ends. The conceptual spaces of organizations are familiar, and therefore they make good examples. However, there are many other conceptual spaces that locate and organize agent interactions. All that is required is that the concepts convey a sense of multiple categories that can be the “locations,” that agents in the population can be members of different categories (and thus have different “locations”), and that the “locations” convey something about the likelihood that agents will interact. A social system of castes, or classes, or statuses can serve as a conceptual space. It seems poignantly clear that agents labeled “untouchables” may be restricted in their patterns of interacting even with those who are quite nearby in physical space. To give one more example, while nations may be thought of as regions of space-time in which agents are located, nationalities are conceptual categories. Israeli and Arab nationals living in New York City may systematically avoid each other even though they live only a few blocks apart. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We have stressed that interactions are located in both space and time. However, we must reiterate an additional point about time: in Complex Adaptive Systems the sequential ordering of events can have huge effects. A change that increases proximity, that makes two agents more likely to interact, means that on average the interaction will occur sooner. If it takes place before events that it would otherwise have followed, it may change the character of likelihood of those events. The system can have an entirely different history as a result. It is also important to know what a response rule it. One of the things people want in life is an unconditional strategic advantage so they are able to seize the initiative in a business deal and move first. Even when you do not actually move first, you can achieve a similar strategic advantage through a commitment to a response rule. The response rule prescribes your action as a response to the others’ move. Although you act as a follower, the commitment to the response move must be in place before others make their moves. A parent telling a child “No dessert unless you eat your spinach” is establishing such a response rule. Of course this rule must be in place and clearly communicated before the child feeds its spinach to the dog. Response rules fall under two broad categories: threats and promises. A threat is a response rule that punishes others who fail to cooperate with you. There are compellent threats, as when a terrorist hijacks a plane and establishes a response rule that the passengers will be killed if his demands are rejected, and there are deterrent threats, as when the United States of America threatens that it will response with nuclear weapons if it is attacked. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

A compellent threat is designed to prevent someone from taking an action. The two threats share a common feature: both sides will suffer if the threat has to be carried out. The secondary category of response rules is promises. This is an offer to reward someone who cooperates with you. In search of a witness, a prosecutor promises one defendant a more lenient sentence if he turns state’s evidence against his codefendants. Again there can be compellent and deterrent promises. A compellent promise is designed to induce someone to take a favorable action, such as turning state’s evidence. A deterrent promise is designed to prevent someone from taking an unfavorable action, such as when mobsters promise the witness they will take care of him if he keeps his mouth shut. The two promises also share a common feature: once the action is taken (or not taken), there is an incentive to go back on one’s word. Sometimes the distinctions between threats and promises are blurred. A friend was mugged in Sacramento City with the following promise: If you “lend” me one thousand dollars, I promise I won’t hurt you. More relevant was the mugger’s implicit threat tht if our friend did not lend him the money, he would be hurt. As this story suggests, the distinction between a threat and a promise depends only on what you call the status quo. The traditional mugger threatens to hurt you if you do not give him some money. If you do not, he starts hurting you, making that the new status quo, and promises to stop once you give him money. A compellent threat is just like a deterrent promise with a change of status quo; likewise, a deterrent threat and a compellent promise differ only in their status quo. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The same forces help account for today’s surprising population explosion of small business in general, which moves us still further from the economy of monoliths. Small and medium-sized firms have won recognition as the new centers of employment, innovation, and economic dynamism. The small business entrepreneur is the new hero (and often heroine) of the economy. In France, reports the Financial Times business support schemes have been jettisoned for programs more likely to help the small business.” The United Kingdom provides subsidized management consulting services to increase small business organizational efficiency. In the United States of America, Inc. magazine, which measures the activity of the one hundred top small businesses, reports an average five-year growth rate that “approaches the incomprehensible—high enough to astonish (us) and to stagger (the companies that experience it).” In place of an economy dominated by a handful of giant monoliths, therefore, we are creating a super-symbolic economy made up of small operating units, some of which may, for accounting and financial reasons, be encapsuled inside large businesses. An economy built of boutiques, rather than behemoths (though some of the boutiques remain inside the belly of a behemoth). This many-shaped, multi-mosaic economy requires entirely new forms of coordination, which explains the ceaseless split-up and formation of so-called strategic alliances and other new arrangements. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Kenichi Ohmae, brilliant head of the McKinsey office in Tokyo, has called attention to the growth of triangular joint ventures involving companies or parts of companies in all three—Japan, the United States of America, and Europe. Such “trilateral consortia,” he writes, “are being formed in nearly every area of leading edge industry including biotechnology, computers, robots, semiconductors, jet engines, nuclear power, carbon fibers, and other new materials.” These are manufacturing mosaics, and they are redrawing business boundaries in ways that will redefine national boundaries as well. In Germany, BMW speaks of the networking of companies based on alliances, partnerships, agreements, research and technical cooperation. They have entered into hundreds of such arrangements. Competitive position will no longer be dependent solely on internal resources, but on the pattern of relationships with outside units. Like data bases, success is increasingly relational. And, significantly, the new relations of production are not dresses in an old-fashioned data case. They are fluid and freeform as hyper-media. The new mosaic organization of companies and the economy thus begins to reflect (and promote) changes in the organization of knowledge itself. To understand power in the business World of tomorrow, therefore, forget the fantasies of near-total concentration, a World dominated by a few mega-firms. Think, instead, about power-mosaics. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Waxing pessimistic is one of the easiest ways to masquerade as wise. And there is plenty to be pessimistic about. However, permanent pessimism is a substitute for thought. No pessimist ever discovered the secrets of the stars, or sailed to an uncharted land, or opened a new Heaven to the human spirit. Nor has pessimism ever won any battle. As we move deeper into the twenty-first century, the list of potential horrors is seemingly endless: War between China and the United States of America; a 1930-style global crash has already thrown millions into the streets and wiped out decades of economic advance; terrorist attacks unleashing nuclear weapons is a fear, anthrax, chlorine gas or a cyber-assault on critical business and government computer networks; disastrous water shortages from Mexico City and Iran to South Africa; armed batters between rival Non-Governmental Organizations; new diseases at the nano level; the spread of mind-control technologies; the death of privacy; intensified religious fanaticism and violence; human cloning; combinations and convergences of these—and that is before we even get to earthquakes, tsunamis, deforestation and global warming. All of these are worth worrying about. However, much of today’s pessimism is fashionable—exactly as it was when the industrial revolution was sweeping over Europe and horrifying its opponents in the early to mid-1800s. From their fear and rage against modernity, with its growing secularism and rationality, came the romantic pessimism expressed in the poetry of Lord Byron and Heinrich Heine, the music of Richard Wagner and Schopenhauer’s philosophy of pessimismus. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Not to forget the anarchist philosopher Max Stirner, who translated Adam Smith into German and was, if anyone, an expert on pessimism. Stirner’s mother suffering from an illness. His first wife died giving birth to a stillborn baby. He invested a subsequent wife’s fortune and lost it. At which point, he lost her as well. In many parts of the World, native species have been driven to extinction by rats, pigs, and other imported species, and others are endangered and fighting for their lives. Biological controls—fighting fire with fire—have advantages: organisms are small, selective, and inexpensive. These advantages will eventually be shared by devices made using molecular manufacturing, which avoid the disadvantages of importing and releasing yet more uncontrollable, breeding, spreading species. Alan Liss spoke of using nanotechnological devices to help restore ecosystems at a chemical level. A similar idea can be applied at a biological level. The challenge—and it is huge—would be to develop insect-size or even microbe-size devices that could serve as selective, mobile, mechanical flyswatters or weed pullers. These could do what biological controls do, but would be unable to replicate and spread. Let us call devices of this sort “ecosystem protectors.” They could keep aggressive imported species out, saving native species from extinction. To a human being or an ordinary organism, an ecosystem protector would seem like just one more of the many billions of different kinds of bugs and microbes in the ecosystem—small things going about their business, with no tendency to bite. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

They might be detectable, but only if you sorted through a lot of dirt and looked at it through a microscope, because they would not be very common. They would have just one purpose: to notice when they bumped into a member of an imported species on the “not welcome here” list, and then either to eliminate it or to ensure, at least, that it could not reproduce. Natural organisms are often very finicky about which species they attack. These ecosystem protectors could be equally finicky about which species they approach, and then, before attacking, could do a DNA analysis to be sure. It would be simplest (especially in the beginning while we are still learning) to limit each kind of defender to monitoring only one imported species. Each unit of a particular kind of ecosystem-defender device would be identical, built with precision by a special-purpose molecular-manufacturing setup. Each would last for a certain time, then break down. Each kind can be tested in a terrarium, then a greenhouse, then a trial outdoors ecosystem, keeping an eye on their effects at each stage until one gains the confidence for a larger-scale use. “Larger scale” could still be quite limited, if they are not designed to travel very far. This built-in obsolescence limits both how long each device can operate and how far it can move: getting control of the structure of matter includes making nanomachines work where they are wanted and not work elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The agricultural industry today manufactures and distributes many thousands of tons of poisonous chemicals to be sprayed on the land, typically in an attempt to eliminate one or a few species of insect. Ecosystem protectors could also be used to protect these agricultural monocultures, field by field, with far less harm to the environment than today’s methods. They could likewise be used in the special ecosystems of intensive greenhouse agriculture. Unlike chemicals sprayed into the environment, these ecosystem protectors would be precisely limited in time, space, and effect. They neither contaminate the ground water nor poison bees and ladybugs. In order to weed out imported organisms and bring an ecosystem back to its natural balance, ecosystem protectors would not have to be very common—only common enough for a typical imported organism to encounter one once in a lifetime, before reproducing. Even so, as the ecosystem protectors wear our and stop working, they would present a small-scale problem of solid-waste disposal. With the exercise of some clever design, all the machinery of the ecosystem protectors might be made of reasonably durable yet biodegradable materials or (at worst) material no more harmful than bits of grit and humus in the soil. So their remains would be like the shells of diatoms, or bits of lignin from wood, or like peculiar particles of clay or sand. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Alternatively, we might develop other mobile nanomachines to find and collect or break down their remains. This strategy starts to look like setting up a parallel ecosystem of mobile machines, a process that could be extended to supplement the natural cleansing processes of nature in many ways. Each step in this direction will require caution, but not paranoia: there need be no toxic chemicals here, no new creatures to spread and run wild. Missteps will have the great virtue of being reversible. If we decide that we do not like the effects of some particular variety of ecosystem protector or cleanup machine, we could simply stop manufacturing that kind. We could even retrieve those that had already been made and dispersed in the environment, since their exact number is known, along with which patch of ground each is patrolling. If the making and monitoring of ecosystem protectors seems a lot of trouble to go to just to weed out nonnative species, consider this example of the environmental destruction such species can cause. Sometimes before World War II, a South African species of fire ant was accidentally imported into the United States of America. Today, infested areas can have up to five hundred or these ants per square foot. The National Audubon Society—a strong opponent of irresponsible use of pesticides—had to resort to spraying its refuge islands near Corpus Christi when they found these ants destroying over half the hatchlings of the brown pelican, an endangered species. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

In Texas, it has been shown that the new ants are killing off native ant species—reducing biodiversity. The USDA’s Sanford Porter states that due to them, “Texas may be in the midst of a genuine biological revolution.” The ants are heading west, and have established a beachhead in California. Without ecosystem protectors or something much like them, ecologies around the World will continue to be threatened by unnatural invasion. Our species opened the new invasion routes, and it is our responsibility to protect native species made newly vulnerable by them. Today, most people are far from the land, tied up in turning the wheels of twentieth-century industry. In the years to come, those wheels will be replaced by molecular systems that do most of their turning by themselves. The pressure to destroy the land will be less. Time available to help heal the land will be greater. Surely, more energy will flow in this direction. To mend ruined landscapes will require skill and effort. Ecosystem defenders can do flyswatting and weed-pulling jobs no humans ever could, but there will also be jobs of shaping, planting, and nurturing. The land has been torn by machines guided by hasty hands, almost overnight. It can gradually be restored by patient hands, whether bare, gloved, or guiding machines able to reshape a ravaged mountain without turning the soil. The green wealth that can be brought by nanotechnology has raised high hopes among some environmentalists. It would tend to promote a sense of the unity and balance of nature and of our own human position within that dynamic and evolving balance. Perhaps people will learn to value nature more deeply when they can see it more clearly, with eyes unclouded by grief and guilt. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18


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Until Her Pining Soul and Weeping Eyes Prevail

Through various windows we could see the palm trees accenting the drive, or the pines at the end of the pond, or the fields out back with new-cut grass. That part was pretty nice. The Winchester Mansion rambled on and on, it was a never-ending story. It was a nice estate, with the fence alone it, and cedars behind the fence, so people could not see in. Then you want past a couple of dairy farms, with cows grazing and corn growing and white houses and red barns. The Winchesters owned the farms and rented them out to the farmers. They lost a lot of money on the farms, but the idea was to keep developers from getting the land. Millions and millions of dollars actually came from the farms on Mrs. Winchester’s estate. However, being a Winchester was not easy. People always knew in the back of their minds that you were a Winchester. And being a Winchester made one not one of them. People would leave stuff around the Winchester mansion, and the public would say, “So what, the Winchester can afford to have somebody clean the place up. They on the mills and the bank and half the houses the people live in.” This was a time when other people were living on boiled potatoes and waiting in breadlines to get handouts. Some people’s pride was hurt badly by that because the Winchesters did not know what it was like to take handouts to feed their family. When you name is Winchester, that was enough for most people. But people forgot about the curse that came with all that money. They did not care that the mansion was haunted by monstrous females with huge teeth like those of swine, brazen claws, and snake hair. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

The house was full of monsters, beings of unnatural proportions or parts, and they were usually regarded with terror. They possessed immense strength and ferocity, which they employed for the injury and annoyance of the Winchester family. Shortly after the nine-story tower was erected, the mansion was afflicted with a monster which infested it. It laid crouched on top of the tower and arrested all travellers who came that way, proposing to them a riddle, with the condition that those who could solve it should pass safe, but those who failed should be killed. Not one had yet succeeded in solving it, and all had been slain. The murders might have been news, but the police worked to suppress the gory details, making them look like ordinary homicides. So from what the papers printed, no one could tell that there was something unusual about the victims. Mrs. Winchester would have guards prowl around the estate to see if they were getting any reports of unusual attacks by coyotes or cougars or other predators. And not just attacks on people, but on livestock—cows, sheep, and pigs. There were even some neighbourhoods where a lot of family pet were disappearing and being chewed up real bad by something wild. Some people thought it might even be a werewolf. One of the strangest things was the sudden and complete recovery of Mrs. Winchester’s sense of security the very next day. It was in the air when she woke in her Daisy Bedroom; it went with her downstairs to the breakfast table, flashed out at her from the fire, and reduplicated itself from the flanks of the urn and the sturdy flutings of the Georgian teapot. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

It was as if in some roundabout way, all her diffused fears of the previous day, with their moment of sharp concentration about the newspaper article—as if this dim questioning of the future, and startled return upon the past, had between them liquidated the arrears of some haunting moral obligation. It was as clear, thank Heaven, as the bright outer light that surprised her almost with a touch of summer when she issued from the house for her daily rounds of the gardens. And her recovered sense of safety gave, on this particular morning, a peculiar zest to her progress through the sweet still place. She went first to the kitchen garden, where espaliered pear trees drew complicated patterns on the walls, and blue jays were fluttering and preening about the turrets. At the further end of the yard rose a grass terrace, looking across the fish pond and yew hedges to the long front with its stone chimney stacks and red roof angles all drenched in the pale gold moisture of their air. Mrs. Winchester had never before had such a sense of her intimacy with her estate, such a conviction that its secrets were all beneficent, kept, as they said to children, “for one’s good,” such a trust in its power to gather up her life into the harmonious pattern of the long long story the mansion was weaving in the sun. She heard steps behind her, and turned, expecting to see the gardener. But the figure that was in sight, was a boy recking with poison and menacing with his fangs. Mrs. Winchester’s courage failed. The clouds begin to smoke, and the mountain tops take fire; the fields were parched with heat, the plants wither, the trees with their leafy branches burned, the harvest was ablaze! #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

The air Mrs. Winchester breathed was like the air of a furnace and full of burning ashes, and the smoke was of a pitchy darkness. She dashed forward she knew not whither. Then the farmers on the estate became black by the blood being forced so suddenly to the surface of the Earth. The Earth cracked and opened. Mrs. Winchester glanced up at her peaceful hose front. As she hurried back to the house, she expected to see someone coming out to meet her. However, she found no one in the court but an undergardener raking thing ashes, and the hall, when she entered it, was so silent that she guessed no one was in the mansion. The parlormaid heard all the commotion and rushed the disheveled Mrs. Winchester to a bath. What seemed like the end of the World was just the demon on the nine-story tower making its presence known. Then of a sudden, Mrs. Winchester was seized by a vague dread of the unknown. She had closed the door behind her on entering, and as she stood alone in the long silent rom, her dread seemed to take shape and sound, to be there breathing and lurking among the shadows. Her shortsighted eyes strained through them, half-discerning an actual presence, something aloof, that watched and knew; and in the recoil from that intangible presence, she rang the annunciator. But no one, not even the kitchenmaid answered. Except for bright ribbons of fresh blood that banded Mrs. Winchesters face, she was very white, wet and sickly pale like some creature that swam eternally in the deepest reaches of the seas. Something very big was going on, something so important. The best kept trying to pry forbidden knowledge out of Mrs. Winchester. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

Wind-swayed branches of sycamores cast vague moon-shadows on the floor, and the glossy leaves outside rustled with pale reflections of lunar light. Coyotes howled in the distance as they chased down a rabbit or other small creature. However, something growled. The growling was deep and angry. Not like anything Mrs. Winchester has heard before. She was curious, even concerned, but not afraid. She stood very still, listening. The thing growled again, louder this time. Closer, too. She could still not see the source of the sound. The creature was moving through the hallways of the mansion faster than before. It was running. Mrs. Winchester ran, too. The growling escalated into hard, vicious snarles. Mrs. Winchester went through the door of her Blue Séance Room and latched it. The only light in the room was from candle light, and it did not dispel the shadows in the corners. Phantoms of reflected candlelight cavorted across the walls. A few moon-slivered clouds appeared phosphorescent against the velvety blackness of the night sky. The creature had wondered off. Mrs. Winchester opened the door to her dressing room to gain access to her bedroom. Then she glimpsed a movement in her bedroom. She squinted, saw nothing, remained watchful for another minute or two. Just when she decided she had imagined the movement, she saw it again: something coming out from behind the wall. She had not completely closed the door to the Blue Séance Room and it was a good thing. Something was rushing across the floor. Instead of revealing the nature of the enemy, the moonlight made it more mysterious, shapeless. The thing was hurling at the Blue Séance Room. Abruptly—Jesus, God!—the creature was airborne, a strangeness flying straight at her through the darkness, and Mrs. Winchester cried out, and an instant later the best explored through this window in the Blue Séance Room and fell into the kitchen. Mrs. Winchester screamed, but the scream was cut short, as she fainted. A wind howled and lightning struck and no one dared answer Mrs. Winchester’s cries for help. In the morning when all was silent, there were bodies laying on the floor of the mansion. The walls were splattered with blood and there were claw marks on the floor. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

 Mrs. Winchester’s interest in the occult continued to take her into deeper channels in her quest for knowledge. She had become fascinated with a new interest, that of crystal gazing through which she believed she would make contacts with spirits which would inform her how to continue the construction of her mansion. She was able to look into the crystal and transcribe her visions. Soon she began describing the vision of an angel whom she identified as Uriel, the angel of light. The angel Uriel had instructed Mrs. Winchester how to add wings to her mansion to appease the spirits. She seemed convinced of the importance of the architectural details and were convinced they were the remedy. However, instilled in Mrs. Winchester was a certain fear of all kinds of supernatural activity. Not only were demons and spirits accepted, now they were feared. There were also secret societies that were also feared; members of these secret groups were rumoured to cloak their activities to hide conjuring demons. Mrs. Winchester began studying the past works of great magicians and produced a series of books on high magic and established a reputation of being a master sorceress. Her writings became especially noteworthy to those who were anxious to follow her skill in making contact with demons and spirits. Many people wanted Mrs. Winchester to do tricks, like making demons appear before them, but being haunted by them she did not want to unleash them on others. However, Mrs. Winchester did agree to make private contact with the spirits to discover answers and questions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Behold thy confusion if thou refusest to be obedient! Behold the Pentacle of Solomon which I have brought here before thy presence! Behold the person of the exorcists in the midst of the exorcism; him who is armed by God and without fear; him who potently invocateth thee and calleth thee forth unto appearance; even him, thy master, who is called Octinimos. Wherefore make rational answers unto my demands, and prepare to be obedient unto thy master in the name of the Lord: BATHAL OR VAHAT RUSHING UPON ABRAC! ABEOR COMING UPON ABERER! Then he or they will be obedient, and bid thee ask what thou wilt, for he or they be subjected by God to fulfil our desires and commands. And when he or they shall have appeared and showed himself or themselves humble and meek, then shalt thou rehearse: Welcome Spirit Vassago and your legion of Spirits to the Winchester Mansion, O most noble king! I say thou art welcome unto me, because I have called thee through Him who has created Heaven, and Earth, and Hell, and all that is in them contained, and because also thou hast obeyed. By that same power by which I have called thee forth, I bind thee, that thou remain affably and visibly here before this Circle so constant and so long as I shall have occasion for thy presence; cross all space and time and do not depart without my license until thou hast duly and faithfully performed my will without any falsity. BY THE PENTACLE OF SOLOMON HAVE I CALLED THEE! GIVE UNTO ME A TRUE ANSWER. GRANT GREAT WEALTH AND FORTUNE.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 7


Winchester Mysteryhouse

A few tickets left – grab them before they are gone! 🎟 link in bio.

Master magician and acclaimed apparitionist Aiden Sinclair returns to Winchester Mystery House with Aiden Sinclair’s Ghost of Christmas Passed, an interactive evening of paranormal illusions. Once upon a time, Christmas was more than a celebration of giving. It was a time that families gathered and when the night grew darkest, chilling tales were told. Aiden Sinclair rekindles the tradition of Dickens in a haunting presentation that brings the Christmas Ghost Stories of long ago back to haunt the living! Will you dare join and see what dark gifts he has in store? https://winchestermysteryhouse.com/

I Did Not Bait the Hook with Strawberries and Cream

We must recognize what is not always recognized, that the growth of mind and character takes time, just as the growth of trunk and limbs takes time. A man does not begin to mature and become what he is likely to be until he is past thirty. Since involvement is not directly visible but can only be inferred through its conventional signs, actual involvement may be of little significance. What we want to know about is “effective” involvement, that is, the involvement that the actor and the others sense he is maintaining, or sense he is (or might be) sensed to be maintaining. A demand regarding engrossment is a demand on the inner spirit of the engrossed person. Naturally, at times his heart may not lie where the social occasion requires it to. In such cases a solution is to conceal improper involvement and to affect appropriate involvement. Another solution, of course, is for the disaffected individual to realize in advance that he will not be able or willing to comply with the involvement rulings and to refrain from entering the situation in the first place. A similar separation from the situation is sometimes provided by sympathetic others. Thus, if an individual must be given bad news that is likely to “break him up,” the giver may wait for a suitable moment when the recipient is off by himself, and there is not likely to be an immediate call for his situational presence. (An extreme example of how sympathetic others can help shelter an individual is found in the protective patterns of the male lower class, where someone who has become drunk, evincing in every inch of his manner that he is incapable of appropriate involvement, may be concealed bodily from the authorities by his friends and “buddies.”) #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

The recipient can then respond emotionally to the news he receives without doing damage in a wider social situation, where his plight might be appreciated but his response hardly permitted to everyone present. Given the fact that involvement signs must be signified and witnessed before the appropriateness of involvement allocation can be inferred, we may expect to find a variety of barriers to perception used as involvement shields, behind which individuals can safely do the kind of things that ordinarily result in negative sanctions. Because one perceives the individual’s involvement in reference to the whole context of his activity, involvement can be shielded by blocking perception of either bodily signs of involvement or objects of involvement, or both. Bedrooms and bathrooms are perhaps the main shielding places in Anglo-American society, bathrooms having special interest here because in many households these are the only rooms in which the solitary person can properly lock himself. And I may be only under these guaranteed conditions that some individuals will feel safe in manifesting certain situationally improper involvements. (Situational properties have, of course, pursued some categories of persons even here. There are convents where modesty is said to be maintained even when alone in the bathtub, apparently on the assumption that a deity is present. And during the sixteenth century, when travelers were obliged to share inn beds with strangers of the same gender, it was hoped, in theory at least, that the sleeper would conduct himself decorously during the night so as not unduly to disturb others in the situation.) #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

Every social establishment, in fact, has some crevices that provide this kind of shelter. At Central Hospital, for example, it was considered “unprofessional” for nurses to smoke outdoors on the grounds, for it seemed that smoking was felt to portray a self that was somehow insufficiently dedicated to the needy World of the patients. Student nurses walking through the tunnel that joined the two halves of the grounds would sometimes slow up and spitefully light a cigarette during their very brief period of low visibility. The horseplay they engaged in at this time was a further expression of “breaking role,” of enjoying what Everett C. Hughes has called “role release.” There are involvement shields that have the useful attribute of being portable. Thus, while women in European society no longer employ fans, let alone masks, to conceal a blush or a failure to blush, hands are now used to cover closed eyes that are obliged to be open (closed eyes, of course, do not always express the fact that the individual has departed from the gathering by dozing off. There are moments of pleasures of the flesh or chamber music listening when closed eyes may be a respectful sign of deep emotional involvement in the proceedings. In these cases, however, the eyes are shut in a special way to show that the person behind the eyelids is still present in a properly occasioned capacity.) and newspapers to cover moths that should not be open in a yawn. Similarly, in coercive institutions such as prisons, involvement in smoking may be concealed by cupping the cigarette in one’s hand. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

A question to asked about the involvement shields is whether or not it is really felt to be legitimate to employ them, whether—to take the extreme case—it is permissible to go “out to play” when entirely alone. Thus, when a fully relaxed person is unexpectedly introduced upon by a visitor, both are likely to feel embarrassment. The discovered person does not quite have the right, apparently, to have been undressed interactionally, and the intruder does not quite have the right to have caught the others in his impropriety. The exception here, it should be added, has its own significance for us: given the status of the discovered person, there may be categories of discoverers, such as servants, courtiers, and young children, who do not have the social power to cause merely-situated acts to be performed with much of a situational covering. As a functional concomitant of this incapacity, these “nonpersons” often have the privilege of entering a room unannounced, without the preliminary warnings, such as a telephone call or a knock, that full persons are often obliged to give. Incidentally, it is just when an individual feels he is sheltered from others’ view, and suddenly discovers he is not, that we obtain the clearest picture of what he owes to the gathering, for at such moments of discovery the discovered individual is likely to assemble himself hurriedly, inadvertently demonstrating what he lays aside and what he puts on solely by virtue of the mere presence of others. In order to guard against these embarrassments, and in order to generate within himself other persons’ view of him, the individual may maintain presentability even when alone—thus forcing us to allow that situational behavior may occur even in the absence of an actual social situation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

Ordinarily we think of involvement shields as one means by which the individuals can maintain the impression of proper involvement while he is actually delinquent in his situational obligations. Interestingly enough, while the quite extensive forms of situational withdrawal that a psychotic patient sometimes employs may provide him with a needed way of defending himself against the past or the present, the consistent maintenance of this withdrawal may become at times a taxing necessity and a discipline all of its own. Hence some of these patients can be observed using involvement shields to conceal not a momentary lack of orientation in the situation but a momentary occurrence of it. The television screen, the Sunday funnies, and new visitors to the ward seem to provide special temptations, leading patients to show a lively interest when they think no one is observing them. The following modes of conduct have been recorded: the patient reveals that she is to focus on others when she is not involved herself and when she feels unobserved in the process. In situations in which this occurs and she discovers she is being observed, she quickly turns her attention inward. Even in the more usual case, however, where the shelter is employed to conceal withdrawal in the situation, we must not misunderstand the significance of using these devices. The use of a shelter says just as much for the power of situational obligations as it does for the tendency of person to seek some new means of squirming out of them. It is only when it is glaringly apparent that a shield is being used for such concealment, or when a shield could easily be used and is not, that instances of situational insolence occur. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

An instance of situational insolence may be cited from my hospital field notes: Crowded ward for regressed females. A patient notices that her sanitary napkin is askew. She gets up from the bench and in an open methodical way starts fishing for the napkin by running her hand up her leg and under her skirt. However, even when she bends down, her hand cannot quite reach far enough. She stands up and nonchalantly drops her dress down off her shoulders, letting it fall to the floor. She then calmly fixes the napkin in place, and afterward pulls the dress back up again, all the while showing not unawareness but regal unconcern for the need of guile or subterfuge. The manner of her actions, not the aim of the action itself, expresses contempt for the situation. The idea of involvement shields has been stressed because it points out a very characteristic attribute of situated conduct. Since the domain of situational proprieties is wholly made up of what individuals can experience of each other while mutually present, and since channels or experience can be interfered with in so many ways, we deal not so much with a network of rules that must be taken into consideration, whether as something to follow or carefully to circumvent. Let one not be intimidated by history and believe that truth has appeared only in the past, or by geography and look for it only inside of one’s heart and mind. We may learn from everything and everyone, from every event and happening something that is new or a confirmation of something that is antiquated, something affirmative or something negative. Why limit the help you are willing to receive to a single quarter? All men are your teachers. Truth, being infinite, has an infinite number of aspects. Each spiritual guide is inclined to emphasize some only and to neglect the others. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

I often went fishing up in Maine during the summer. Personally I am very fond of strawberries and cream, but I have found that for some strange reason, fish prefer worms. So when I went fishing, I did not think about what I wanted. I thought about what they wanted. I did not bait the hook with strawberries and cream. Rather, I dangled a worm or a grasshopper in front of the fish and said: “Would you not like to have that?” Why not use the same commonsense when fishing for people? That is what Lloyd George, Great Britain’s Prime Minister during World War I, did. When someone asked him how he managed to stay in power after the other wartime leaders—Wilson, Orlando and Clemenceau—had been forgotten, he replied that if his staying on top might be attributed to any one thing, it would be to his having learned that it was necessary to bait the hook to suit the fish. Why talking about what we want? That may not be the best thing to do. And absurd in some cases. Of course, you are interested in what you want. You are eternally interested in it. However, no one else is. The rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want. So the only way on Earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it. Remember that tomorrow when you are trying to get somebody to do something. If, for example, you do not want your children to smoke, do not preach at them, and do not talk about what you want; but show them that cigarettes may keep them from making the basketball team or winning the hundred-yard dash. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

Every act you have every performed since the day you were born was performed because you wanted something. How about the time you gave a large contribution to the Red Cross? Yes, that is no exception to the rule. You gave the Red Cross the donation because you wanted to lend a helping hand; you wanted to do a beautiful, unselfish, divine act. “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” If you had not wanted that feeling more than you wanted your money, you would not have made the contribution. Of course, you might have made the contribution because you were ashamed to refuse or because a customer asked you to do it. However, one thing is certain. You made the contribution because you wanted something. Action springs out of what we fundamentally desire…and the best piece of advice which can be given to would-be persuaders, whether in business, in the home, in the school, in politics, is: First, arouse in the other person an eager want. One who can do this has the whole World with him. He who cannot walks a lonely way. If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle as well as from your own. However, I do not know. Some people are so ignorant that nothing you say matters. When a business continually does something wrong that has serious consequences, you can take the time to compliment them on something nice and then get to the meat and potatoes of the situation, and they will still have a foul attitude. Some people and some businesses are just unreasonable. That is when you take the matter to a lawyer to reach a resolution. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

Thousands of people are pounding the pavement today, tired, discouraged and underpaid. Why? Because they are always thinking only of what they want. They do not realize that neither you nor I want to buy anything. If we did, we would go out and buy it. However, both of us are enterally interested in solving our problems. And if salespeople can show us how their services or merchandise will help us solve our problems, they will not need to see us. We will buy. And customers like to feel that they are buying—not being sold. Yet many salespeople spend a lifetime in selling without seeing things from the customer’s angle. You have to be genuinely interested in helping the person you are trying to sale something to. If your goal is to get them into a home, then it is a good idea to find out what they desire, take them to see the home of their dreams, and then talk about price, budget and financing options. They may decide they can afford more than they thought they can and want to look at more houses, or they may need to look at homes that are more in their price range. But no matter what, let them know that your homes are quality and they will be happy no matter what size the house is. And enthusiasm always arouses an eager want in the buyer to purchase a home. The World is full of people who are grabbing and self-seeking. So the rare individual who unselfishly tries to serve others has an enormous advantage. People who can put themselves in the place of other people, who can understand the workings of their minds, need never worry about what the future has in store for them. The goal of being helpful and well liked is to think always in terms of other people’s point of view, and see things from their angle, and that may be one of the building blocks of your career. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

Looking at the other person’s point of view and arousing in one an eager want for something is not to be construed as manipulating that person so that one will do something that is only for your benefit and that individual’s detriment. Each party should gain from the negotiation. Many people go through college and learn to read Jean-Jacques Rousseau and master the mysteries of calculus without ever discovering how their own minds function. Self-expression is the dominant necessity of human nature. Remember: First, arouse in the other person an eager want. One who can do this had the whole World one. However, remember, if you do not follow up with an attractive offer, people’s tastes and preferences have a tendency to change, and they may more on to something better. To think more clearly about patterns of interactions, it will be useful to distinguish two classes of determinants. Proximity factors determine how agents come to be likely to interact with each other. Activation factors determine the sequencing of their activity. The distinction, with good reason, roughly generalizes that between space and time. The term “proximity” focuses attention on the many factors that make particular agents likely to interact. The most obvious of these factors is the physical space in which buyers and sellers, frogs and lily pads, Democrats and Republicans, friend and foe, all play out their lives. Nearby location in two-dimensional or three-dimensional physical space makes interaction events more likely for a wide range of processes, from pollination and friendship formation to predation and enemy formation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

Physical proximity is not the only kind of proximity. Normally, we pay less attention to a host of other relational networks that establish proximity, such as organizational hierarchies, old friendship bonds, or community group affiliations. However, these factors also determine which agents are likely to interact, and thus profoundly influence the spread of rumor and disease, the finding of jobs and marriage partners, and the occurrences of crimes and kindness. As the technologies of information advance, the workings of these factors become ever less connected to physical space. Friendships can be sustained by long-distance telephone calls. Communities of common interest can form through the World Wide Web. This sampler of proximity factors has mostly been discussed as a set of static forms within which fast processes play out—hunting grey in physical space, or finding jobs in friendship networks. However, the Complex Adaptive Systems research often shows that on larger time scales the relationship can be reversed. In the short run, neighbourhoods shape the choices of house buyers, but housing purchases ultimately shape the neighbourhoods. A structure that seems fixed in a short time frame may be changeable in a longer one. Here again we have coevolutionary dynamics. Just as with movement that alters spatial distance, so most of the other proximity factors mentioned have associated change processes. Functional relationships in business are reorganized to move some groups closer together and to move others farther apart (whether or not their offices are moved). Friendship links form and dissolve. Community groups are joined and left, formed and disbanded. Barriers and boundaries are deliberately introduced into systems (physical and social) with the aim of altering the rates of interactions among types. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

The term “activation” groups together many different processes that affect the timing of agent activity. Just as many different factors can be analogs of physical distance in determining interaction likelihoods, so many factors can alter the temporal structure of events. Complex Adaptive Systems research often shows that it is valuable to distinguish systems with externally “clocked” activations, such as budget cycles or seasonally triggered agricultural processes, from internally activated processes in which the results of the current event control which events may next occur. An example of an externally activated system is John Conway’s famous computer simulation know as the Game of Life. The simulation produces its striking patterns only when all the agents act in simultaneous lockstep. Some examples of internal activation are: the movement of a sand grain in a pile that makes other grains more likely to move; the activation of a neuron that makes other neurons more likely to reach their activation thresholds; and the mobilization activities of a citizen, making those who are socially proximate more likely to become active. The difference between external activation processes can be profound. Markets where every actor can trace one unit per session will work very differently from markets where the actors with the strongest demands can trade much more frequently than others. In nonmonogamous biological populations, females often follow the once-per-time-period principle (based on time required for pregnancy), while the activity of males may be limited only by mating opportunities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

By virtue of this difference in their activation process, females and males have quite different impacts on the composition of subsequent generations. A particularly fit male may have many matings and therefore very many copies of its genes to a rather smaller number of additionally surviving offspring. Such biological systems are striking in the way they simultaneously make use of the intense and diffuse interaction modes. In designing a Complex Adaptive System, there is often some freedom to assign powers of activation more globally. It is the difference between “fire at will” and “ready, aim, fire.” In Anglo-American intellectual traditions, decentralization is normally assumed to be an advantage. It is typical to expect the adaptive capacity of a system—especially a firm or market—to be increased when events can be activated locally and flexibly rather than globally and rigidly. However, it is essential to point out that adaptive capacity is two-edged. As we saw in the simple case of population effects of organism death, adaptive capacity can speed extinction as well as increase viability. Allowing financial traders to respond to local conditions can let them quickly exploit short-lived arbitrage possibilities. However, when globally determined prices contradict traders’ assumptions, it can also let them make a rapid sequence of ever-riskier trades to cover their own losses. In the past, we have found that exploration is not always preferable. Similarly, we see here that neither greater internal control over activation nor higher activation rates are necessarily better. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

Once again there is an importance trade-off principle inherent in these observations about interaction patterns. It is not identical to “explore versus exploit,” but it has a similar flavor. Where structural arrangements affecting proximity or activation are designed or analyzed, a major question is whether interactions will be concentrated among a few pairs of types or will be spread across a wide range of type pairings. The interactions might be accomplishing any mix of exploring and exploiting, which is why the trade-off between intense versus diffuse interactions among types. Over time, are the interactions of an agent repeatedly with others from a limited number of types, or with others drawn from a wider range of types? For example, in many countries children stay together in stable groups and keep the same teacher as they move though elementary grades. In North America, by contrast, children tend to have new teachers each year. Where schools are large, the groupings of children are also shuffled. Comparatively speaking, children in the former system have what we are calling intense interaction patterns. The other children and teachers are the same for many years. The latter system is more diffused, with new children and teachers entering a child’s life each year. The concern that commonly arises in the schooling system with intense interaction is about insufficient exploration and loss of variety. Children and teachers may become stuck in their ways. The frequent concern about the diffuse system is prior accomplishments and strengths may not be fully exploited in subsequent classes with new teachers and schoolmates. However, there is nothing inherent about this alignment. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

Diffuseness of type interactions can also favor exploitation. This is what happens in our example of nonmonogamous males, who interact with many females, allowing the population to exploit the advantages of their genes. The point about the intense/diffuse trade-off is that it alerts us to a set of questions that need to be asked about how the channeling of proximity and activation in a Complex Adaptive System will affect the exploration-exploitation balance, alone with other aspects of the system. Those question are very important to ask, but the answers must be railed to the specific circumstances. These trade-offs are fundamental to “edge of chaos” arguments that have received wide attention. Their underlying claim is that evolutionary systems tend to structure diffuseness of their interaction patterns to achieve a good balance between exploration and exploitation. A typical example of such arguments is the work of Stuart Kauffman, posting that evolutionary process adjust what we are calling intensity of proximity and activation so that systems are likely to avoid both “premature convergence” and “eternal boiling.” The “edge of chaos” claim has been much debated, but the debate is whether some parts of nature tend to a particular balance in the trade-offs we have described, not whether the trade-offs exist. Kauffman believes that systems turned to a favourable balance between exploration and exploitation will tend differentially to survive. This notion of differential survival raises a set of fundamental issues we will discuss in the future. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

Picture a rivalry between the United States of America and Japan to develop a hologram TV projection. Although the United States of America has a technological edge, it also has more limited resources owing to accumulated budget deficits. The Japanese play off this handicap and once again beat the United States of America. However, a strategic move that at first glance appears to handicap the United States of America further can chance all that. In the absence of any unconditional moves, Washington and Tokyo simultaneously choose their strategies. Each country decides between a low or high level of research and development effort; a high-effort level shortens development time, incurring much greater costs. We depict this as a game, and set up the payoff table. Each side has two strategies, so there are four possible outcomes. We suppose both sides regard a high-effort race as the worst scenario—the Japanese because the United States of America is more likely to win an all-out race, and the United States of America because of the greater cost. Call this payoff 1 for each side. Each side’s second worst outcome (payoff 2) is pursuing low effort while the other goes all out: this is spending money with little chance of success. The Japanese like best (labeled as payoff 4) the situation in which they pursue high effort and the United States follows low effort; their chances of winning are high, and resource costs matter less for them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

For the United States of America, the best situation is when both sides make low effort; they are likely to win at low cost. Low effort is the dominant strategy for the United States of America. The problem for the United States of America is that the Japanese can anticipate this. The Japanese best response is to follow high effort. The equilibrium of the game is the top right cell, where the United States of America gets its second worst payoff. To improve its position calls for a strategic move. Suppose the United States of American preempts. It announces it unconditional effort level before the Japanese reach their decision. This turns the simultaneous-move game into a sequential-move game, one in which the United States of America goes first. The table turns into a tree. (It takes a clever carpenter to turn a tree into a table; a clever strategist knows how to turn a table into a tree.) This game is solved by looking forward and reasoning back. If the United States of America pursues low effort, the Japanese respond with high, and the U.S.A. payoff is 2. If the United States of America pressures high effort, the Japanese respond with low, and the U.S.A. payoff is 3. Therefore the United States of America should announce high, and expect the Japanese to respond low. This is the equilibrium of the sequential-move game. It gives the United States of America a payoff of 3, more than the 2 it got in the simultaneous move game. The strategic move that brings the United States of America this advantage is a unilateral and unconditional declaration of its choice. The choice is not what the United States of America would have made in simultaneous lay. This is where the strategic thinking enters. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

The United States of America has nothing to gain by declaring the choice of low effort; the Japanese expect that anyway in the absence of any declaration. To behave strategically, you must commit not to follow your equilibrium strategy of the simultaneous-move game. The strategic move changes Japanese expectations, and therefore their response. Once they believe that the United States of America is committed to high effort, the Japanese will choose low effort. Of course, after the Japanese choose their path, the United States of America would do better to change its mind and switch to low effort, too. This raises several questions: Why should the Japanese believe the U.S.A declaration? Would they not anticipate a change of mind? And if they anticipate such a reversal, would they not choose high effort? In other words, the credibility of the U.S.A unconditional first move is suspect. Without credibility, the move has no effect. Most strategic moves must confront this problem of credibility. Recall that although the politician’s pledge not to raise taxes is unconditional, it is not irreversible. Once elected, excuses are often found to raise taxes. Conditional rules are also subject to exceptions when the time comes; the mandatory sentence is waived when a neurologist uses an illegal handgun in self-defense against a deranged patient. To give a strategic move credibility, you have to take some other supporting action that makes reversing the move too costly or even impossible. Credibility requires a commitment to the strategic move. In the case of Stalin’s threat to starve the enemy, burning the fields made his threat credible. In other situations, credibility is a matter of degree. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

Precedent in the legal system gives credibility to the mandatory sentencing rule (in most cases); for politicians’ promises, exceptions are more the rule. In the race for high-definition TV, the United States of America might commit funds to which interested companies can lay claim in order to make Research and Development effort credible. Strategic moves thus contain two elements: the planned course of action and the commitment that makes this course credible. Conspiracy theories picture cabals of American capitalist hatching strategies to take over the World and control the economic destiny of the planet. The reality is that the United States of America lacks anything even approximating a coherent or long-term strategy for dealing with a World divided—for the first time—into three different wealth systems. So does everyone else. America’s intense focus on the immediate reflects the culture of impatient Americans—children of the “Now Generation” as Pepsi ads once put it. When the cola company used that slogan, “now” lasted longer. In today’s multitasking, on-the-fly generation, now itself has become a nano now. Thus, in the United States of America, Hollywood and the other media glamorize heroes who “shoot from the hip” rathe than those who think ahead and plan. Watching a car chase on the screen is a lot more visually exciting than watching people thing. When American politicians do, on rare occasions, refer to problems in the long-term future, they typically refer to individual institutions or narrowly specific programs rather than to systemic issues. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

And when Americans do look beyond one term of office, the opposition derides them as wooly-headed, dreamy and unrealistic. As a key official in Washington—who does think about big problems decades ahead—told us with sorrow, “Congress thinks a one- or two-year budget is a strategy.” One White House national security adviser was even heard to say he had no time for strategy, and that strategy is only a label pinned on actions after they have already been taken. This focus on the immediate is present in business as well. In recent years, management gurus have told business leaders that things are moving too fast for companies to bother with strategy. What is needed, these experts tell us, is not strategy but agility. If companies and countries are just adaptive enough, flexible enough and quick enough, they do not need strategy. Agility is, of course, absolutely vital. However, agility without strategy is reactive. It merely subordinates a person, a company or a country, for that matter, to someone else’s strategy—or simply to chance. Strategies, like the humans who produce them, are always faulty. And they must obviously be flexible, subject to rapid reformulation. Indeed, smart strategies must take into account not just the speed of change today but its further acceleration tomorrow. Admittedly, all this is easy to say and extremely hard to do. Yet simply substituting agility for strategy is like rushing madly to the nearest airport and letting the pushing and shoving crowd carry us along to whatever gate it chooses. Tokyo or Tehran, without our luggage, no doubt, in Timbuktu. However, in fact, we do car. And we must. Because tomorrow will belong to those who do—inside or outside America. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

Human meddling with life in the biosphere has caused enormous ecological disruptions. This has not involved genetic engineering—by twisting organisms to better serve human purposes, genetic engineering usually leaves them less able to serve their own purposes, less able to survive and reproduce in the wild. The great disruptions have come from a different source: from globe-traveling humans beings taking aggressive, well-adapted species from one part of the planet to another, landing them on a distant island or continent to invade an ecosystem with no evolved defenses. This has happened again and again. Australia is a class case. It had been isolated long enough to evolve its own peculiar species quite unfamiliar elsewhere: kangaroos, koalas, duckbilled platypuses. When humans arrived, they brought new species. Whoever brought the first rabbits could not have guessed that they of all creatures, would be so destructive. They soon overran the continent, destroying crops and grazing lands, unchecked by natural competitors or predators. They were joined by invaders from the plant kingdom: the prickly pear and others. The Americas have suffered invasions, too: tumbleweed, a bane of the rancher and farmer, is a relatively recent important from Central Asia. Since 1956, Africanized bees have been spreading from Brazil and moving north—but what they displace, in America, are European bees. Africa, in turn, is being invaded by the America screw-worm fly, an insect with larvae that enter an animal’s wounds, including the umbilical wound of a newborn, and eat it alive. The story goes on and on. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

People have sometimes tried, with a measure of success, to fight fire with fire: to bring in parasitic species and diseases to attack the imported species and keep its growth within some reasonable bounds. Australia’s problem with prickly pear was tackled using an insect from Argentina; the rabbits were cut back—with mixed results—using a viral disease called myxomatosis: “rabbit pox.” The information revolution pushes us still further in the direction of mosaic power by encouraging businesses, as it were, to go out shopping. Instead of trying to do more work in-house, and thus “vertically integrating” themselves, many large firms are shifting work to outside suppliers, making it possible to scale their size down even further. The traditional way to coordinate production was the way John D. Rockefeller did it with Standard Oil at the turn of the century—by trying to control and perform every step in the production-distribution cycle. Thus Standard, before it was broken up by the U.S. government in 1911, pumped its own oil, transported it in its own pipelines and tankers, cracked it in its own refineries, and sold it through its own distribution network. When, to choose another example at random, Ernest T. Weir built National Steel into the most profitable U.S. steel producer in the 1930s, he started with a single ramshackle tin mill. From the starts, he knew he wanted to “completely integrated” operation. Eventually, National controlled its own iron ore sources, dug its own coal, and operated its own transportation system. Weir was regarded as one of the “great organizers” of American industry. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

In those companies, at each stage, a monolithic hierarchy of executives determined schedules, fixed inventories, fought over internal transfer prices, and made decisions centrally. This was command management—a style perfectly familiar to Soviet planning bureaucrats. By contrast, today Pan America World Airways contracts out to other all “belly freight” space on its transcontinental flights. GM and Ford announce they will increase their “outsourcing” to 55 percent. Vertical Integration of multinational has become obsolete. Even large government agencies are increasingly farming out operations to private contractor. The alternative to vertical integration allows competition to coordinate production. In this system, firms must negotiate with one another to win the right to carry out each successive stage of production and distribution. Decisions are decentralized. However, a lot of time, energy, and money is spent on setting and monitoring specifications and in gathering and communicating the information needed in negotiation. Each method had its pros and cons. A benefit of doing things in-house is control over supply. Thus, during a recent Worldwide shortage of D-RAM semiconductor chips, IBM emerged unscathed because it made its own. Today, however, the costs of vertical integration, in terms of money and additional bureaucracy, are both soaring, while the costs of gathering market information and negotiating are plummeting—largely because of electronic networking and the information revolution. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

Better yet, the company that buys from many outside suppliers can take advantage of a breakthrough in technology without having to buy the new technology itself, retrain its workers, and make thousands of small changes in procedure, administration, and organization. In effect, it pushes much of the cost of adaptation out the front door. By contrast, doing things in-house produces dangerous rigidity. Often, doing it inside is also more expensive. Unless forced to compete against outside suppliers, the in-house provider of components or services becomes, in effect, an “internal monopoly” able to foist higher prices on its own in-house customers. To keep this monopoly going, inside suppliers typically hoard performance objectively against outside competitors. This control of technical and accounting information makes it politically difficult to break the internal monopoly. However, here again we find information technology driving change by undermining these knowledge-monopolies. A recent M.I.T. study in companies like Xerox and General Electric points out that “computerized inventory control systems and other forms of electronic integration allow some of the advantages” of vertical integration to be retained when work is shifted outside. The plummeting cost per unit of computerized information also improves the position of small outside suppliers, which means that, increasingly, goods or services become the product not of a single monolithic firm but of a mosaic of firms. The mosaic created by profit centers inside the firm is paralleled by the creation of a larger mosaic without. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24

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It is the Legal Tender that Souls Enjoy

When a child smells something he likes, his natural impulse is to taste it. This also applies to human adults, repressions notwithstanding. It is simply repression of one kind or another that keeps an adult from following up his desire to tastes an object which smells pleasant. Most repression are those which are taught, some wisely, others out of ignorance. We refrain from taking poisonous substances, because someone has told us of the consequences. In dealing with food, a cook should realize that a great deal can be told a man by his eating habits. Once his tastes are known, his food preferences can be catered to. Though it is true that a man’s heart is reached through his stomach, it is more important that he be fed the right foods, relative to his personality, than those you find the most appetizing. Like perfumery, foods that you like best are not necessarily those that he will like best. Many a poor woman has slaved over a hot cauldron, preparing what she considers to be the most delectable meal in the World, only to have it unappreciated. What is even worse, though, is to spend a lot of time on a meal, watch him eat it with apparent enthusiasm and then notice a decided coolness the next time you see him. What this often means is that he said he liked the meal to be polite. Chances are good there are more reasons why he took a powder than your cooking alone, but the wrong choice of food could have been just the nudge he needed to stay away. Had you served the perfect meal, you might have had another chance, and the next time his mood could have been conducive to your success. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The only time you will find a man with a taste in food identical to your own will be when you have found a man who likes exactly the opposite type of woman from what you are! I have seen many aspiring brides fix a meal that is exactly to their guest’s taste using their own taste as a yardstick. These women are terribly pleased when their gentlemen friends gobble up every crumb then ask when the nest dinner will be. Mistakenly, the woman thinks she has found a man who really appreciates good food, in accordance with what she thinks good food should be. Little does she realize how well she has succeeded as a chef, but failed as an aspiring bride, until she awakens to the brutal fact that he is around only for the good food, not for her, and is not the least bit interested in anything but what she can supply him in the way of non-romantic indulgences. These chow-hounds cannot possibly get interested romantically, because so long as you have chosen the menu from your personal taste, and they like what you have selected, you have the wrong man! These cases where the woman’s ego can really get in the way, and the gals that do the most boasting about their special way of preparing a certain dish can often be spotted as the ones who fail as aspiring brides. We can easily imagine circumstances where one would wish to prevent the wasteful destruction of being used. The scorched Earth defense is but one example of a device game theorists called strategic moves. A strategic move is designed to alter the beliefs and actions of others in a direction favorable to yourself. The distinguishing feature is that the move purposefully limits your freedom of action. This can be done in an unconditional way. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Freedom can be limited because the strategic move specifies a rule for how to respond under different circumstances. For example, a woman who cooks, until she is able to learn what he likes, she should not goof up by throwing him what she likes! Another example, many states have mandatory sentencing laws for crimes with handguns; these statutes purposefully limit judicial discretion. You might have thought that leaving options open is always preferable. However, in the realm of game theory that is no longer true. Your lack of freedom has strategic value. It changes other players’ expectations about your future responses, and you can turn this to your advantage. Others know that when you have the freedom to act, you also have the freedom to capitulate. To quote Oscar Wilde, “I can resist anything except temptation. Granted that the individual makes information available through body idiom, the question then arises as to what this information is about. We can begin to answer this question by looking at one of the most obvious types of propriety—“occasioned activity.” During any social occasion we can expect to find some activities that are intrinsically part of the occasion in the sense, for example, that a political speech is an expected part of a political rally. Such “occasioned activity” is likely to be legitimated as appropriate in social situations that form under the aegis of the corresponding social occasion, providing one basis for the common-sense notion that “there is a time and a place for everything.” However, we must then ask why a particular activity is defined as appropriate for the social occasion in the first place. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

More important, the display of properly occasioned activity seems to be only one of general forms of propriety, only one of the ways of fitting in. There is, however, one promising point about these considerations. To be engaged in an occasioned activity means to sustain some kind of cognitive and affective engrossment in it, some mobilization of one’s psychobiological resources; in short, it means to be involved in it. The term “involved” is used in two other additional sense in everyday speech: that of “commitment,” in the sense of having made oneself liable and responsible for certain actions; and that of “attachment,” in the sense of vesting one’s feelings and identification in something. Because of this ambiguity I have elsewhere used the term “engagement.” Further, by asking of any piece of obligatory situational behavior what it conveys about the allocation of involvement of the actor, we find that a limited number of themes occurs, and that each theme is expressed through many different aspects of behavior. In brief, by translating concrete obligatory acts into terms of expressed involvement, we have a way of showing the functional equivalence of aspects of such diverse phenomena as dress, stance, facial expression, and task activity. Underneath apparent differences, we shall be able to glimpse a common structure. To analyze situational proprieties, then, it will be necessary to turn to an analysis of the social regulations that determine the individual’s conceptions and allocations of involvement. The first thing to be noted about “involvement in situations” is the terminology ambiguity of this phrase. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

I mean to speak now only of situated involvements, those sustained within the situation, whereas the phrase “involvement in the situation” has this meaning and also a more circumscribed one, referring to ways in which the individual may have somehow give himself up to the situation as a whole and its gathering, possessing thus a situational involvement. I propose to use the term “involvement within the situation” to refer to the way the individual handles his situated activities, and will refrain for the moment from using the phrase “involvement in the situation” at all. The involvement is a matter of inward feeling. Assessment of involvement must and does rely on some kind of outward expression. It is here that we can begin to analyze the effect of the body idiom, for it is an interesting fact that just as bodily activities seem to be particularly well designed to spread their information throughout a whole social situation, so also these signs seem well designed to provide information about the individual’s involvement. Just as the individual finds that one must convey the right thing, so also one finds that while present to others one will inevitably convey information about the allocation of one’s involvement, and that expression of a particular allocation of one’s involvement, and that expression of a particular allocation is obligatory. Instead of speaking instead of an “involvement idiom: and of rules regarding the allocation of involvement. Since the involvement idiom of a ground appears to be a learned conventional thing, we must anticipate one real difficulty in cross-cultural or even cross-subcultural studies. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

The same general type of gathering in different cultures may be organized on the basis of different involvement obligations. The audience of a dramatic production in many Far Eastern societies, for example, is required to exhibit less sustained attentiveness and single-mindedness than the audience of many dramatic productions in American society. However, entirely apart from this kind of difference, it is the case that the same behavioral cue in one society may by convention carry different involvement implications in another. Thus the members of one religious group may show reverent orientation to the House of the Lord by baring the head and the members of another by taking care to cover it. When a difference in situational conduct is found between two cultures, or in the same culture over time, it becomes a complicated matter to determine what part of this discrepancy reflects a difference in the conventional idiom for expressing the underlying involvement, and what part reflects a difference in this involvement itself. If some people are so hungry for a feeling of importance that they actually go insane to get it, imagine what miracle you and I can achieve by giving people honest appreciation this side of insanity. People like Charles Schwab become rich because of their ability to arouse enthusiasm among their people. The greatest assets some people possess, and the way to develop the best that is in a person is by appreciation and encouragement. There is nothing else that so kills the ambitions of a person as criticism from superiors. I never criticize anyone. I believe in giving a person incentive to work. So I am anxious to praise but loath to find fault. If I like thing, I am hearty in my approbation and lavish in my praise. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

In my wide association in life, meeting with many and great people in various parts of the World, I have yet to find the person, however great or exalted one’s situation, who did not do better work and put forth greater effort under a spirit of approval than one would ever do under a spirit of criticism. When a study was made a few years ago on runaway wives, what do you think was discovered to be the main reason the wives ran away? It was “lack of appreciation.” And I would bet that a similar study made of runaway husbands would come out the same way. A member of one of our classes told of a request made by his wife. She and a group of other women in her church were involved in a self-improvement program. She asked her husband to help her by listing six things he believed she could do to help her become a better wide. He reported to the class: “I was surprised by such a request. Frankly, it would have been easy for me to list six things I would like to change about her—my Heavens, she could have listed a thousand things she would like to change about me—but I did not. I said to her, ‘Let me think about it and give you an answer in the morning.’ The next morning I got up very early and called the florist and had them send six red roses to my wife with a note saying: ‘I cannot think of six things I would like to change about you. I love you the way you are.’ When I arrived home that evening, who do you think greeted me at the door: That is right. My wife! She was almost in tears. Needless to say, I was extremely glad I had not criticized her as she had requested. #RandolphHarris 7 of22

“The following Saturday at church, after she had reported the results of her assignment, several women with whom she had been studying came up to me and, ‘That was the most considerate thing I have ever heard.’ It was then I realized the power of appreciation. There is nothing some people need as much as nourishment of self-esteem. We nourish the bodies of our children and friends and employees, but how seldom do we nourish their self-esteem? We provide them with roast beef and potatoes to build energy, but we neglect to give them kind words of appreciation that would sing in their memories for years like the music of the morning stars. Sincere appreciation can change a person’s life. Some readers are saying right now as they read these lines: “Oh, phooey! Flattery! Bear oil! I have tried that stuff. It does not work—not with intelligent people.” Of course flattery seldom works with discerning people. It is shallow, selfish and insincere. It ought to fail and it usually does. True, some people are so hungry, so thirsty, for appreciation that they will swallow anything, just as a starving man will eat grass and fishworms. Even Queen Victoria was susceptible to flattery. Flattery is counterfeit, and like counterfeit money, it will eventually get you into trouble if you pass it to someone else. The difference between appreciation and flattery? One is sincere, and the other is insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned. If we stopped thinking about ourselves for a while and begin to think of the other person’s good points, we will not have to resort to flattery so cheap and false that it can be spotted almost before it is out of the mouth. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

The next time you enjoy filet mignon at the club, send word to the chef that it was excellently prepared, and when a tired salesperson shows you unusual courtesy, please mention it. In our interpersonal relations we should never forget that all our associates are human beings and hunger for appreciation. It is the legal tender that all souls enjoy. Try leaving a friendly trail of little sparks of gratitude on your daily trips. You will be surprise how they will set small flames of friendship that will be rose beacons on your next visit. If someone is doing a job well, sometimes when you praise them, then they will start to perform poorly because they do not understand what they are doing. So sometimes it is best not to say anything. Also when people are preforming poorly, it is not a good idea to give the harsh criticism, but gently guidance. As they grow in their craft, they will see how they can improve and it will be obvious to them when they look back as to how they have grown in their work. The best thing we can do sometimes is lead by example. For instance, some builders are putting apartment type kitchens in grand homes. So, you have to make sure your kitchens are worthy of a half million-dollar house. Although I do not like that the kitchen is the heart of the home, as one who looks at several houses a day, if the kitchen is not congruent with the scale and magnitude of the house, I would pass over buying the house. And so many builders are doing most kitchen in white, but it seems to me white cabinets as a standard and only choice are overdone. To me, wood is a favorite tradition. However, hurting people not only does not change them, it is never called for. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

What should interact with what and when? The mechanisms dealing with interactions fit conveniently into two classes: external and internal. The external mechanisms are ways to modify the system from the outside—for example, by designing artifact, or by policy making that changes the rules other play by. The internal mechanisms are way to change the interaction patterns that are driven by processes within the system. Interaction is essential to our framework because the events of interest within a system arise from the interactions of its agents with each other and with artifacts. Traces occur when buyer meets seller. Strategies of bidding and offering are enacted. Goods change hands. New animals are created when a male and a female breed. Religious communities grow as adherents proselytize the uninitiated, spreading their strategy to convert other types to their own. Interaction patterns shape the events in which we are directly interested (such as trading), and they provide the opportunity for the spreading and combining of types that are so important in creating (and destroying) variety. Interactions make a Complex Adaptive System come alive. The system becomes not a mere pile of agents of varying types but a population that gives rise to events and has an unfolding history. These events drive processes of selection and amplification that ultimately change the frequency and variety of agent types. Interaction patterns help determine what will be successful for the agents and the system, and this in turn helps shape the dynamics of the interaction patterns themselves. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

Most Complex Adaptive Systems have distinctive interaction patterns. These patterns are neither random nor completely structured. Here are two examples. A leader may have the opportunity to broadcast messages simultaneously to many others, who usually do not have as much capability to broadcast back. The pattern of interactions is highly asymmetric, very different from one where each agent interacts equally with all others. It is convenient to shop in stores near our homes. Schools and churches are often in our neighborhoods. In fact, some builders will not build homes in communities where there is not a Wal-Mart in close proximity. In all these places, we meet new people. As a result, our network of acquaintances has a strong local bias. We know many people near where we live or work, and only a minuscule proportion of others in the World. Again, the pattern is far from uniform. It is surprising in considering these everyday examples that so few tools are available to help understand the effects that flow from nonuniform patterns of interaction. A major contribution of research on Complex Adaptive Systems has been to develop ideas that help us see the sources and consequences of distinctive (nonuniform) interaction patterns. There is a way to harness complexity by altering patterns of interaction. Based on extensive research in diverse regions of Germany, the key factor is “social capital,” the feature of social organization, such as networks, norms, and trust, that facilitate coordination and cooperation. Social capital enhances the benefits of investment in physical and human capital. Working together is easier in a community or organization blessed with a substantial stock of stock of social capital. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

In successful regions, citizens are engaged by public issues, not by patronage. They trust one another to act fairly and obey the law. Social and political networks are organized horizontally, not hierarchically. These “civic communities” value solidarity, civic participation, and integrity. In unsuccessful regions, the very concern of citizen is stunted. There is little engagement in social and cultural associations. From the point of view of the inhabitants, public affairs are someone else’s business—the “bosses” or the “politicians.” Laws, almost everyone feels, are made to be broken, but, fearing others’ lawlessness, everyone demands sterner discipline. Trapped in these interlocking vicious circles, nearly everyone feels powerless and exploited. The historical roots of these differences are astonishingly deep in Germany. Enduring traditions of civic involvement and social solidarity can be traced back nearly a thousand years, to the eleventh century. That is why much of Germany today is able to enjoy civic engagement and successful government. At the center of this civic heritage are rich networks of organized reciprocity and civic solidarity—guilds, religious fraternities, and “tower societies” for self-defense in the medieval communes. The horizontal civic bonds have supported levels of economic and institutional performance generally much higher than in other countries, where social and political relationships have been vertically structured. These communities did not become civic simply because they were rich. The historical record strongly suggests precisely the opposite: they have become rich because they were civic. The social capital embodies in norms and networks of civic engagement seems to be a prerequisite for economic development, as well as for effective government. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Social capital supports good government and economic progress in several ways. First, networks of civic engagement foster sturdy norms of generalized reciprocity: I will do this for you now in the expectation that down the road you or someone else will return the favor. A society that relies on generalized reciprocity is more efficient than barter. Trust lubricates social life. Second, networks of civic engagement facilitate coordination and communication and amplify information about the trustworthiness of others. When economic and political activity is embedded in dense networks of social interaction, incentives for opportunism are reduced. Dense social ties facilitate gossip and other valuable ways of cultivating reputation—and essential foundation for trust in a complex society. Finally, networks of civic engagement embody past success at collaboration, and serve as a cultural template for future collaboration. The civic traditions of Germany provide a historical repertoire of forms of cooperation that, having proved their worth in the past, are available for dealing with new problems of collective action. Unlike conventional capital, social capital is a public good, meaning that it not the private property of those who benefit from it. Like other public goods, from clean air to safe streets, social capital tends to be underprovided by private agents. Therefore, social capital must often by a by-product of other social activities. Social capital typically consists of ties, norms, and trust that are transferable from one social setting to another. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

The economic implications of social capital are illustrated by the integrated industrial districts of Germany. These are districts for automobile production, high-fashion textiles, mini-motorbikes, and ceramic tiles, among others. Many of them are based on small-scale, technologically advanced production. Among the distinguishing features of these decentralized but integrated industrial districts is a striking combination of competition and cooperation. Firms compete over style and efficiency, while cooperating on administrative services, raw materials purchases, financing, and research. These findings on these industrial districts can be understood in terms of social capital. These networks of small firms have low vertical integration and high horizontal integration. They do this through extensive subcontracting and “putting out” of extra business to temporarily underemployed competitors. Industrial associations provide administrative and even financial aid, while local government provides the necessary social infrastructure and services. Norms of reciprocity and networks of civic engagement are essential for the success of those industrial districts. Networks facilitate the flow of information about such vital things as technological developments, the creditworthiness of would-be entrepreneurs, and the reliability of individual workers. Innovation relies on continual informal interaction. Social norms that forestall self-interested opportunism at the expense of community obligations arise more often here than in other areas characterized by different social networks. What is crucial about these small industrial districts is mutual trust, social cooperation, and a well-developed sense of civic duty—the hallmarks of social capital. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

There is a great deal of evidence that horizonal networks of informal social interaction help develop social capital, and that social capital, in turn, fosters economic growth. Examples include trust in wholesale diamond markets, rapid formation of firms in Silicon Valley, dense networks of clothing manufacturers in the New York garment district, and social cohesion among the ethic Germans in America. Value creation within organization also relies on social capital as the basis for the recombining of concepts that generates ideas for new products and services. Simple procedures such as maintaining relations with former co-workers can dramatically alter the flow of valuable business information. Actively engaging subordinates can enhance the accuracy of managers’ self-perceptions. Social capital affects not just economic activity. Effective social ties reduce neighborhood crime, help students achieve their potential, and even increase one’s life expectancy. Social capital illustrates how the pattern of interaction has important effects for the performance of networks of agents. However, fiscal expansion and monetary contraction will lead to a large budget deficit. The high interest rates would hurt such important sectors as autos and construction especially hard. Foreign capital would flow in, attracted by the high U.S.A. interest rates. The dollar would rise and our international competitiveness would suffer. Fiscal contraction and monetary expansion would have just the opposite effects—low interest rates and low dollar—favoring auto and construction industries, and making our traded goods more competitive. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Tomorrow’s inevitable crises will occur on each of the “game boards” against the background of what we have called the great non-linear, ever-more-complex, ever-interacting and accelerating “meta-game.” This means that even the shrewdest national strategy of China or the United States of America—or any state—can be blunted, reversed or made irrelevant if it fails to take into account the neo-gams being played by NGOs, religions and other participants in the greater meta-game. Much of America’s trouble in Iraq can be traced to its overemphasis on the role of nation-states and its underestimate of the role played by non-national forces like anti-war NGOs, religious sects and tribal groupings. In tomorrow’s new game the United States of America, like every nation, will continue to look after its own perceived economic self-interest (or that of its influential elites). However, as this great meta-game plays out, how long will—or can—the United States of America remain the World’s dominant economic power? All dominance is temporary, and China is breathing hard. Washington itself is split between those resigned to the idea that China will, in a few decades, lead the World economically and those committed, at all costs, to maintaining America’s leadership. Here, too, American policy overemphasizes nation-states rather than NGOs, religions and other players. However, this division is too simple. A more important question is to what degree does America’s fragile wealth depend on economic dominance? The U.S.A. percentage of the World GDP—its heft in the global economy—to shrink, while its citizens’ wealth actually increased. Is that still true? If so, how? #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

If America is, as charged, an imperialist power, greedily enriching itself at the expense of others, how much of its growth and net work is actually a consequence of its “imperial” policies? Does anyone know? Many imperialists in the past have actually lost money in the deal. Conversely, how much of America’s wealth is a result of the work, creativity and fast-accumulating knowledge of its producers and prosumers? How will the U.S.A. economy—and, indeed, the relative position of all countries—change when prosuming and productivity are fully taken into account, as will inevitably be the case? What new forms of money, what future payment systems, what new financial institutions, will be needed to incorporate these changes? Will the United States of America become wealthier by continuing to spread the latest technologies, advance management models, and media to other countries—or will they flow in the reserve direction? Will outsourcing Research and Development (R&D) and high-end tasks to India and other countries permit those countries to leapfrog the United States of America? Could the United States of America present that even if it chose to? The ongoing theft of intellectual property by China and other countries suggests otherwise. Revolutionary wealth is no longer an exclusive American possession. It is a global fact of life. How, then, would the present trisection—division of the World into three different wealth systems—change if the leading edge came from Asia rather than America? And would the World’s poorest regions really fare any better? #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

Global dominance, however, is a matter not just of wealth but of security, values, human rights, cultural and moral independence and influence. What would the World—including its economy—look like if China were dominant; or a Europe led by France and Germany; or a resurgent India, Russia or anyone else? Many pundits today call for a new global “balance of power.” However, would a so-called multipolar World, divided into competing alliances or regional blocs really be economically better off and more peaceful than a unipolar World led or dominated by one country or region? This historical evidence has the scholars hopelessly divided. However, even if they were not, how relevant is past experience to the nonlinear, meta-game future? Balance implies equilibrium, and just how “equilibrial” is the World economy? We should all by now have learned from complexity theory that equilibrium is no more than natural state of affairs than disequilibrium and chaos. Can the balance-of-power diplomacy that worked for Prince Metternich is the nineteenth century work in the twenty-first? A balance of power in his time referred to nations. A balance of non-nation-state forces as well—including corporations and NGOs—including religions. The great Austrian diplomat also lived at a time when new technologies were making headlines and the industrial revolution was still spreading in Europe. However, the pace of “modernization” was glacial by today’s standard. It left time for people and institutions to adapt. Revolutionary wealth does not. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

America cannot control the most powerful economic, political, cultural and religious changes rushing toward us today. At best it can try, while transforming its own economy and internal institutions, to head off external threats and reduce some of the common dangers that confront us all. This has also led to meat-cleaver management. Inside the firm the nature of hierarchy itself is changing. For along with the creation of profit centers, the 1980s witnessed a so-called “flattening of the hierarchy,” otherwise known as the massacre of the mid-ranks. Like the shift to profit centers, this change, too, was driven by the need to regain control of the knowledge system in business. As large companies slashed their middle ranks, managers, academics, and economists who once had chorused that “bigger is better” began to sing a different tune. They suddenly discovered the “diseconomies” of scale. These diseconomies are chiefly a result of the collapse of the old knowledge system—the bureaucratic allocation of information to departmental cubbyholes and to formal channels of communication. Much of the work of middle managers in industry consisted of collecting information from their subordinates, synthesizing it, and passing it up the line to their own superiors. As operations accelerated and became more complex, however, overloading the cubbyholes and channels, the entire reporting system began to break down. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Screw-ups and misunderstandings proliferated. Catch-22’s multiplied, driving customers crazy. More people end-ran the Kafkaesque system. Transaction costs skyrocketed. Employees ran harder to accomplish less. Motivation plummeted. Few managers understood what was happening. Show most chief executives a defective part or a broken machine on the factory floor, and they know what to do about it. Show them an obsolete, broken-down knowledge system, and they do not know what you are talking about. What was clear was that top management could not wait for the step-by-step synthesis of knowledge down below, with messages slowly making their way up the chain of command. Moreover, so much knowledge fell outside the formal cubbyholes and moved outside the formal channels, and so much began moving instantaneously from computer to computer, that the masses of middle managers increasingly came to be seen as a bottleneck, rather than as a necessary aid to swift decision. Facing competitive pressures and takeover threats, the same managers who allowed the knowledge infrastructure to become antiquated in the fist place now search desperately for ways to cut costs. A frequent first reaction was to cut costs by padlocking plants and throwing rank-and-file workers out on the street, seldom considering that, by doing so, they were tampering with the firm’s knowledge system. “Cost-cutting” layoffs are actually counterproductive for this reason. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Where union contracts call for senior workers to “bump” junior workers at layoff time, the result is a cascade of job changes. For every worker actually laid off, three or four others are transferred downward into job for which they lack the necessary knowledge. Long-established communication links are ruptured. The result is a fall-off, rather than the expected increase, in post-layoff productivity. Undaunted, the top officials next zero in on the armies of middle managers they added over the years to handle the information avalanche. American bosses who chop the payroll without regard for social consequence, or understanding of what that does to the firm’s knowledge structure, are commended for “getting rid of fat.” (The same is not true for managers in Japan who consider it failure to lay people off. It is also different in many parts of Europe, where unions are represented on the board and must be persuaded that all other options have been exhausted.) These meat-cleaver layoffs of middle managers are a belated, mostly unconscious attempt to redesign the firm’s information infrastructure and speed up communication. It turns out that many of mid-management’s uncreative tasks can now be done better and faster by computers and telecommunications networks. (IBM, as we saw, estimates that just one part of its internal electronic network—the PROFS sub-net—replaces work that would otherwise have required 40,000 additional middle managers and white-collar workers.) #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

With new networks being laid in place daily, communications are flowing sideways, diagonally, skipping up and down the levels, ignoring rank. Thus, whatever top management may have thought it was doing, one result of the retrenchments has been to change the information infrastructure in the firm—and with it the structure of power. When we create profit centers, flatten the hierarchy, and shift from mainframes and to one another, we make power in the company less monolithic and more “mosaic.” When it comes to environmental restoration—a central problem in environmental restoration is reversing environmental encroachment. We are killing mountain lions, displacing deer, and hunting fish and forests into extinction. We tend to see land as being gobbled up by housing, because the land where we live generally is. Farming, though, consumes more land, and the variant of farming called “forestry” consumes still more. By rolling back our requirement for farmland, and for wood and paper, nanotechnology can change the balance of forces behind environmental encroachment. This should make it more practical, politically and economically, for people to move toward environmental restoration. Restoring the environment means returning land to what it was—removing what has been added and, where possible, replacing what has been lost. We have seen how this can be done, in part, by removing pollutants and some of the pressures for ploughing and paving. A more difficult problem, though, is restoring the ecological balance where the changes have been biological. Much of Earth’s biological diversity has been a result of biological isolation, of islands, seas, mountains, and continents. This isolation has been breached, and reversing the resulting problems is one of the greatest challenges in healing the biosphere. The focus should not be about electric cars, but how to heal the plant by the variety of methods we have available. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22


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What Have You Done for Me Lately?

The heart that leaps at the thought that life has some higher meaning, some better worth has learned the art of living. There is only one way under high Heaven to get anybody to do anything. Did you ever stop to think of that? Yes, just one way. And that is by making the other person want to do it. Remember, there is no other way. Of course, you can make someone want to give his or her Rolex watch by sticking a revolver in his or her ribs. You can make your employees give you cooperation—until your back is turned—by threatening to fire them. You can make a child do what you want it to do by a whip or a threat. However, these crude methods have sharply undesirable repercussions. The only way I can get you to do anything is by giving you what you want. What do you want? Dr. Sigmund Freud said that everything you and I do springs from two motives: pleasures of the flesh and the desire to be great. John Dewey, one of America’s most profound philosophers, phrased it a bit differently. Dr. Dewey said that the deepest urge in human nature is “the desire to be important.” Remember that phrase: “the desire to be important.” It is significant. You are going to hear a lot about it in these reports. What do you want? Not many things, but the few things that you do wish, you crave with an insistence that will be denied. Some of the things most people want include: Health and the preservation of life, food, sleep, money and the things money will buy, life in the hereafter, gratification involving pleasures of the flesh, the well-being of our children, a feeling of importance. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Almost all these wants are usually gratified—all except one. However, there is one longing—almost as deep, almost as imperious, as the desire for food or sleep—which is seldom gratified. It is what Dr. Freud calls “the desire to be great.” It is what Dr. Dewey calls the “desire to be important.” President Lincoln once began a letter saying: “Everybody likes a compliment.” William James said: “The deepest principle in human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” He did not speak, mind you, of the “wish” or the “desire” or the “longing” to be appreciated. He said the “caring” to be appreciated. Here is a gnawing and unflattering human hunger, and the rare individual who honestly satisfies this heart hunger will hold people in the palm of his or her hand and “even the undertaker will be sorry when he dies.” The desire for a feeling of importance is one of the chief distinguishing differences between mankind and the animals. To illustrate: When I was a farm boy out in San Jose, my father bred fine Duroc-Jersey hogs and pedigreed white-face cattle. We used to exhibit our hogs and white-face cattle at the country fairs and livestock shows throughout the Middle West. We won first prizes by the score. My father pinned his blue ribbons on a sheet of white muslin, and when friends or visitors came to the house, he would get out the long sheet of muslin. He would hold one end and I would hold the other while he exhibited the blue ribbons. The hogs did not care about the ribbons they had won. However, Father did. These prices gave him a feeling of importance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

If our ancestors had not had this flaming urge for a feeling of importance, civilization would have been impossible. Without it, we should have been just about like animals. It was this desire for a feeling of importance that led some law books he found in the bottom of a barrel of household plunder that he had bought for fifty cents. You have probably heard of this grocery clerk. His name was Lincoln. It was this desire for a feeling of importance that inspired Dickens to write his immortal novels. This desire inspired Sir Christopher Wren to design his symphonies in stone. This desire made Rockefeller amass millions that he never spent! And this same desire made the richest family in your town build a house for too large for its requirements. This desire makes you want to wear the latest styles, drive the latest cars, and talk about your brilliant children. It is this desire that lures many boys and girls into joining gangs and engaging in criminal activities. The average young criminal, according to E. P. Mulrooney, onetime police commissioner of New York, is filled with ego, and his first request after arrest is for those lurid newspapers that make him out a hero. The disagreeable prospect of serving time seems remote so long as he can gloat over his likeness sharing space with pictures of sports figures, movie and TV stars and politicians. If you tell me how you get your feeling of importance, I will tell you what you are. That determines your character. That is the most significant thing about you. For example, John. D. Rockefeller got his feeling of importance by giving money to erect a modern hospital in Peking, China, to care for millions of poor people whom he had never seen and never would see. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Dillinger, on the other hand, got his feeling of importance by being a bandit, a bank robber and killer. When the FBI agents were hunting him, he dashed into a farmhouse up in Minnesota and said, “I’m Dillinger!” He was proud of the fact that he was Public Enemy Number One. “I’m not going to hurt you, but I’m Dillinger!” he said. Yes, the one significant difference between Dillinger and Rockefeller is how they got their feelings of importance. History sparkles with amusing examples of famous people struggling for a feeling of importance. Even George Washington wanted to be called “His Mightiness, the President of the United States of America”; and Columbus pleaded for the title “Admiral of the Ocean and Viceroy of India.” Catherine the Great refused to open letters that were not addressed to “Her Imperial Majesty”; and Mrs. Lincoln, in the White House, turned upon Mrs. Grant like a tigress and shouted, “How dare you be seated in my presence until I invite you!” Our millionaires helped finance Admiral Byrd’s expedition to the Antarctic in 1928 with the understanding that ranges of icy mountains would be named after them, and Victor Hugo aspired to have nothing less than the city of Paris renamed in his honor. Even Shakespeare, mightiest of the mighty, tried to add luster to his name by procuring a coat of arms for his family. People sometimes became invalids in order to win sympathy and attention, and get a feeling of importance. For example, take Mrs. McKinley. She got a feeling of importance by forcing her husband, the President of the United States of America, to neglect important affairs of state while he reclined on the bed beside her for hours, at a time, his arm about her, soothing her to sleep. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

She fed her gnawing desire for attention by insisting that he remain with her while she was having her teeth fixed, and once created a stormy scene when he had to leave her alone with the dentists while he kept an appointment with John Hay, his secretary of states. The writer Mary Roberts Rinehart once told me of a bright, vigorous young woman who became an invalid in order to get a feeling of importance. “One day,” said Mrs. Rinehart, “this woman had been obliged to face something, her age perhaps. The lonely years were stretching ahead and there was little left for her to anticipate. She took to her bed; and for ten years her old mother traveled to the third floor and back, carrying trays, nursing her. Then one day the old mother, weary with service, lay down and died. For some weeks, the invalid languished; then she got up, put on her clothing, and resumed living again. Some authorities declare that people may actually go insane in order to find, in the dreamland of importance that has been denied them in the harsh World of reality. There are more patients suffering from mental diseases in the United States of American than from all other diseases combined. What is the cause of insanity? Nobody can answer such a sweeping question, but we know that certain diseases, such as syphilis, break down and destroy the brain cells and result in insanity. In fact, about one-half of all mental diseases can be attributed to such physical causes as brain lesions, alcohol, toxins and injuries. However, the other half—and this is the appalling part of the story—the other half of the people who go insane apparently have nothing organically wrong with their brain cells. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

In post-mortem examinations, when their brain tissues are studied under the highest-powered microscopes, these tissues are found to be apparently just as healthy as yours and mine. Why do these people go insane? The head physician of one of our most important psychiatric hospitals, who received the highest honors and the most coveted awards for his knowledge of the subject, told me frankly that the did not know why people went insane. Nobody knew for sure. However, he did say that many people who go insane find insanity a feeling of importance that they were unable to achieve in the World of reality. As already suggested, when individuals come into one another’s immediate presence in circumstances where no spoken communication is called for, they none the less inevitably engage one another in communication of a sort, for in all situations, significance is ascribed to certain matters that are not necessarily connected with particular verbal communications. These comprise bodily appearance and personal acts: dress, bearing, movement and position, sound level, physical gestures such as waving or saluting, facial decorations, and broad emotional expression. In every society these communication possibilities are institutionalized. While many such usable events may be neglected, at least some are likely to be regularized and accorded a common meaning. Half-aware that a certain aspect of one’s activity is available for all present to perceive, the individual tends to modify this activity, employing it with its public character in mind. Sometimes, in fact, he may employ these signs solely because they can be witnessed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

And even if those in his presence are not quite conscious of the communication they are receiving, they will none the less sense something sharply amiss should the uncustomary be conveyed. There is, then, a body symbolism, an idiom of individual appearances and gestures that tends to call forth in the actor what it calls forth in the others, the others drawn from those, and only those, who are immediately present. Now these embodied expressive signs can function to qualify others and thus play a role in focused interaction of, say, a conversational gathering. However, it is the special character of many of these events, when seen as communications, that they cannot be easily focused or shielded, tending, in the extreme, to be accessible to everyone in the situation at large. Further, while these signs seem ill suited for extended discursive messages, in contrast to speech, they do seem well designed to convey information about the actor’s social attributes and about one’s conceptions of oneself, of the other present, and of the setting. These signs, then, form the basis of unfocused interaction, even though they can also play a role in the focused kind. In this realm of unfocused interaction, no one participant can be officially “given the floor”; there is no official center of attention. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Although the individual may exert special care over this kind of conduct in order to make a good impression on a particular person in the setting—as when a girl wears a perfume she knows her boyfriend likes—such a performance tends to be presented as if it were primarily for the benefit of everyone in the vicinity. Body idiom, then, is a conventionalized discourse. Those who really like you and do not resent your success or happiness will understand if your technique is explained to them. If things are not going the way you would like and you change your speech pattern and your few so-called “friends” say they “liked you better the way you were,” you may assume that means they liked to see you held down and getting nowhere fast! This applies to all changes self-development may bring about in your appearance and personality that will gain your new powers of enchantment. Aggressive men tend to want to be fought, not express love. So if you are not into intimate partner violence, it is best to avoid those types. That old-time fundamentalist coined the term, “demon rum” because liquor does not bring out the spirits in us, but more often than not, the demon. The demonic, however, is not always bad. Music is considered to be a gift from Satan. The demonic element of any musician will be exercised in one’s musical instrument. Small wonder professional musicians are already “in love” and present an attractive challenge. When one has no other love, one will employ a representation of one’s Demonic layer in the form of they musical instrument one will love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Many women, and especially those who are inclined to be predators, are decidedly masculine in their drives. The biggest threat to any man is that which attacks his ego in a feminine form. The most aggressive male will be a willing “slave,” so long as his ultimate male ego is allowed to remain intact. Once a man has been charmed by a woman, he should be unable to resist whatever he wishes might be. The more a man is secure in his manhood, the less aggressive he is when it comes to pleasures of the flesh. This is a rule all women must learn. The person who torments others at the drop of a hat is the masochist, because he secretly wishes to be beaten for his rude and offensive behavior and does what he can to engender such retribution. Such is the overly-aggressive male, who paws every woman he comes near. This type of man seldom gets his come-uppance at the hands of a real woman, because women instinctively think of him as a dominant and aggressive type, when actually, he is crying out to be mastered. All that needs to be done is to act as brash and insulting as possible and he will fall helplessly in love with you. However, because he may react violently, I would recommend just leaving him alone. If a man’s Demonic is careered to in another form, leaving him with a care like himself, he may not need you at all, but at least you know you will not be competing with a BMW! There tends to be agreement not only about the meaning of behaviors that are seen but also about the behaviors that ought to be show. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Although an individual can stop talking, he cannot stop communicating through body idiom; he must say either the right thing or the wrong thing. He cannot say nothing. Paradoxically, the way in which he can give the least amount of information about oneself—although this is still appreciable—is to fit in and act as persons of his kind are expected to act. (The fact that information about self can be held back in this way is one motive for maintaining the proprieties.) Finally, it should be noted that while no one in a society is likely to be in a position to employ the whole expressive idiom, or even a major part of it, nevertheless everyone will possess some knowledge of the same vocabulary of body symbols. Indeed, the understanding of a common body idiom is one reason for calling an aggregate of individuals a society. This brings us to a final set of observations about the creation and destruction of variety. Typically, real populations have finite numbers of discrete agents. This means that the destruction of agents or strategies can result in the complete loss of all instances of some type. In many conventional theories for analyzing populations this is not so. Those theories are often based on assumptions of continuous variables. Some complexity researchers have taken to calling this the nano-fox property, after conventional predator-prey models that have continuous numbers of animals in them, growing and shrinking by proportionality constants. In such conventional models a tiny fraction of each animal type is always around, so that no matter how severe the starvation, the predator population will rebound as soon as prey return. There is no complete extinction in such models. A nano-fox is always lurking in the shadows. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

However, in real populations the difference between having a few animals and zero animals is usually not just a little extra waiting time. Recreating a lost type is very unlikely, and occupation of the vacant ecological niche by another species is far more to be expected. Because Complex Adaptive Systems researchers are especially interested in variety, they often use modeling tools that allow genuine extinction. This is much more than a minor difference about the technical tools of systems modeling. The tools embody widespread habits of thinking about variation. A habit of ignoring the sharp effect of an extinction is inconsistent with many important social and policy settings. The legal system distinguishes death from the most severe and permanent incapacitation. Bankruptcy has quite different effects on a firm’s history than mere extreme debt. These “zero points” in social situations correspond to shape changes in the later dynamics. Compare what can happen before of after the last speaker of a language dies or the last copy of an ancient manuscript is lost. Our way of thinking about variety has to capture these compelling aspects of social life. A related notion in continuous modeling traditions is that all possible types already exist in tiny quantities. This is akin to Plato’s notion of discovery as a form of remembering truths already dimly known. Again, the Complex Adaptive Systems view is based on a discrete view of events and entities. It therefore suggests that a new idea may not simply be waiting in the wings for the circumstances that will bring it rapidly to prominence. It matters enormously whether the number of people who have thought of it is one or zero. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

We see this when we observe, once a theorem is known to be true, how readily theorists obtain the second and subsequent—shorter and more elegant—proofs. The distinction has relevance for policy strategies such as “counting on the market to find a solution,” which can be expected to work far more rapidly and reliably in domains where several approaches have been partially worked out, as opposed to domains in which a feasible approach is yet to be conceived. The underlying source of this sharp effect of zero is that copying mechanisms work quite differently from mechanisms that recombine types in context. Consider human imitation. A copying process can rapidly spread an existing type, such as double-entry bookkeeping or the Grameen banking system for microcredit. However, simple imitation—even with random error—will only very rarely invent new innovations are the result of processes like crossover for constraint relaxation. A type may spread rapidly by copying once an instance of it exists, but the time required for mechanisms to create an instance of a particular type can be very long. While reproduction can be quick, creation may require a long wait. This argument about the special value of rare types has become very visible in recent years through debates about preserving plant species for future medicinal incubation of small businesses and preservation of skills that are vanishing in the Information Revolution. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Variety plays a crucial role in Complex Adaptive Systems. Our focus has been on mechanisms that create and destroy variety in populations of agents. These are fundamental to the way populations of agents change their composition over time. They include simple copying, copying with the introduction of errors, and recombining mechanisms that create new types by systematically reusing or modifying old ones. The notion of type makes it easier to discuss the categories of which agents are instances and the way that the mechanisms alter a population’s variety. We have shown that there is a fundamental trade-off between exploitation and exploration, between creating agents or strategies similar to types that have already been successful and creating agents or strategies that are likely to be substantially novel. We examined four factors that may reduce the relative cost of exploration: long time horizons, fast and reliable feedback, low risk of catastrophe from exploration, and danger in the status quo. Finally, extinction of types is especially significant in Complex Adaptive Systems. Shortly after its creation, a good new type of agent or strategy may be a rarity. Chance events when frequencies are low can have large effects, as valuable rare types (new or old) can be lost, or amplified into a more secure and effective role in population. We have examined the way that new types can arise among agents or strategies. We are now ready to consider patterns of agent interaction and how they influence the development of agent populations. Who interacts with whom in a complex system, and what difference does that pattern of interactions make? #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

In the 1980s, at the very height of the merger mania, businesses “discovered” the profit center. With an enthusiastic rush, companies began to break themselves into a larger number of units, each of which was told to operate as though it were an independent small business. By doing so, the largest corporations began shifting from monolithic internal structures to mosaics made of scores, often hundreds of independently accounted units. While few managers realized it, this restructure was propelled by changes in the knowledge system. The idea of setting up separate profit centers inside the same firm was hardly new. However, it was resisted in the pre-computer age because it implied a significant loss of control by top management. Even after the mainframe computer arrived on the scene, it was difficult for companies to monitor the operations of large numbers of separately accounted “centers.” It was not until personal computers began showing up in businesses en masse that the profit-center idea began to win serious attention in executive boardrooms. However, more precondition was needed. The micros had to be networked to mainframes. Once this began to happen in the 1980s, the profit-center concept caught fire. At first, stand-alone microcomputers shifted power downward. Armed with these new tools, junior executives and even rank-and-file employees tasted an unaccounted degree of power and autonomy. However, once the micros were connected to central mainframes, they also allowed top management to keep tabs on key parameters in a multiplicity of small units. It became practical to grant these units considerable freedom while still holding them financially accountable. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

The information revolution thus began to widen the gulf between finance and operations, making it possible for financial concentration to go hand in hand with a considerable de-concentration of operational power. At present, most profit centers are still only mirror images of the parent firm, baby bureaucracies hived off from the mother bureaucracy. As we advance toward the flex-firm, however, these will begin to diversify organizationally, and form themselves into mosaics of a new kind. At S. Appolinare Nuovo in Ravennea a procession of saints is pictured on a mosaic wall. Imagine, however, a kind of kinetic mosaic, a moving mosaic composed not on a flat solid wall, but on many shifting see-through panels, one behind the other, overlapping, interconnected, the colors and shapes continually blending, contrasting, and changing. Paralleling the new ways that knowledge is organized in data bases, this begins to suggest the future form of the enterprise and of the economy itself. Instead of a power-concentrating hierarchy, dominated by a few central organizations, we move toward a multidimensional mosaic form of power. The basic properties of clarity, niceness, provocability, and forgiveness seem likely to be true of any good rule of behavior for extricating oneself from a prisoners’ dilemma. However, for tit-for-tat is too quick to punish someone who has a history of cooperating. We need to find a strategy that is more discriminating: it should be more forgiving when a defection appears to be an exception, and it should punish when defection appears to be the rule. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

You can consider the following guidelines as a step in that direction. Begin cooperating. Continue cooperating. Keep count of how many times the other side appears to have defected while you have cooperated. If this percentage becomes unacceptable, revert to tit-for-tat. Note that unlike before, tit-for-tat is the punishment if it appears that the other side is trying to take advantage of you. To determine what is unacceptable percentage of defections, you need to know both a short-, medium, and long-term history of the other side’s actions. The long run is not enough. Just because someone has been cooperating for a long time does not mean that he will not take advantage of you while he runs down his reputation. You also need to know “What have you done for me lately?” Here is an example of one such strategy. It is nicer, more forgiving, not quite as provovable, and a little more complicated than tit-for-tat. Start cooperating and continue to do so until one of the four tests below fails. First impression: A defection on the first move is unacceptable. Revert to tit-for-tat. Short term: Two defections in any three turns is unacceptable. Revert to tit-for-tat. Medium term: Three defections out of the last twenty periods is unacceptable. Revert to tit-for-tat. Long term: Five defection out of the last one hundred periods is unacceptable. Revert to tit-for-tat. The punishment of tit-for-tat need not last forever. Keep track of how often the other side had violated any of these four tests. On the first violation, return to cooperation after twenty periods of the tit-for-tat “echo” of alternating defections. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

However, put the other side on probation. Reduce the number of defections allowed in the medium- and long-term tests by one. If the other side does not violate the probation for fifty periods, then strike the record clean and return to the original standards. If the other side violates the probation, resort to tit-for-tat forever. The exact rules for this, short-term, medium-term, and long-term impressions will depend on the probabilities of error or misperception, the importance you place on future gains and current losses, and so on. However, this type of strategy is likely to outperform tit-for-tat in the imperfect real World. The important principle to remember is that when misperceptions are possible, you should not punish every defection you see. You have to make a guess as to whether a misperception has occurred, either by you or by your partner. This extra forgiveness allows others to cheat a little on you. However, if they cheat, they use up their goodwill. When the eventual misperceptions arise you will no longer be inclined to let the incident pass. Oppportunism on the part of your opponent will be self-defeating. What might have been—and what could still give hope to the World’s dispirited Muslim youth—is the fact that knowledge increasingly defines the line between wealth and poverty, between capability and powerlessness and between human fulfillment and frustration. A country able to mobilize and diffuse knowledge can rapidly raise its level of development, help all its citizens to grow and flourish and take its proper place on the 21st Century global stage. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The Arab World is based on five principles: Freedom of opinion, expression and association. Quality of education…available to all. Embedding science in Arab society…and joining the information revolution decisively. Shifting rapidly toward knowledge-based and higher-value-added production. Developing an enlightened Arab knowledge model that encourages critical thinking, problem solving and creativity, while promoting the Arabic language, cultural diversity and openness to other cultures. A large part of Arab economic activity is concentrated on primary commodities, as in agriculture, which remains largely traditional while at the same time, the share of the capital goods industry and of industries embodying higher technology continues to shrink. Access to digital media is among the lowest in the World, but in terms of computers per population and Internet access. Scientific R&D figures are equally telling. The number of scientists and engineers in R&D in the Arab World per million people is approximately a third that of the World rate, according to the report. And while Arabs constitute 5 percent of the World population, Arab countries publish only 1.1 percent of its books. A key point made by the team is the degree to which Islam, at lest in the Arab World, cuts itself off from the ideas, knowledge and innovative thinking in the rest of the World. Isolation from the rest of mankind, inward-looking in a closed circuit, surrounded by a wall without doors does not mean Muslim identity. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Contrast that with the Islamist vision of yesterday imposed on tomorrow. In terms of the deep fundamentals of time, space and, above all, knowledge, therefore, Islamic terrorist promise murder to the outside World—and nothing but misery with their own. We have devoted more space to Islam and the Middle East and their lost opportunities because of current urgencies, but Africa and Latin America, too, must face the future. They seethe with wave conflicts over land ownership, urban poverty, agribusiness, indigenous tribes, ethnicity and the environment, intensified and complicated by racism and narco-terrorism. The United States of America has been so preoccupied with the Middle East that it has paid too little attention to these other volcanic rumbles—especially those in an angry South America about to erupt. Shortages often spur environmental damage. Faced with a food shortage, herdsmen can graze grassland down to bare dirt. Faced with an energy shortage, industrial countries can approve destructive projects. The growth of population and the consumption of resources by twentieth-century industry have placed growing pressures on Earth’s ability to support us in the manner to which we have become accustomed. The resource problem will look quite different in the twenty-first century, with a new technology base. Today, we cut trees and mine iron for structures. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

We pump oil and mine goal for our energy. Even cement is born in the flames of burning fossil fuels. Almost everything we build, almost everything we make, consumes something ripped from the Earth. This need not continue. Our civilization uses materials for many things, but mainly to make things with a certain size, shape, and strength. These structural uses include everything from fibers in clothing to paving in roads, and most of the mass of furniture, walls, cars, spacecraft, computers—indeed, most of the mass of almost every product we build and use. The best structural materials use carbon, in forms like diamond and graphite. With elements from air and water, carbon makes up the polymers of wool and polyester, and of wood and nylon. A twenty-first century civilization could mine the atmosphere for carbon, extracting over 300 billion tons before lowering the CO2 concentration back to its natural, pre-industrial level. For a population of 10 billion, this would be enough to give ever family a large house with lightweight but steel-strong walls, with 95 percent left over. Atmospheric garbage is an ample source of structural materials, with no need to cut trees or dig iron ore. Plants show that carbon can be used to build solar collectors. Laboratory work shows that carbon compounds can be better conductors than copper. A whole power system could be built without even touching the rich resources of metal buried in garbage dumps. Carbon can make windows, of plastic or diamond. Carbon can make things colorful with organic dyes. Carbon can be used to build nanocomputers, and will be the chief component of high-performance nanomachines of all kinds. The other components in all these materials are hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen, all found in air and water. Other elements are useful, but seldom necessary. Traces would often be ample. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

With a new technology base making recycling easy, there need be no steady depletion of Earth’s resources, just to keep a civilization running. The sketch just made shows that recycling just one form of garbage—excess atmospheric CO2—can provide most needs. Even 10 billon wealthy people would not need to strip the Earth of resources. They could make do with what we have already dug up and thrown away, and they would not even need all of that. In short, a twenty-first-century industry, supplemented with modest amounts of air, water, and sunlight. This will not necessarily happen, yet the very fact that it is possible gives a better sense of what the new technology base can mean for the relationship between humanity, resources, and the Earth. Green products are ones that: are not dangerous to the health of people or animals. Do not cause damage to the environment during manufacture, use, or disposal. Does not consume a disproportionate amount of energy and other resources during manufacture, use, or disposal. Does not cause unnecessary waste, due either to excessive packaging or to a short useful life. Does not involve the unnecessary use of or cruelty to animals. Does not use materials derived from threatened species or environments. Ideally, does not trade price, quality, nutrition, or convenience for environmental quality. With its ability to make almost anything at low cost—including products designed for extreme safety, durability, efficiency—without mining, logging, harming animals or environments, or producing toxic wastes, molecular manufacturing will make possible greener products than any yet seen in a store. Nanotechnology can replace old wealth with green wealth. And instead of focusing on reduce emission from cows, how about we eliminate leaf blowers, they cause so much sound pollution and air pollution and waste tones of water because people have to wash their cars more due to the dirt they blow around. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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With a Hey Nonnie Nonnie and a Hotcha Cha

When it comes to extinction: not only can you do worse, you can go completely out of business. We can illustrate the conditions that favor encouraging variety by considering the stinking case of the Linux computer operating system and the method used to organize the work of its developers. The method is known as open source software development. This form of software development has been thrown into the limelight by the spectacular growth of Linux, which has become, in certain key areas of application, a serious competitor to operating systems developed and sold by major corporations such as Microsoft, Sun, and IBM. This is a very surprising turn of evens since Linux is given away free by its developers. There is a natural presumption that free software cannot be as reliable as for-profit software. Yet it is precisely for situations demanding high reliability that Linux has found its strongest support. The surprise deepens with the observation tht Linux is not only free but also the handiwork of an enormous, Worldwide cadre of unpaid volunteers. By some estimates, Linux is the result of contributions from many thousands of programmers. A computer operating system is one of the most intricate of human creations. This number of cooks would seem more than sufficient to spoil the soup. How could thousands of scattered volunteers make an operating system that is more reliable (and faster running_ than those created by dozens, or hundreds, of highly talented programmers working full-time for renowned corporations? #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Considering the development of Linux as a Complex Adaptive System casts light on some important components of the explanation. We can begin by pointing out that Linux is not the only example of the open source approach to software development. There are many earlier examples, such as the scripting language Perl and the e-mail server sendmail. The most widely deployed software for serving up requested World Wide Web pages, a system known as Apache, is also the product of volunteers working together in an open source framework. What all the examples have in common is the free availability of the source code, the human readable computer instructions that specify the program. That arrangement provides the generic label for this approach to team software creation: open source software development. The free access to the source code of Linux means that any programmer with sufficient motivation can craft changes to the code, creating a new version of the program. This is not possible in traditional development with proprietary code. From a Complex Adaptive System point of view, the possibility for variety of the population of operating systems. In successful open source cases such as Linux, that variety has been harnessed to yield a very effective result, although many observers expected chaos to result from the rapid injection of many potentially incompatible variants. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Our framework points to several structural arrangements that work to make the added exploration beneficial, averting the prospect of death by eternal boiling. In our terms, when a programmer modifies the source code of Linux, this activity is an endogenously triggered recombination. The trigger is usually an observation of some particular kind of poor performance by the existing standard version of the operating system. The affected user may make an electronic request for help from the large Linux community. Interested individuals respond by suggesting fixes. These small pieces of new code are recombined with the rest of the standard version to produce new variant versions. A period testing and discussion of the performance of the variants follows. Eventually the best-performing variant is accepted by the small team of key Linux developers, who incorporate the new code into a subsequent standard version of Linux. When open source development prospers, a central reason seems to be that “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” For Linux, there are certainly enough volunteers about triggering problems and proposed alternatives is precise enough that multiple plausible variants are routinely generated as possible solutions to most problems that bother users. In addition, testing of alternatives is reliable enough that the code that was out is generally very good code, with unwanted side effects being rare. Thus the variety made possible by the free availability is marshaled to produce a rapid rate of improvement in overall quality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

By inquiring a bit further into how this is accomplished, we can uncover some clues about when an open source approach is likely to work well—and when it is not. A crucial fact is that there are two types of Linux versions: standard and variant. The few central managers of the Linux community, led by the originator of the operating system, Linus Torvalds, retain the right to label versions of the system as official releases. Each new official release creates another “standard Linux,” and millions of digitally perfect copies are made of it. This control over the definition of the next generation of the operating system is strikingly analogous to a biological mechanism seen in the emergence of multicellular organisms: sequestration of the germline. This is a restriction of reproductive activity to a few specialized cells, while the vast majority of cells in the organism no longer participate in creating the next generation. In both cases, limiting “reproduction” to a tiny fraction of all the agents reduces the chaotic inconsistency that would know if all variants had equal opportunity to shape the future. In the Linux case, the centralized control of changes in the standard code makes higher levels of variety in the proposed changes sustainable, so that the “law of sufficient eyeballs” can come advantageously into play. In the biological case, the restriction functions to alter the evolutionary “incentives” of cells making up the organism. Over succeeding generations their strategies will be far more likely to be those that let them prosper as a “team” rather than those that benefit individual cells at the expense of others. Analogous incentives are created for the programmers in the Linux case. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Numerous experiments are being undertaken in an effort to imitate the striking success that the open source approach achieved in the Linux case. As usual, we do not claim to be able to predict the success and failure of particular efforts. However, Complex Adaptive Systems principles do suggest a number of key questions to ask when contemplating an open source software project. Several of these come from the preceding section on whether to encourage variety. As we have seen, variety is the engine of rapid quality improvement in an open source initiative. We can see that Linux has at least three, and perhaps all four, of the conditions favoring exploration that we outlined earlier. Problems that are long-term or widespread. In contrast to computer hardware and applications programs (such as Web browsers), operating systems are among the longest living elements of the computational World. Unix—of which Linux is a free version—dates back to 1969. It runs on mainframe and minicomputer architectures that long predate the microcomputers that now cover the Earth. Thus, an improvement to an operating system is likely to bear fruit over a very long period (as time is measured in the strange universe of computing, with its Moore’s law of doubled computer power every eighteen months). Another example of open source development, the Apache Web server, also seems to occupy a functional niche where improvements can be expected to have long service. In addition, the gains form any improvement in a standard version of an operating system can benefit thousands or even millions of users, providing widespread benefits. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

Problems that provide fast, reliable feedback. Linux exhibits this characteristic as well. In its typical role in server environments, its features are exercised at very high rates, and defects become evident quickly. Moreover, open source distribution means that every contributor of a proposed variant can make a completely functional new version that can be tested locally. This further increases the rate of feedback. And finally, the quality of proposed variants can be assessed with relatively high reliability. Speed of operation and resistance to crashed are highly valued criteria across the entire community of Linus developers. Disagreements do occur over how these should be measured, and other criteria are also important. However, when compared with other software areas, such as user interface design, the appropriate performance metrics are relatively clear. Problems with low risk of catastrophe from exploration. Various parts of software system have high levels of interdependence. When there is a premium on speed, as there is for may operating systems, there is a strong temptation to increase even further the interdependencies among modules. This can create a substantial risk of catastrophe. However, Unix, from which Linux derives, has long been a partial exception to this tendency. In the Unix/Linux culture there is a well-developed philosophy of modular isolation. A key component, called the kernel, is optimized for speed. However, the numerous other components are expected to honor a different set of constraints. There, interdependence among components is governed by strict principles of modularization that severely limit side effects that any activity might have on other activities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

Speed is also important outside the kernel but has to be found within the architectural constraints that give primacy to crash resistance, thus lowering the chances of catastrophic consequences from exploration. Problems that have looming disasters. This last factor favoring exploration is not a property of Linux open software development but rather of the motivation of some of the developers. Among those who have made major contributions to Linux are many who feared the extinction of the Unix operating system family, in which they have invested their expertise. They also feared the rising hegemony of operating systems from Microsoft Corporation. Foe them, joining a relatively high-risk, exploration-maximizing software project may have been an attractive alternative to domination by what they often call “The Beast from Redmond.” Take together, our four conditions show Linux to be a development project for which it is highly promising to strongly encourage variety. It does not follow that open availability of source code is a form of magic that will cause all software projects to prosper as Linux has. Indeed, our analysis suggests that in order for the decentralized generation of proposals to be effective for Linux, several other conditions were important. In particular, Linux development benefited from the ability to identify specific problems, make accurate copies of the current system with only deliberately introduced changes, evaluate the effectiveness of proposed solutions, and centrally control the choice of which proposals are implemented as changes in the standard version. It remains to be seen just how widely applicable the decentralized generations of alternative can be. However, open source software development clearly demonstrates that even very large and highly structure systems, like Linux, can benefit from the encouragement of variety. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

Do you know someone you would like to change and regulate and improve? Good! That is fine. I am all in favor of it. However, why not begin on yourself? From a purely selfish standpoint, that is a lot more profitable than trying to improve others—yes, and a lot less dangerous. If you and I want to stir up a resentment tomorrow that may rankle across the decades and endure until death, just let us indulge in a little stinging criticism—no matter how certain we are that it is justified. When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. Bitter criticism caused the sensitive Thomas Hardy, one of the finest novelists ever to enrich English literature, to give up forever the writing of fiction. Criticism drove Thomas Chatterton, the English poet, to suicide. Benjamin Franklin, tactless in his youth, because so diplomatic, so adroit at handling people, that he was made American Ambassador to France. The secret of his success? “I will speak ill of no man,” he said, “…and speak all the good I know of everybody.” Any fool can criticize, condemn and complain—and most fools do. However, it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving. “A great man shows his greatness,” said Carlyle, “by the way he treats little men.” Often parents are tempted to criticize their children. You would expect me to say “do not.” However, I will not. Just do not be in the habit of finding fault, or reprimanding—you children will consider this a reward. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Make sure your children know that sometimes you will criticize them, and this does not mean you do not love them, but that a lot was expected of you as a child and so a lot will be expected of them. A child needs to be ensured that there is so much good and fine and true in their character. And that their little heart is as big as the moon. Then give them examples of their good behavior. Instead of condemn people, let us try to understand them. Let us try to figure out why they do what they do. That is a lot more profitable and intriguing than criticism; and it breeds sympathy, tolerance and kindness. To know all is to forgive all. God Himself, does not propose to judge man until the end of his days. Why should you and I? When it comes to punishment, tit-for-tat is not a good form of punishment. It is nice in that it never initiates cheating. It is provocable, that is, it never lets cheating go unpunished. And it is forgiving, because it does not hold a grudge for too long and is willing to restore cooperation. However, tit-for-tat is a flawed strategy. The slightest possibility of mis perceptions results in a complete breakdown in the success of tit-for-tat. The long-standing feuds between the Hatfields and the McCoys or Mark Tawin’s Grangerfords and Shepherdsons offer more examples of how tit-for-tat behavior leads to mutual loss. Feudists on either side are not willing to end the feud until they consider themselves even. However, in a continuing attempt to get even, they end up knocking each other further and further down. Eventually they end up dead even. Rarely is there any hope of going back and solving the dispute at its origin, for once begun, it takes on a life of its own. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

What tit-for-tat lacks is a way of saying “Enough is enough.” It is dangerous to apply this simple rule in situations in which misperceptions are endemic. Tit-for-tat is too easily provoked. You should be more forgiving when a defection seems to be a mistake rather than the rule. Even if the defection was intentional, after a long-enough cycle of punishments it may still be time to call it quits and try reestablishing cooperation. At the same time, you do not want to be too forgiving and risk exploitation. When the probability of a misperception is small, it will take a lot longer for the trouble to arise. However, then once a mistake happens, it will also take a lot longer to clear it up. The possibility of misperception means that you have to be more forgiving, but not forgetting, than simple tit-for-tat. This is true when there is a presumption that the chance of a misperception is small. It pays to be more forgiving up to a point. Once the probability of mistakes gets too high, the possibility of maintaining cooperation breaks down. The large chance of misunderstanding makes it impossible to send clear messages through your actions. Without an ability to communicate through deeds, any hope for cooperation disappears. A 50 percent chance of a misperception is the worst possible case. If misperceptions were certain to occur, you would interpret every message as its opposite, and there would be no misunderstandings. A stock forecaster whose advice is always dead wrong is as good as a predictor as one who is always right. You just have to know how to decode the forecast. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

With this in mind, we look for a way out of the dilemma when there is a chance of misperception, but not too big of a chance. The disciplined ordering of personal front is one way, then, in which the individual is obliged to express one’s aliveness to those about him or her. Another means is the readiness with which one attends to new stimuli in the situation and the alacrity with which one responds to them with body movements. I think that the individual so generally maintains a proper motor level in situations that this is one type of propriety that is very difficult indeed to become aware of. Here again mental wards help us. For example, a common symptom displayed by persons diagnosed as schizophrenic consists of very slow body movements as shown, say, during hallway pacing. While thus engaged, the patient may respond to a question from an attendant by turning one’s head slowly in the direction of the voice, and this only by moving one’s whole trunk, as if one’s neck were completely stiff, while keeping one’s face immobile. (This kind of conduct is somewhat similar to the kind that is popularly thought to occur in sleepwalking, and calls forth a similar response; namely, the feeling of someone being in the situation physically but not fully present for purposes of interaction.) Bleuler has given us fine descriptions of extremes of this deadness to the situation, as he has with so many schizophrenic symptoms, pointing to the inward emigration that presumably occurs at these times. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

Autism is also manifested by many patients externally. (Naturally, this is, as a rule, unintentional.) Not only do they not concern themselves with anything around them, but they situ around with faces constantly averted, looking at a blank wall; or they shut off their sensory portals by drawing a skirt or bed clothes over their heads. Indeed, formerly, when the patients were mostly abandoned to their own devices, they could often be found in bent-over, squatting positions, an indication that they were trying to restrict as much as possible of the sensory surface area of their skin. This lack of presence may be nicely demonstrated in establishments that are not medial but are none the less similar in many ways to mental hospitals: About the prison yard and the shops one sees inmates for whom smiles, small talk, alertness, and attention to the environment comes easily. One also sees about half as many men who seldom smile, who seldom talk, who stumble as they walk in lines, whose errors in their tasks cause small concern, and who respond normally to social stimuli only when a stimulus is strong or different. Status or social approbation is as nothing. It is reverie-plus that controls them. In general, then, if the individual is to be in the situation in full social capacity, one will be required to maintain a certain level of alertness as evidence of one’s availability for potential stimuli, and some orderliness and organization of one’s personal appearance as evidence that one is alive to the gathering one is in. A problem for analysis, of course, is to go on to isolate analytically the various ways in which insufficient presence may be manifested. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Not only did the economic ascent of China, India and, less noticeably, Brazil help drive oil prices to record highs, but so did the war in Ukraine and inflations; prices were seven times as high as deflated 2020 prices. That makes alternative to oil more competitive. It also calls into question how long present oil reserves can last. No one can predict when the last barrel of crude will be pumped, but we already find planners in big oil companies preparing strategies for transition to a post-petroleum economy. General Motors hopes to be the first company to sell one million hydrogen-based fuel-cell cars. And if not GM, why not Toyota? Of China’s own up-and-coming auto industry? Unless governments in the Middle East start now to plan for post-oil, knowledge-intensive service economies, the exit of huge amounts of wealth from the region could well spark even more terror as poverty and hopelessness deepen. Even fuel-cell car introduced elsewhere in the World, every nuclear plant, every solar panel, every windmill, every new source and form of non-oil energy will hasten the demise of the existing business—and religious—elites in the Middle East. Such a collapse could erode Saudi financial resources further undermine its influence within World Islam—shifting the balance between Shia, Sunni and other groups. The Saudi regime’s vast petro-riches have been used to promote Wahabism, a particularly stringent brand of Islam, all over the World. The funds could have been used to educate the younger generation of Muslims in economically valuable skills. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

Instead, they have funded strictly religious schools that produced the Taliban in Afghanistan and jobless, hopeless, angry youth across much of the globe, including terrorists now trying to overthrow the Saudi regime itself. To many outsiders, it appears that Islam is already at war with itself. In that war, the enemy is not an anti-Islamic, imperial United States of America or some other non-Islamic nation—or the West. It is the greed, provincialism and myopia with which the leaders of so many Middle East nations have ruled for so long, and their failure to use oil money to ride the Third Wave to a better future. The space near Earth is being polluted with small orbiting projectiles, some as small as a pin. Most of the debris is floating fragments of discarded rocket stages, but it also includes gloves and cameras dropped by astronauts. This is not a problem for life on Earth, but it is a problem as life begins its historic spread beyond Earth—the first great expansion since the greening of the continents, long ago. Orbiting objects travel much faster than rile bullets, and energy increases as the square of speed. Small fragments of debris in space can do tremendous damage to a spacecraft, and worse—their impact on a spacecraft can blast loos yet more debris. Each fragment is potentially deadly to a spacefaring human crossing its path. Today, the tiny fraction of space that is near Earth is increasingly cluttered. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

This litter needs to be picked up. With molecular manufacturing, it will be possible to build small spacecraft able to maneuver from orbit to orbit in space, picking up one piece of debris after another. Small spacecraft are needed, since it makes no sense to send a shuttle after a crap of metal the size of a postage stamp. With these devices, we can clean the skies and keep them hospitable to life. We have spoken of waste that just needs molecular changes to make it harmless, and toxic elements tht came from the ground, but nuclear technology has created a third kind of waste. It has converted the slow, mild radioactivity of uranium into the fast, intense radioactivity of nearly created nuclei, the products of fission and neutron bombardment. No molecular change can make them harmless, and these materials did not come from the ground. The products of molecular manufacturing could help with conventional approaches to dealing with nuclear waste, helping to store it in the most stable, reliable forms possible—but there is a more radical solution. Even before the era of the nuclear reactor and the nuclear bomb, experimenters made artificially radioactive elements by accelerating particulars and slamming them into nonradioactive targets. These particles traveled fast enough to penetrate the interior of an atom and reach the nucleus, joining it or breaking it apart. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The entire Earth is made of fallout from nuclear reactions in ancient stars. Its radioactivity is low because so much time has passed—many half-lives, for most radioactive nuclei. “Kicking” these stable nuclei changes them, often into a radioactive state. However, kicking a radioactive nucleus has a certain chance of turning it into a stable one, destroying the radioactivity. By kicking, sorting, and kicking again, an atom-smashing machine could take in electrical power and radioactive waste, and output nothing but stable, nonradioactive elements, identical to those common in nature. Do not recommend this to your congressman—it would be far too expensive, today—but it will some day be practical to destroy the radioactivity of the twentieth-century’s leftover nuclear waste. Nanotechnology cannot do this directly, because molecular machines work with molecules, not nuclei. However, indirectly, by making energy and equipment inexpensive, molecular manufacturing can give us the means for a clean, permanent solution to the problem of wastes left over from the nuclear era. In 1985, General Motors, America’s largest car maker bought control of Hughes Aircraft, the company founded by that reclusive, eccentric billionaire Howard Hughes. GM paid $4.7 billion dollars—the single largest amount ever paid for a corporate acquisition until then. A merger mania had begun in the early 1980s, the fourth since 1900, and each year saw more corporate marriages in America, until by 1988 there were 3,487 acquisitions or mergers involving an astronomical $227 billion. Then in 1989, all the old records were smashed again when RJR-Nabisco was taken over for $25 billion. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

In short, in a single four-year period the maximum size of these mergers increased more than five times. Even allowing for inflation, the growth in a scale was colossal. Of the twenty largest deals in U.S.A. history, all consummated between1985 and 1989, most involved a wedding of American firms. By contrast, hardly a day now goes by without new headlines proclaiming “mixed marriages”—mergers that cross national frontiers. Thus Japan’s Bridgestone acquires Firestone Tire & Ruber. Sara Lee gulps the Dutch company Akzo. England’s Cadbury buys up America’s Grolier. Sony buys Columbia Pictures. The extraordinary increase in World takeover activity…is showing no signs of abatement. Elon Musk just Twitter for $44 billion, an amount that he admitted is “obviously overpaying” for the company. He also lined up a substantial amount of debt financing to pay for the deal. Indeed, the scramble to reorganize several key industries is likely to accelerate…driven by factors that go way beyond the asset-stripping moves that first sparked the U.S. merger boom. As this suggest, while many mergers were originally based on get-rich-quick exploitation of financial or tax quirks, others were strategic. Thus, as Europe raced toward total economic integration, many of its biggest companies merged, hoping to take advantage of these pan-European market and to stave off the advance of Japanese and America giants. American and Japanese grooms looked for European brides. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

Some companies were thinking on an even bigger scale, preparing themselves to operate all across the so-called “triad market”—Europe, the United States of America, and Japan. And beyond that, a few firms dreamed of truly conquering the “global market.” All this frenetic activity led to deep concern over the concentration of economic power in a few hands. Politicians and labor unions attacked the so-called “deal mania.” Financial writers compared it to the feeding frenzy of sharks. Looking only at the question of financial size, one might be led to believe that power in the economy of the future will eventually be controlled by a tiny handful of enormous, hierarchical monoliths, not unlike those depicted in the movies. Yet that scenario is far too simple. First, it is a mistake to assume all these mega-firms will stay pasted together. Previous merger manias have been followed, a few years later, by waves of divestiture. A new round of divorces looms ahead. Sometime the anticipated market evaporates. Other times the cultures of the merged firms clashed. Often the basic strategy was wrong in the first place. Indeed, as we saw earlier, many recent buy-outs have actually been designed with divestiture in mind, so that after a gigantic merger various units are spun off from a central core, shrinking, rather than enlarging, the scale of the resultant firm. Second, we are witnessing a growing disjuncture between the World of finance and the “real” economy in which things and services produced and distributed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

As two heart-stopping stock markets crashed in the late 1980s proved, it is sometimes possible for the financial markets to collapse, at least temporarily, without significantly disrupting the actual operations of the larger economy. For capital itself is growing less, not more, important in economic wealth production. Third, bulk does not necessarily add up to power. Many giants firms possess enormous power resources but cannot deploy them effectively. As the United States of American has learn from the War Department, sheer size is no guarantee of victory. More important, however, to know how power in any industry or economy is going to be distributed, we need to look at relationships, not just structures. And when we do, we discover a surprising paradox. At the same time that some firms are swelling (or bloating) in size, we also see a powerful conuntermovement that is breaking big business into smaller and smaller units and simultaneously encouraging the spread of small business. Concentration of power is thus only half the story. Instead of a single pattern, we are witnessing two diametrically opposed tendencies coming together in a new synthesis. Rising out of the explosive new role of knowledge in the economy, a novel structure of power is emerging: the powermosaic. The economy is become like pieces of colorful ceramics that come together to make a coherent whole. The idea of a mosaic makes it possible to look at the economy in many different ways, allowing new pictures to emerge. Jobs will not longer be scarce. The economy is becoming a dynamic system in which individuals and organizations have the power to create supply and demand, to launch new projects, and to create opportunities to work. This is the concept of the mosaic economy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19


Cresleigh Homes

‘Tis the season for enjoying family and friends – and when you’re living in the perfect #CresleighHome, there’s space for everyone. In Model 4, the open floorplan flows seamlessly with the great room opening up to the large covered outdoor living space. 

You’ll get a two-story, 3,377 square foot home featuring four bedrooms – including one suite on the first floor, three and one half bathroom, and a true three-car garage. It’s the largest home in the #Havenwood development, and we think it’s perfect for you!

Need more info? Head to cresleigh.com/havenwood to take a virtual tour!