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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cresleigh Homes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cresleigh Homes

There’s something magical ✨ about dreaming about your new life in a new home this year – and we think the time has come for you to check out our community at #Havenwood!

Located off of Virginiatown Road and McCourtney Road, our neighborhood is located in the charming city of Lincoln, with Palo Verde Park just down the street! Head to our website to find out more about available homes.

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