Randolph Harris II International Institute

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Luncheon #4 with Coffee

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Such a Neighbour Does Not Offer His Eyes to Another

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Possess them Not with Fear, Psychologically Burn Your Ships Home!

As we have seen, orienting our lives to consumption creates a climate of superfluity and ennui. The problem is closely related to a crisis that is affecting the entire Western World now but mostly goes unrecognized, because more attention is given to its symptoms than to its underling causes. Having considered some circumstances under which persons become available to unacquainted others, we can examine the other side of the questions: when does the individual have the right to initiate overtures to those with whom he is unacquainted? Obviously, one answer is that one can do this when the other is in an exposed position. Another answer is that some of the persons who are defined as open tend also to be defined as “opening persons,” as individuals who have a built-in license to accost others. Just as the intentions of those who accost them are not suspect, so, in some cases, their intentions in accosting others may not be suspect. Priests and nuns provide one kind of example: police, who presumably will be able to produce a legitimate reason for the engagement after initiating it, provide another. Those who have responsibility for managing, or for guarding the entrance to, social occasions provide still another example, since they are allowed, and often obliged, to initiate engagements of welcome with all who enter, whether acquainted with them or not. Shopkeepers, in those societies that define shops, more than we do, as the scene of a running social occasion, may often find themselves in the host’s role, required to engage each entrant and leave-taker in a special salutation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

In Salt Lake City, Utah; you are still at leisure to notice what charming thing good manners are. As you step into a person’s home, you will greet the owner with “Peace be upon you,” and he and all who are withing hearing will reply with no fanatic exclusion, but in full and friendly chorus to that most gracious of salutations, and will follow your departing steps with the “God bless you,” the divine security. Their shops they treat as small reception-rooms where the visiting buyer is a guest—and sitting at coffee over their affairs will look with surprised but tolerant amusement at the rough Westerner who brushes by to examine saddle-bags or daggers, unconscious of the decent rules of behaviour. In our society, license to approach, like license to be approached, is taken (if not given) by individuals who for a period find themselves out of role. Here, license to initiate improper contact is merely part of the syndrome of license associated with anonymity, in the sense that an individual projecting an alien self is not fully responsible for the good conduct of that self. (In the same way, when he trips or slips, he projects a self from which he can dissociate his inner being.) Again we see a connection between exposed positions and opening ones, for the very alienation from his projected self that allows others to treat this self as approachable and expendable allows him to misbehave in its name. The falsely presented individual may, in fact, have a special need to make and to elicit overtures; in both cases he is able to transmit an appreciation that what he is appearing as is not his true self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Nor is it only when engagement is patently to the advantage of the person approached that emergency engagement with strangers occurs. In our society, as presumably in others, bonds between unacquainted persons are felt to be strong enough to support the satisfying of “free needs,” even where the person receiving the service is the one who initiates the counter that makes this possible A patent unthreatening need appears to provide a guarantee of the good intentions of the person who is asking for assistance. Thus, in our society, an individual has a right to initiate requests for the time of day, for a light, for directions, and for coin change—although, given a choice in the matter, the accoster (Mutual claims in regard to matters such as directions can be strong enough to cause some people to respond politely to direction requests from unknown persons.) is under obligation to select the individual present whom he is least likely to be able to exploit. Similarly, if an individual finds himself in a position where he badly needs hi apologies or explanations to be accepted, he then has some right to engage others. Liberty to apologize for accidentally inconveniencing another is also a liberty to present oneself in a proper light, even at the expense of communication rules. Thus, to parallel an earlier example, a man walking around in the grass looking for a key he has dropped has a right to comment on his predicament to a lone passing stranger to demonstrate that he is not improperly involved in some occult activity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The same kind of license occurs when an individual feels he has been mistreated in some way by an unacquainted other, and initiates a complaint, threat, or caution. While defense of one’s honour may work hardships upon the person against whom action is taken, the person who institutes such action is not suspect as far as communication rules are concerned. The aim of this system is to bring man to conscience. Conscience is a certain quality that is in every normal man. It is really a different expression of the same quality as consciousness, only consciousness works more on the intellectual side and conscience more on the moral (id est, emotional) side. Conscience helps a man to realize what is good and what is bad in his own conduct. Conscience unites the emotions. We can experience on the same day a great many contradictory emotions, both pleasant and unpleasant, on the same subject, either one after another or even simultaneously, and we do no notice the contradictions because of the absence of conscience. Buffers are what prevent one “I” or one personality from seeing another, but in a state of conscience a man cannot help seeing all these contradictions. He will remember that he said one thing in the morning, another thing in the afternoon and yet another in the evening, but in ordinary life he will not remember, or—if he does—he will insist that he does not know what is good and what is bad. The way to conscience is through destroying buffers, and buffers can be destroyed through self-remembering and through not identifying. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

The idea of conscience and the idea of buffers need long study, but when speaking about the moral side of this system, what should be understood from the beginning is that a man must have a sense of good and bad. If he was not, nothing can be done for him. He must start with a certain moral sense, a sense of right or wrong, in order to get more. He must understand first the relativity of ordinary morality, and secondly he must realize the necessity of objective right and wrong. When he realized the necessity of objective permanent right and wrong, then he will look at things from the point of view of this system. Conscience is in the essence, not in personality, whereas magnetic center is in personality, not in essence. Magnetic center is in personality, not in essence. Magnetic center is acquired in this life. It is in the intellectual part of emotional center, though perhaps also in the intellectual part of the intellectual center, and it is built on B influences. “To awaken conscience does one have to eliminate buffers?” someone asked. When buffers are only shaken, conscience awakes. Sometimes people can discover their own buffers. If one has the right idea of buffers, one may find them. There is a great difference between excuses and buffers. Excuses may be different every time, but if the excuse is always the same, then it becomes a buffer. Buffers are connected with conscience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Conscience is a word we use generally in a conventional sense, to mean a sort of educated emotional habit. Really, conscience is a special capacity which everybody possesses but which nobody can use in the state of sleep. Even if we feel conscience for a moment accidentally, it will be a very painful experience, so painful that immediately we shall want to get rid of it. People who have occasional glimpses of conscience invent all kinds of methods to get rid of this feeling. It is the capacity to feel at the same time all that we ordinarily feel at different times. Try to understand that all our different “I”s have different feelings. One “I” feels that he likes something, while another hates it, and a third “I” is indifferent. However, we never feel these things at the same time because between the are buffers. Because of these buffers we cannot use conscience, cannot feel at the same time two contradictory things which we feel at different times. If a man does happen to feel them he suffers. So, in our present state, buffers are even necessary things without which a man would go mad. However, if he understands about them and prepares himself, then after some time, he may start to destroy the contradictions and break the buffers down. The breaking of a mechanical habit, whether good or bad, may be uncomfortable, because we have mechanical habits such as rules of conduct and more rules which we get from our education. In most cases, therefore, we do not experience conscience; we have too many buffers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

As I have said, they are partitions between our emotional attitudes, and experience of conscience means seeing a hundred things at the same time. Partitions disappear and all inner contradictions are seen at the same time. This is very unpleasant, and as the general principle of life is to avoid unpleasant sensations and realizations we run away from seeing them. In this way we create inner buffers. Contradictions seen other after the other do not appear contradictory; they have to be seen at the same time. We are machines and we must see where we can change something, because in every machine of every kind there is always a point where it is possible to begin. Sometimes people ask if there is anything permanent in us. There are two things, buffers and weaknesses. The weaknesses are sometimes called features, but they are really just weaknesses. Everyone has one, two or three particular weaknesses, and everybody has certain buffers belonging to him. He consists of buffers, but some are particularly important because they enter into all his decisions and all his understandings. These features and buffers are all that can be called permanent in us, and it is lucky for us that there is nothing more permanent, because these things can be changed. Buffers are artificial; they are not organic; they are acquired chiefly by imitation. Children begin to imitate grown-up people and so they create some of their buffers. Others are created unknowingly by education. If it were possible to put a child amongst people who were awake, he would fall asleep, but—in the conditions in which we live—imaginary personality of imaginary “I” generally appears in a child at the age of seven or eight. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Sometimes people ask whether we can see buffers in our present state of consciousness. We can see them in other people, but not in ourselves. Often times, the way to get people to cooperate is through stimulating competition. Our consciousness is very important in the work we are employed to do. Not everything needs to be tied to money, but we must foster in people a desire to excel. The desire to excel! The challenge! Throwing down the gauntlet! An infallible way of appealing to people of spirit. When anyone’s shadow darkens, they ought to feel immediately embraced and loved and lifted and inspired to go and be better because they know they are loved and because they have friends. We can create a greater sense of belonging as we reassure and include those who are new to an employment office or community. It can often break a person’s heart if someone comes and is very vulnerable, and the gets a cold shoulder or a lack of interest. That is tragic. We have to do better than that. When you choose to put yourself out there and make others feel like part of the team, you are blessing someone else’s life. This can encourage others at work to do their best to be more productive because they feel like they are a part of a fraternity that cares. All people have fears, but the brave put down their fears and go forward.  What greater challenge can be offered than the opportunity to overcome those fears? Sometimes we need a person with experience to show us how to preserver. It is important for us to humanize those we work with an interact with. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Pay and pay alone will never bring together or hold good people. The joys of having colleagues and taking pride in your production is often the key. In studying the depth of the work attitudes of thousands of people, the most motivating factor was the work itself. If the work is exciting and interesting, the worker looks forward to doing it and is motivated to do a good job. That is what every successful person loves: the game. The chance for self-expression. The chance to prove one’s worth, to excel, to win. That I what makes footraces and hog-calling and pie-eating contests. The desire to excel. The desire for a feeling of importance. The importance of knowing what to count as success is the point of an Army story about the new draftee who was an operations analyst in civilian life. After standing with fellow draftees in a long line to get their dinner plates washed and rinsed, the recruit went up to the old sergeant and explained it is inefficient to use two vats for washing dishes and two vas for rinsing them. It would be faster to use three vats for washing and only one for rinsing since washing takes more time than rinsing. The old sergeant looked with disdain at the new recruit, and said, “You’ve got it exactly backwards. I want them to stand just as much as possible. I can’t keep them running around all day, but the longer I can keep them on their feet, the better.” Clearly, selection of agents or strategies implies some metric of success. Agents need not attend to the measure. Animals can have many offspring out of motives far more compelling than the eventual adaptation of their species. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Fashion may be copied without much big-picture reflection by those adopting a new style. In such cases, success is actually defined by outside observers as “frequently copied.” Rather than specifying a success measure and copying what scores well, this approach measures success by numbers of copies. Biologists take this line when they assess fitness as number of offspring. In biology, survival defines what is fittest. However, in most of the situations we consider, performance measures are active in the minds of designers, policy makers, and other actors, whether they are acting inside the system or contemplating it from the outside. Recall the example of Linux software development, with its thousands of volunteers proposing solutions to specific problems in a massive operating system. Being able to evaluate the effectiveness of proposed solutions using clear measures such as speed and crash-avoidance was one of the requirements for such open software development to work. Typically, however, the assessment of alternatives in a Complex Adaptive System is not easy. In fact, there is usually more than one criterion that could be used to assess results. For a business, profit seems a natural measure of success. For a checkers player, winning games is a natural performance measure. Yet even in these examples, with success criteria that seem indisputable, complexity might be harnessed more effectively if other measures of success are used. In the business example, market share provides an additional measure that can be a useful supplement to profits. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

One reason is that changes in profits may reflect factors beyond the control of the company, such as improvement in the national economy. You might not want to attribute credit for increased profits to your new marketing campaign if you knew that your entire industry had prospered during a buoyant economy. An increase in your market share could provide a better indication than profits of whether you were doing something right—and what it was. We will also see below for our checkers example that there are measures of success that may be more effective than waiting for the outcome of the game. Our approach to harnessing complexity does not take any performance measure as “given.” It does not anoint any other measure as a highest goal. Performance measures can be seen as instruments that shape what events are likely to occur. Even the preservation of life is not a goal that trumps all others, as human willingness to die for principles so dramatically reveals. Since goals are not see as fixed, setting goals, the criteria that govern processes of selection, is one of the main interventions for those who would harness complexity. Our view leads to two important and uncommon observations about performance measures. First, it is valuable to appreciate that performance measures are defined within the system. They are modified (or maintained) and applied (or disregarded) by agents themselves. This observation is not a surprise to many experienced practitioners, who are well aware of the political work that lies behind measures later taken as givens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Unfortunately, many efforts to apply complexity concepts to social systems give little attention to how performance measures are defined within the system. To see what we mean, consider the case of profit as one such measure. What may count as a profit depends on many factors, including what the law allows individuals to own, what social norms and religions define as morally fair, whether actual practices conform to those norms, what the tax code recognizes as legitimate costs, and whether society charges for disposal of the by-products of activity, sch as used motor oil or even carbon dioxide. We also regulate the scope of profit as a permissible goal. We largely removed profit from the decision making within American schools, hospitals, and prisons at the beginning of the twentieth century and are experimenting now with reintroducing it. A further consequence of performance measures being defined by the agents themselves is that there can be more than one measure active. In addition, the measures may be inconsistent and may change over time. Change that is seen as improvement by one type of agent may be seen as a loss by others. There are issues of variety in performance measures just as there are in other characteristics of agents and their strategies. When members of an organization assess a situation from different evaluative angles, they generate a greater variety of new possibilities that, if not excessive, can have great value for the organization. However, it is clear that beyond some level, variety in performance measures can also be a source of debilitating inconsistency and conflict. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

But one life to lay down for your country—how can an army get the enemy to believe that its soldiers will in fact lay down their lives for their country when called upon to do so? (By getting Americans to be ashamed to be American, and becoming unwilling to buy American cars, produce, meat and other goods and service; and to disrespect the American flag, the National Anthem, and other Americana and art, the enemy is using mental warfare to weaken the American spirit and army.) Most armies would be finished if each soldier on the battlefield starts to make a rational calculation of the costs and the benefits of risking one’s life. Other devices have to be found, and they include many of the ones above. We have already mentioned the tactic of burning bridges, and the role of punishments and teamwork in deterring desertion. Now we concentrate on the devices to motivate individual soldiers. The process begins in the boot camp. Basic training in the armed forces everywhere is a traumatic experience. The new recruit is maltreated, humiliated, and put under such immense physical and mental strain that the few weeks quite alter his personality. An important habit acquired in this process is an automatic, unquestioning obedience. There is no reason why socks should be folded, or beds made, in a particular way, except that the officer has so ordered. The idea is that the same obedience will occur when the order is of greater importance. Trained not to question orders, the army becomes a fighting machine; commitment is automatic. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Th seeming irrationality of each soldier thus turns into strategic rationality. Shakespeare knew this perfectly well; in the night before the battle of Agincourt, King Henry V prays: “O God of battles! steel my soldiers’ hearts; possess them not with fear; take from them now the sense of reckoning, if th’ opposed numbers pluck their hearts from them…” Next comes the pride that is instilled in each soldier: pride in one’s country, pride in being a soldier, and, perhaps above all, pride in the tradition of the fighting unit. The U.S.A. Marine Crops, famous regiments of the British Army, and the French Foreign Legion exemplify this approach. Great deeds from past battles fought by the unit are constantly remembered, heroic deaths are glorified. Constant repetition of this history is meant to give new recruits a pride in this tradition, and a resolve not to flinch from similar deeds when the time comes. Commanders of troops also appeal to a far more personal sense of pride of their men According to Shakespeare, King Henry V inspired his troops at Harfleur thus: “Dishonour nor your mothers; now attest that those you call’d father did beget you.” Pride is often an elitist emotion; it consists in doing or having something that most others lack. Thus, again, we have Henry V speaking to his troops before the battle of Againcourt: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers; for he to-day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother; and gentlemen in England now a-bed shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here and hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks that fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

There is also the use of commitment through a combination of teamwork, contracting, and burning one’s bridges. Once again we turn to Shakespeare’s Henry V speaking to his troops before the battle of Agincourt. “That he which hath no stomach to this fight, let him depart; his passport shall be made, and crowns for convoy put into his purse: We would not die in that man’s company that fears his fellowship to die with us.” Of course everyone is too ashamed to take this offer up publicly. However, even so, by their act of rejecting the offer, the soldiers have psychologically burned their ships home. They have established an implicit contract with each other not to flinch from death is the time comes. Henry V’s brilliant understanding of how to motivate and commit his army to battle is reflected in success on the battlefield, even when vastly outnumbered. In 1986, when Allen Murray took over as chairman, the Mobil Corporation was America’s third-largest company. Like other oil companies, Mobil had, during the early eighties, launched a major drive to diversify. It brought Montgomery Ward, the giant retail firm, and Container Corporation, the packager. No sooner did Murry take charge than the axe began to chop. In led than two years he had sold off $4.6 billion in assets, including both Montgomery Ward and Container Corp. “We have gotten back to basis at Mobil,” declared Murry. “We’re in the business we know how to run.” Petroleum engineers, it turned out, were not terrific marketers of women’s clothing or paperboard boxes. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The same questioning of function has now begun in government as well. What business calls “divestiture,” politicians the World over now call “privatization.” Thus, Japan’s government decided it did not need to be in the railroad business. When it announced plans to sell off the Japan National Railways, the employees struck. In a coordinated campaign of sabotage widely attributed to the Chukaku-ha, or “Middle Core,” radical group, signaling equipment was damaged in twenty-four places in seven regions, and travel in the Tokyo area was paralyzed. Fire broke out in a station. The railway union denounced the sabotage. Some 10 million commuters were inconvenienced. However, the plan went through, and the rail lines are now privately owned. The Japanese government also decided it did not need to be in the telephone business. This led to the sell-off of Nippon Telephone and Telegraph, Japan’s biggest single employer (with some 290,000 jobs). When ownership of NTT was shifted from the public to the private sector, it swiftly became, for a time,  one of the World’s most highly valued corporations. Headlines outside Japan tell a similar story: Argentina privatizes thirty companies…West Germany sells off Volswagen…France divests itself of Matra, a defense manufacturer, along with such giant state enterprises as St.-Gobain, Paribas, Compagnie Generale d’Eletricite, and even Havas, an advertising agency. Britain sells shares in British Aerospace and British Telecom. Heathrow, Gatwick, and other airports are now run by a privatized BAA (Once the government-owned airport authority), and the government-operated bus services are now private. Canada sells stock in Air Canada to the public. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Seen in perspective, the privatizations to date amount to no more than a fleabite on a dinosaur’s hide, and even recently privatized firms could be renationalized in the event of a sudden change in political fortunes or a World-scale economic collapse. Nevertheless, a deep reconceptualization is under way—a first nervous step toward slimming down and restructuring governments in ways that roughly parallel organizational changes in the private economy. None of this is to say that privatization is the panacea claimed by Margaret Thatcher and free-market purists. It often carries its own long list of shortcomings. Yet, at a time when all governments face a kaleidoscopic, bewildering World environment, privatization helps leaders focus on strategic priorities rather than dissipating the taxpayers’ resources on a hodgepodge of distracting sidelines. Still more significant, it speeds up response times in both the divested and the retained operations. It helps bring government back into sync with the rising pace of life and of business in the symbolic economy. Privatization, however, is not the only way in which governments are, consciously or not, trying to cope with the new realities. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Aging—where does aging fit in the spectrum of difficulty? The deterioration that comes with aging is increasingly recognized as a form of disease, one that weakens the body and makes it susceptible to a host of other diseases. Aging, in this view, is as natural as smallpox and bubonic plague, and more surely fatal. Unlike bubonic plague, however, aging results from internal malfunctions in the molecular machinery of they body, and a medical condition with so many different symptoms could be complex. Surprisingly, substantial progress is being made with present techniques, without even a rudimentary ability to perform cell surgery in a medical context. Some researchers believe that aging is primarily the result of a fairly small number of regulatory processes, and many of these have already been shown to be alterable. If so, aging may be tackled successfully before even simple cell repair is available. However, the human aging process is not well enough understood to enable a confident projection of this; for example, the number of regulatory processes is not yet known. A thorough solution may well require advanced nanotechnology-based medicine, but a thorough solution may well require advanced nanotechnology-based medicine, but a thorough solution seems possible. The result would not be immortality, just much longer, healthier lives for those who want them. As we are face with the choice between a humane society and barbarity, between total nuclear disarmament and total, or best, massive destruction, the extension of one’s life is certainly something to debate about. However, I think it beats the “right to die.” #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Defaulting Clients All Had the Reputation of Paying their Bills Promptly

Each person wants one’s life to be a marker for good as one’s group defines it. Men and women work their programs of heroism according to the standard cultural scenarios, from Pontius Pilate through Eichmann and Calley. Once we see the role of acquaintanceship in social life, we are led to ask how this relationship may be developed between two individuals. Presumably, acquaintanceship can develop “informally,” as when persons in the same office or factory come to “know about” each other and gradually acknowledge this to one another, so that knowing about becomes knowing. A special case of this is found among ritually profane persons such as young children. Here it may be enough for each to know that the other goes to the same school for acquaintanceship to be automatically assumed. Acquaintanceship may also come about informally through joint participation in the same encounter, although differences in status of the participants may here act as a restriction. This may be illustrated from a report on an environmental maintenance custodian’s response to the way he was treated by a hospital physician: “Of course they are [the doctors] not all like that. Some of them would not say hello if they tripped over you. Now you take Dr. Winchester. He came down here once and asked Al to fix something that belonged to him, so Al dropped his work and went ahead and fixed this thing. Winchester was nice as could be, stood around very friendly and chatted while Al fixed this thing. Well, Al says he met up in the hall the next day and the doctor walked right by him as if he had never laid eyes on him before. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

“Al says he has met him lots of times since then and the doctor never lets on her recognizes him. Al said to me, ‘What do you think ails him?’ I told him. ‘I don’t know, Al, maybe some of these doctors think they are better than we are. Just don’t pay any attention to him.’” The relationship of acquaintanceship may also develop “formally” in our society, as when two individuals are introduced, typically by a third party but sometimes, when conditions are right, by themselves. An introduction, even more than acquaintanceship that develops informally, ought, it is felt, to have a permanent effect, placing the introduced persons forever after in a special and accessible position in regard to each other. The difference is that, while informal acquaintanceship may spring up without the participants in fact “knowing” each other’s name, formal acquaintanceship presumably involves an exchange of names and an obligation to be able thereafter to refer to the other by one’s name. Thus, with persons who have been formally introduced, or who have used names to each other on the basis of informal acquaintanceship, the offense of forgetting may take two distinct forms: not knowing that one ought to know a particular person (the greater of the sins); and knowing that one knows the person, but not being able to remember one’s name. If acquaintanceship places individuals in a preferential communication relationship, or, rather is a preferential communication relationship, then we can understand why some persons will avoid those places and occasions where troublesome introductions are likely to occur. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

More important, it can easily be appreciated that an introducer may feel an obligation to make sure that no harm resulting from the new relationship will come to those whose communication relation to each other he has altered. Since harm of this kind seems to flow from the poor to the affluent, the male to female, the weak to the powerful, the introducer may feel obliged to check with the one who has the more to lose before effecting the introduction, and assume that the one who has something to gain will have no objection to the relationship. Friends or acquaintances may not be introduced to one another unless it is known that the introduction will be agreeable to both parties. Suppose two persons, however, are of the same rank and social position, it is proper to accede to the request of one of them to be introduced, without previously asking the permission of the other. It is not in good form to introduce a person of lower rank to one of higher rank without receiving the express permission of the latter, but a request from one of higher rank to be presented to one of lower rank must be complied with instantly. Where the context is a close or continuing one, making it difficult for the persons introduced to employ the courtesy of foregoing their rights, the introducer will presumably have to take special care. You must never introduce people to each other in public places unless you are very certain that the introduction will be agreeable to both. You cannot commit a greater social blunder than to introduce to a notable person someone she does not care to know, especially on shipboard, in hotels, or in other very small, rather public communities where people are so closely thrown together that it is correspondingly difficult to avoid presuming acquaintances who have been given the wedge of an introduction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

One of the complications in understanding the institution of introduction in our society is our interpersonal deference system, because introduction is one of its ritual coins. The forms of introduction themselves are of course tied to the deference system, and differences in the relative rank of the persons introduced will be felt. Thus, “in polite society,” the custom is to introduce the subordinate to the superordinate. Also, the naming employed may be asymmetrical, with one person being introduced, say, by first name, and the second by formal title. And whether symmetrical or asymmetrical, the naming couplet employed may be selected from varying places in the hierarchy of formality, from nicknames to civil titles. Finally, the right to initiate or modify a particular naming usage between two persons may be differentially allocated. When “with” one person, a chance meeting with a second person requires the individual to introduce the two, except when contact with the newcomer clearly must be brief. Failure to introduce, in middle-class society, may be considered an open affront to one or both of those not introduced. Underlying this convention is the rule that, under proper circumstances, an individual has the right to introduce to each other any two persons with whom one is acquainted (a rule that can lead an individual to be put under pressure or under obligation to “arrange an introduction”). The issues raised by obligatory introductions are met in various ways, in addition to the basic one of the limiting one’s acquaintances to social equals, who will not be embarrassed by being introduced to one another, and to trustworthy persons who will not abuse introduction provided them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

When two people—either friends or acquaintances—are walking together and they meet a third who stops to speak to one of them, the other walks slowly on and does not stand awkwardly by and wait for an introduction. If the third is asked by the one she knows, to join them, the sauntering friend is overtaken and the introduction made. The third, however, must not join them unless invited to do so. Further, introductions made at such times, and even fleetingly at large social occasions, are sometimes treated by both introduced parties as “courtesy” introductions only, and are not drawn on when the individuals next find themselves in a similar situation unless, through preliminary signs, each signifies inclination to do so. Finally, where there is marked difference in the status of the unacquainted persons, a strategy may be employed to form a relationship of acquaintanceship without introduction: On occasions I happens that in talking to one person you want to introduce another in your conversation without making an introduction. For instance: suppose you are talking to a seedsman and a friend joins you in your garden. You greet your friend, and then include her by saying, “Mr. Smith is suggesting that I dig up these cannas and put in delphiniums.” Whether your friend gives an opinion as to change in colour of your flower bed or not, she has been made part of your conversation. This same maneuver of evading an introduction is also resorted to when you are not sure that an acquaintance will be agreeable to one or both of those whom an accidental circumstance has brought together. The same “half-way” introduction has been employed in introducing servants to house guests. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Jesse James used to rob trains and held up banks and then gave money to the neighbouring farmers to pay off their mortgages. I am sure he thought that the was doing a good thing, but there are no victimless crimes. The fact is that all people you meet have a high regard for themselves and like to be find and unselfish in their own estimation. However, a person usually has two reasons for doing a thing: one that sounds good and a real one. The person will think of the real reason. You do not need to emphasize that. Yet, all of us, being idealists at heart, like to think of motives that sound good. So, in order to change people, appeal to the nobler motives. For instance, when John D. Rockefeller, Jr., wished to stop newspaper photographers from snapping pictures of his children, he too appealed to the nobler motives. He did not say: “I do not want their pictures published.” No, he appealed to the desire, deep in all of us, to refrain from harming children. He said: “You know how it is, boys. You have got children yourselves, some of you. And you know it is not good for youngster to get too much publicity.” When Cyrus H.K Curtis , the poor boy from Maine was starting on his meteoric career, which was destined to take him millions as owner of The Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies’ Home Journal, he could not afford to pay his contributors the prices that other magazines paid. He could not afford to hire first-class authors to write for money alone. So he appealed to their nobler motives. For example, he persuaded even Louisa May Alcott, the immortal author of Little Women, to write for him when she was at the flood tide of her fame; and he did it by offering to send a check for a hundred dollars, not to her, but to her favourite charity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Although nothing may work in all cases, and nothing may work with all people, it is worthy trying. Six customers of a certain automobile company refused to pay their bills for servicing. None of the customers protested the entire bill, but each claimed that someone charge was wrong. In each case, the customer had signed for the work done, so the company knew it was right—and said so. That was the first mistake. Here are the steps the men in the credit department took to collect these overdue bills. Do you supposed they succeeded? They called on each customer and told him that they had come to collect a bill that was long past due. They made it very plain that the company was absolutely and unconditionally right; therefore he, the customer, was absolutely and unconditionally wrong. They intimated that they, the company, knew more about automobiles than he could ever hope to know. So what was the argument about? Result: They argued. Did any of these methods reconcile the customer and settle the account? You can answer that one yourself. At this stage of affairs, the credit manager was about to open fire with a battery of legal talent, when fortunately the matter came to the attention of the general manager. The manager investigated these defaulting clients and discovered that they all had the reputation of paying their bills promptly. Something was wrong here—something was drastically wrong about the method of collection. So he called in James L. Thomas and told him to collect these “uncollectible” accounts. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Here, in his words, are the steps Mr. Thomas took: He listened to the customers and learned why they disputed the bill. After Mr. Thomas apologized for the matter being badly mishandled and reduced the bill, five of the customers agreed to pay. The sixth refused. However, because Mr. Thomas was so nice and professional, in the next two years, all six of these customers bought new cars from that company. “Experience has taught me,” says Mr. Thomas, “that when no information can be secured about the customer, the only sound basis on which to proceed is to assume that one is sincere, honest, truthful and anxious to pay the charges, once convinced they are correct. To put it differently and perhaps more clearly, people are honest and want to discharge their obligations. The exceptions to that rule are comparatively few, and I am convinced that the individuals who are inclined to chisel will in most cases react favourably if you make them feel that you consider them honest, upright and fair.” Appeal to the nobler motives. “When I look back at the opportunities missed in this life, I have the feeling that only by being a different kind of person could I have acted differently. From this it seems to me that the only way to affect recurrence is to change one’s essence.” Again, very useful. However, how can you do this? “Would memory of a previous recurrence make it possible to change one’s actions?” That I do not know. That you will see when you have it. “A recurring life is not lived exactly as before, is it?” The beginning is always the same. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

“In recurrence through one life to another do we retain the same level of being?” There are different theories about it. One theory is that if one acquires something in one life it is bound to grow. However, there are many other theories. “Is memory in essence?” It is better to say that it is connected with “I”s which are in personality. There are many different kinds of memory of this system, memory of smell, memory of roads. However, we speak of the memory that we know. It is very easy to spoil this memory. “There are people with photographic memory. Are they more conscious?” There are many different kinds of memory. You have a certain kind of memory. Another man has another kind. However, you can use your own kind of memory better or worse by being more conscious or less conscious. Memory is in all centers. It may be a little better in one center than in another but there is only one method of making memory strong—by becoming more conscious. Not only does each center have its own memory but some kinds of memory belong to essence and some to personality. “Id memory a function of the body? Can it be compared to movement?” You can call it a function of the body if you like. However, why compare it with movement? One thing is not like another. Memory is something in us, maybe in essence, maybe in personality. We recollect in personality, but memory of taste or smell is in essence. However, actually one remembers in personality. “What must we do to avoid spoiling our memory?” Work on imagination first; lying second. These two things destroy our memory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

When we first spoke of lying people took it s funny; they did not realize that one can destroy one’s memory completely. Struggle with imagination also, not just for sport or exercise. “What can help us to recognize lying in ourselves?” There are many different things; first, analysis of fact, words and theories. Recognition of other people’s lying is very useful and then one bright morning one can come to oneself. “Does false personality destroy memory?” Yes, one can say that false personality either destroys or distorts memory. “Is false personality a form of lying?” Leave false personality. It is not a form of lying; it is a defence. Avoiding unpleasant results by false personality, one can feel oneself in a certain way. “Does this spoiling of memory result in physiological change?” Oh, yes! It may bring complete lunacy. Old psychologists knew about that. They spoke about hysterics and so on. However, they did not realize that just by our ordinary psychological play we can spoil memory. Lying about ideas, imagining about ideas and so on. “What effect would hard work on stopping thoughts have on recurrence?” Right or wrong, there is promise behind it. “What is the way towards developing memory in recurrence?” This is very interesting and very important. It is necessary to develop memory, as it is also possible to destroy memory. According to the studies to the theory or recurrence, self-remembering is the only way of developing memory. If one remembers oneself in this life, one will remember next time. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Our final mechanism of internal change and interaction patterns deals with space. In this mechanism the actions occurring within the system alter the very structure of the space in which actors are located. The agents are not directly intent on changing the collective interaction patterns, but barriers are being created (or reduced) from the inside, as a by-product of agent actions. The classic example from biology is speciation. Over time a population can diverge, its members evolving into subgroups that eventually can no longer interbreed. The subpopulations have grown far apart, as though they were continents, now separated by a kind of ocean in the space of possible animals. The animals may have had no intention to form separate species, but their breeding decisions eventually had that result. Biological examples of mergers are less common, but they do exist. One widely supported theory suggests that mitochondria, the tiny “fuel factories” of animal cells, are the result of a capturing process. Bacterial structures were incorporated by host animal cells, and some of the genetic encoding for mitochondrial reproduction was moved to the animal cell genome. What had been a separate population was merged into another one. In the social World, we frequently see merging and division of groups and even nations. At the level of national politics, such processes always have an explicit component. New nations declare their independence. Foreign governments recognize their existence. However, frequently this is a late stage of what began as a more implicit and internally driven separation process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

A group of people that have been considered part of some larger nation find themselves interacting more strongly with each other and less with members of the “other” group. They begin to talk of their separate identity. That talk, and the reaction of others to it, may then propel the dynamic into a new phase, one better understood with tools from the early part of our report, on external intervention and introduction of explicit barriers. These remarks on the mixture of internal and external processes in nation building serve as a reminder that actual situations typically involve many mechanisms at once. Variety may be created by imitating foreign visitors even as it is destroyed by censoring media. Interaction may be decreased by a policy decision to reduce foreign language instruction, at the same time as interaction is increased by the need to trade with each other. An idea can be widely adopted in spite of being publicly condemned—indeed, because of being condemned, so that publishers will be eager to print a book “banned in Boston.” Interaction among agents shapes the creation and destruction of variety and produces the events that drive the attribution of credit. Shortly after Ronald Reagan was elected to the American presidency, Lee Atwater, one of his chief assistants (later successively George Bush’s campaign manager and chairman of the Republican National Committee), met with friends for lunch at the White House. His candour at the table was remarkable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

“You will hear a lot in the coming months about the Reagan Revolution,” he said. “The headlines will be full of tremendous changes Reagan plans to introduce. Don’t believe them. Reagan does want to make a lot of changes. But the reality is, in one direction. If we here work very hard and are extremely lucky, Reagan may be able to push it five degrees in the opposite direction. That’s what the Reagan Revolution is really about.” Despite a media focus on individual politicians, Atwater’s remark underlines the degree to which even the most popular and highly placed leader is a captive of the “system.” This system, of course, is not capitalism or socialism, but bureaucratism. For bureaucracy is the most prevalent form of power in all smokestack states. Bureaucrats, not democratically elected officials, essentially run all governments on an everyday basis, and make the overwhelming majority of decisions publicly credited to Presidents and Prime Ministers. “All Japanese politicians…” writes Yoship Tsurumi, head of the Pacific Basin Center Foundation, “have become totally dependent on the central bureaucrats for drafting and passing bills. They stage Kabuki plays of ‘debates’ on bills according to scenarios created by the elite bureaucrats of each ministry.” Similar descriptions apply with varying degrees of force to the civil services of France, Britain, West Germany, and the other countries routinely described as democratic. Political leaders regularly bemoan the difficulty they face in getting their bureaucracies to carry out their wished. The fact is that, no matter how many parties run against one another in elections, and no matter who gets the most votes, a single party always wind. It is the Invisible Part of bureaucracy.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Often others can help us achieve credible commitment. Although people may be weak on their own, they can build resolve by forming a group. The successful use of peer pressure to achieve commitment has been made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous (AA,) and diet centers too. The AA approach changes the payoffs from breaking your word. It sets up a social institution in which pride and self-respect are lost when commitments are broken. Sometimes teamwork foes far beyond social pressure and employs strong-arm tactics to force us to keep true to our promises. Consider the problem for the front line of an advancing army. If everyone else charges forward, one soldier who hangs back ever so slightly will increase one’s chance of survival without significantly lowering the probability that the attack will be successful. If every soldier thought the same way, however, the attack would become a retreat. Of course it does not happen that way. A solider is conditioned through honour to one’s country, loyalty to fellow soldiers, and belief in the million-dollar wound—an injury that is serious enough to send one home, out of action, but not so serious that one will not fully recover. Those soldiers who lack the will and the courage to follow order can be motivated by penalties for desertion. If the punishment for desertion is certain and ignominious death, the alternative of advancing forward becomes much more attractive. However, soldiers are not interested in killing their fellow countrymen, even deserters. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

How can soldiers who have difficulty committing to attack the enemy make a credible commitment to killing their countrymen for desertion? The ancient Roman army made falling behind in an attack a capital offense. As the army advanced in a line, any soldier who saw the one next to one falling being was ordered to kill the deserter immediately. To make this order credible, failing to kill a deserter was also a capital offense. Thus even though a soldier would rather get on with the battle than go back after a deserter, failing to do so could cost one one’s own life. The motive for punishing deserters is made even stronger if the deserter is given clemency for killing those in line next to him who fail to punish him. Thus is a soldier fails to kill a deserter, there are now two people who can punish: his neighbour and the deserter, who could save one’s own life by punishing those who failed to punish him. However, if you are not careful, this can lead to a massacre of one’s own people. A munity. The tactics of the Roman army lie on today in the honour code required of students at West Point. Exams are not monitored, and cheating is an offense that leads to expulsion. However, because students are not inclined to “rat” on their classmates, failure to report observed cheating is also a violation of the honour code. This violation also leads to expulsion. When the honour code is violated, students report crimes because they do not want to become guilty accomplices by their silence. Similarly, criminal law provides penalties for those who fail to report crime as an accessory after the fact. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Plague insurance—medical nanotechnologies promise to extend healthy life, but if history is any guide, they may also avert sudden massive death. The word plague is rarely heard today, except in relation to COVID; it calls up visions of the Black Death of the Middle Ages, when one third of Europe died in 1346-50. A virulent influenza struck in 1918, half lost in the news of the First World War: how many of us realize that it killed at least 20 million? People often act as though plagues were gone for good, as if sanitation and antibiotics had vanquished them. However, as the doctors are forever telling their patients, antibiotics kill bacteria, but are useless for viruses. The flu, the common cold, and other sexually transmitted viruses (which can be deadly)—none has a really effective treatment, because all are caused by viruses. In some American counties, as much as percent of the population is estimated to be infected with a deadly sexually transmitted virus, and even youth and virgins may carry this virus. There is no “safe” population. Without a cure soon, the steep rise in deaths from deadly sexually transmitted viruses still lies in the future. Deadly sexually transmitted viruses and cancer are grim reminders that the great history of plagues are not behind us. New diseases continue to appear today as they have throughout history. Today’s population, far larger than that of any previous century, provides a huge fertile territory for their spread. Today’s transportation system can spread viruses from continent to continent in a single day. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

When ships sailed or churned their way across the seas, an infected passenger was likely to show full-blown disease before arrival, permitting quarantine. However, few diseases can be guaranteed to show themselves in hours of a single aircraft flight. So far as is known, every species of organism, from bacterium to whale, is afflicted with viruses. Animal viruses sometimes “jump the species gap” to infect other animals, or people. You have seen the film “Kaw.” Most scientists believe that the ancestors of a particularly deadly sexually transmitted virus could only infect monkeys. Then these viruses made the interspecies a jump. A similar jump occurred in the 1960 when scientists in West Germany, working with cells from monkeys in Uganda, suddenly fell ill. Dozens were infected, and several died of a disease that caused both blood clots and bleeding, caused by what is now named the Marburg virus. What is the Marburg virus had spread with a sneeze, like influenza or the common cold? We think of human plagues as a health problem, but when they hit our fellow species, we tend to see them from an environmental perspective. In the late 1980s, over half the harbour-seal population in large parts of the North Sea suddenly died, leading many at fist to blame pollution. The cause, though, appears to be a distemper virus that made the jump from dogs. Biologists worry that the virus could infect seal species around the World, since distemper virus can spread by aerosols—that is, by coughing—and seals live in close physical contact. So far its mortality rate has been 60 to 70 percent. There is no reason a great plague could not happen again. We live in evolutionary competition with microbes—bacteria and viruses. There is no guarantee that will be the survivors. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17


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You Should Have Been Able to Feel the Good-Bye in the Air

Power is the life pulse that sustains man in every epoch, and unless the student understands power figures and power sources one can understand nothing vital about social history. Just as the individual is obliged not to exploit the accessibility of others (else they have to pay too large a price for their obligation to be accessible), so one is obliged to release those with whom one is engaged, should it appear, through conventional cues, that they desire to be released (else they have to pay too great a price for their tact in not openly taking leave of one). A reminder of these rules of leave-taking can be found in elementary school classrooms where leave-taking practices are still being learned, as, for example, when a teacher, having called a student to her desk in order to correct one’s exercise book, may have to turn one around and gently propel one back to one’s seat in order to terminate the interview. The rights of departure owed that individual, and the rule of tactful leave-taking owed the remaining participants, can be in conflict with each other. This conflict is often resolved, in a way very characteristic of communication life, by persons active in different roles tacitly cooperating to ease leave-taking. Thus business etiquette provides the following lesson: on when to go—your exit cues are many. They range from clear-cut closing remarks, usually in the form of a “thank you for coming in,” to a vacant and preoccupied start. However, in any case they should come from the interviewer. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

It should not be necessary for one to stand, abruptly; you should have been able to feel the good-bye in the air far enough in advance to father up your gear, slide forward to the edge of your chair and lunch into a thank-you speech of your own. Nor should it be necessary to ask that embarrassing question, “Am I taking too much of your time?”; if that thought crosses your mind, it is time to go. In fact, persons can become so accustomed to being helped out by the very person who creates the need for help, that when cooperation is not forthcoming they may find they have no way of handling the incident. Thus, some mental patients may characteristically hold a staff person in an encounter regardless of how man hints the latter provides that termination ought now to occur. As the staff person begins to walk away, the patient may follow along until the locked door is reached, and even then the patient may try to accompany one. At such times the staff person may have to hold back the patient forcibly, or precipitously tear oneself away, demonstrating not merely that the patient is being left in the lurch, but also that the staff show of concern for the patient is, in some sense, only a show. Pitchmen and street stemmers initiate a similar process; they rely on the fact that the accosted person will be willing to agree to a purchase in order not to have to face being the sort of person who walks away from an encounter without being officially released. In our society, as in others, there are institutions that pertain specifically to the privilege and duty of participating in face engagements. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

There is, first of all, the social relationship of “acquaintanceship.” Its preconditions are satisfied when each of two individuals can personally identify the other by knowledge that distinguishes this other from everyone else, and when each acknowledges to the other that this state of mutual information exists. Once this information relationship has been established between two persons, it seems, with certain exceptions, to give rise to a social bondedness, placing both individuals on a new, typically nonterminable basis in regard to each other. Thereafter, when they come into the same social situation, they are likely to possess either a duty or a right regarding face engagement. (Should one individual forget the “face” of the other, the other need only establish the context of the original acquaintanceship-formation and one will receive engagement rights and often an apology as well.) Thus, the right to initiate face engagements is so important that it tends to get built into the relationship as one of its important ingredients. We can begin to consider the institution of acquaintanceship by specifying two of the common-sense uses of the term “recognition.” There is fist what might be called cognitive recognition, the process by which one individual “places” or identifies another, linking the sight of one with a framework of information concerning one. The identification ritual at criminal “line-ups” is one clear example; to “recognize” a man whom one was supposed to meet by something one promised to carry or wear another. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Typically, cognitive recognition links the person recognized to information that refers exclusively to one, such as one’s name, or a specific configuration of statuses, or a unique personal biography—in brief, one’s “personal identity.” Sometimes, however, cognitive recognition merely implies the placing of an individual in some general social category, but in a context where any member of the category can play a crucial role, as, for example, when pickpockets recognize a plainclothesman who is personally unknown to them, thereby, as the argot puts it, “making him on his merits.” Cognitive recognition, then, is the process through which we socially or personally identify the other. Second, there is “social recognition,” namely, the process of openly welcoming or at least accepting the initiation of an engagement, as when a greeting or smile is returned. Perhaps we ought to include here the according of a special role within an engagement, as when a chairman acknowledges and fulfills an individual’s desire to be given the floor. Cognitive recognition is a private act that a concealed spy can engage in, but it is difficult to engage in it without expressing that one is doing so. Social recognition is a glance specifically functioning as a ceremonial gesture of contact with someone. Now, as previously suggested, in order to carry out certain forms of social recognition it will be necessary for the participants to recognize each other cognitively, of affect having done so, or apologize for not doing so. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

As might be expected, then, it will be possible, when two persons meet who are not well known to each other, to distinguish two types of incipient expression that can touch the face: the expression of someone immediately anticipating a social recognition from another; and the expression of someone going through the rapid cognitive process of physically recognizing or “placing” someone. These two expressions, of course, often occur simultaneously, and properly so; at other times the social recognition expression may momentarily and embarrassingly precede the other expression. Ans sometimes, when the context makes it dangerous for one person to admit that one is acquitted with the other, we find the “placing” expression without the social one, as we also do when the individual happens upon a person whom one knows about but has not met. Also, when it comes to socializing, remember that other people can be totally wrong, even when they think they are not. However, do not condemn them. It may be helpful to put yourself in that person’s place and be wise and tolerant. That is a characteristic of an exceptional person. Success in dealing with people depends on a sympathetic grasp of the other persons’ viewpoint. Cooperativeness in conversation is achieved when you show that you consider the other person’s ideas and feelings as important as your own. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Starting your conversation by giving the other person the purpose or direction of your conversation, governing what you say by what you would want to hear if you were the listener, and accepting his or her viewpoint will encourage the listener to have an open mind to your ideas. You cannot remember if you do not remember yourself, in this recurrence. We have lived before. Many facts prove it. The reason why we do not remember is because we did not remember ourselves. The same is true in this life. We do not really remember the things that we do mechanically, we usually only know that they happened. Only with self-remembering can we remember details. Personality is always mixed with essence. Memory is in essence, not in personality, but personality can present it quite rightly if memory is sufficiently strong. You can prepare nothing. Only remember yourself, then you will remember things better. The whole thing lies in negative emotions: we enjoy them so much that we have no interest in anything else. If you remember yourself now, then you may remember next time. “Id this reason for the ‘I have been here before’ feeling? The feeling that one has already some piece of knowledge that one could not possibly have heard?” I want facts. It may simply be a compound picture of different ideas. If you can really remember something of the kind it means you can self-remember. If you cannot self-remember, it is imagination. “Is accidental self-remembering of any use for this purpose?” Accidental self-remembering is a flash for a second. One cannot rely on it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

The only possibility of change begins from the possibility of beginning to remember yourself now. In the system recurrence is not necessary. It may be interesting or useful; you can even start with it, but for actual work on yourself the idea of recurrence is not necessary. That is why we have not heard it from this system; it came from outside, from literature and from me. Then you see it fits; it does not contradict. However, it is not necessary, because all that we can do, we can do only in this life. If we do not do anything in this life then the next life will be just the same, or it may be the same with slight variations but no positive change. “Can you explain why attempts at self-remembering seem to be tiring, when tried over some time?” They ought not to be. A possible explanation is that by making mental effort your unconsciously make physical effort. I think efforts to self-remember can only be tiring if there is something wrong attached. At first we are unable to remember for long at a time and it is better to remind yourself or find methods to remind you about it as often as possible. It may be tiring if you just try to keep your mind on it. That is not really self-remembering, but remembering about self-remembering. This is useful also when you begin to study, but later you must find other methods. “Any efforts to self-remember that I have made never seemed to get any deeper or on to a higher level. It seems always to be an effort to do it.” That is the thing. You must do what you can do. First try to remember yourself in the ordinary way, then in difficult moments, the moments in which you forget yourself most easily. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

After many repetitions of that you will see that it will suddenly pass to a higher level. However, that will be without your own direct efforts. “as a man attains a higher stats of consciousness, such as self-consciousness, does the speed of one’s functions change? In other words, can one ever hope that an impression for one will be longer than one ten-thousandth of a second, a breath longer than three seconds, and so on?” It is possible for the speed of function to change. This is not similar to the length of impressions and it is useless to examine the dissimilarity. Impressions are longer now. When we speak of a ten-thousandth part of a second we refer only to an impression of the intellectual center. There are others. “If  cell could become conscious of its function s part of a man, would it forget that it was a cell? Similarly, if a man became conscious of the way tht he contributed to the life of a star, for instance, would he lose the memory of his life as a man, and disappear from the cycle of endlessly recurring lifetimes?” Quite the opposite process. A cell would remember it was a cell. The same for man—he would remember that he was a man. It would be the same as self-remembering. He would not lose memory, he would get memory. “Thinking back over one’s life one sees certain crossways where some decision was taken which one thinks was bad. Is there any particular thing one can do in this recurrence so that there is less likelihood that we shall make the same mistake in the next?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Yes, certainly. One can think one can change now in these particular points, and then—if the thinking is sufficiently deep—one will remember; if it is not so deep one may remember. In any case, there is a chance that in time one will manage not to do something which one did before. Many ideas and things like that can pass through one life to another. For instance, someone asked what one could get from the idea of recurrence. If one became intellectually aware of this idea, and if the idea became part of one’s essence—part of one’s general attitude towards life—then one could no forget it, and it would be an advantage to know of it early in the next life. “Are there very definite possibilities for one man at any given moment?” People think that there are many possibilities. At any rate it looks like that, but really there is only one possibility or sometimes two. Men can only change in the sense of the sixth dimension. Things happen in a certain way and one possibility out of many supposed possibilities is realized at each moment and that makes the line of the fourth dimension. However, conscious change, for a definite purpose, which is the idea of work, the idea of development, when you seriously start in this system: that is already a start on the sixth dimension. “You say there may be two possibilities at a given moment. Do you mean one mechanical and one not?” No, there may be several mechanical possibilities because small deviations are possible, but you always come back to the line. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

The doomsday device in the movie Dr. Strangelove consisted of large buried nuclear bombs whose explosion would emit enough radioactivity to exterminate all life on Earth. The device would be detonated automatically in the event of an attack on the Soviet Union. When President Milton Muffley of the United States of America asked if such an automatic trigger was possible, Dr. Strangelove answered: “It is not merely possible; it is essential.” The device is such a good deterrent because it makes aggression tantamount to suicide. (Apparently, Khrushchev attempted to use this strategy, threatening that Soviet rockets would fly automatically in the event of armed conflict in Berlin.) Faced with an American attack, Soviet premier Dimitri Kissov might refrain from retaliating and risking mutually assured destruction. As long as the Soviet premier has the freedom not to respond, the Americans might risk an attack. However, with the doomsday device in place, the Soviet response is automatic and the deterrent threat is credible. However, this strategic advantage does not come without a cost. There might be a small accident or unauthorized attack after which the Soviets would not want to carry out their dire threat, but have no choice as execution is out of their control. This is exactly what happened in Dr. Strangelove. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

To reduce the consequences of errors, you want a threat that is no stronger than is necessary to deter the rival. What do you do if the action is indivisible, as a nuclear explosion surely is? You can make the threat milder by creating a risk, but not a certainty, that the dreadful event will occur. This is Thomas Schelling’s idea of brinkmanship. He explained it in his book The Strategy of Conflict: “Brinkmanship is…the deliberate creation of a recognizable risk, a risk that one does not completely control. It is the tactic of deliberately letting the situation get somewhat out of hand, just because its being out of hand may be intolerable to the other party and force his accommodation. It means harassing and intimidating an adversary by exposing him to s shared risk, or deterring him by showing that if he makes a contrary move he may disturb us so that we slip over the brink whether we want to or not, carrying him with us.” The use of brinkmanship formed the basis of the U.S.A. nuclear deterrent policy. During the cold war, the United States of America did not need to guarantee a nuclear retaliation if the Soviets invaded Europe. Even a small chance of nuclear war, say 10 percent, was enough to deter the Soviets. A 10 percent chance is one-tenth the threat and consequently required much less commitment in order to establish credibility. While the Soviets might not have believed that the United States of America would surely retaliate, they could not be sure that Americans would not either. There was always the possibility that a Soviet attack would start an escalatory cycle that got out of control. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Mass democracy implies the existence of “masses.” It is based on mass movements, mass political parties, and mass media. However, what happens when the mass society begins to de-massify—when movements, parties, and media all splinter? As we move to an economy based on noninterchangeable labour, in what sense can we continue to speak of the “masses”? If technology permits the customization of products, if markets are being broken into niches, if the media multiply and serve continually narrowing audiences, if even family structure and culture are becoming increasingly heterogenous, why should politics still presume the existence of homogeneous masses? All these changes—whether rising localism, resistance to globalization, ecological activism, or heightened ethnic and racial consciousness—reflect the increased social diversity of advanced economies. They point to the end of mass society. However, with de-massification, people’s needs, and therefore their political demands, diversify. Just as markers researchers in business are finding more and more differentiated segments and “micromarkets” for products, reflecting the rising variety of life styles, so politicians are bombarded by more and more diverse demands from their constituencies. While mass movements may fill the state Capitol in Sacramento, California USA or Wenceslas Square in Prague, in the high-technology nations mass movements, while still a factor, increasingly tend to fragment. Mass consensus (on all but a handful of high-priority issues) becomes harder to find. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

The initial result, therefore, of the breakup of the mass society is a tremendous jump in the sheer complexity of politics. In terms of winning elections, the great leaders of the industrial era faced a comparatively simple task. In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt could assemble a coalition of half a dozen groups—urban workers, poor farmers, the foreign-born, the intellectuals. With it, his Democratic Party was able to command power in Washington for a third of a century. Today an American presidential candidate must piece together a coalition composed not of four or six major blocs, but of hundreds of groupings, each with its own agenda, each changing constantly, many surviving only a matter of months or weeks. (This, not just the cost of television advertising, helps explain the rising cost of American elections.) What is emerging, as we will see, is no longer a mass democracy but a highly charged, fast-moving “mosaic democracy” that corresponds to the rise of mosaics in the economy, and operates according to its own rules. These will force us to redefine even the most fundamental of democratic assumptions. Mass democracies are designed to respond mainly to mass input—mass movements, mass political parties, mass media. They do not yet know how to cope with mosaics. This leaves them doubly vulnerable to attack by what we might call “pivotal minorities.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

It is ironic that in our efforts to stabilize systems against independent or correlated failures, we often transform them into more tightly coupled systems that redistribute stress. For example, we create power grids so that regions can borrow power from neighbouring regions. Local power shortages are reduces, but larger failures become possible, such as the cascade of power outages that caused the 1977 New York City blackout, or the two outages of 1996 that each affected millions of utility customers in the Western United States of America. Independent failures and correlated failures can both occur is systems whether or not the elements are connected to each other. Stress propagation failure, become possible when the elements interact naturally, or are designed to interact. Here the risk is that a failure in one element can cause stress in another element, leading to failure of that element as well. Eventually a cascade of failures could cause a large-scale failure. As we have seen as we have been discussing redistributing stress, stress propagation failures occur not only in information systems but also in many other systems that are closely coupled. In fact, advances in information systems allow more and more systems of different kinds to be designed in ways the provide efficiency through a close coupling of their elements, with attendant risk of large-scale failures. A good example is “just in time” inventory systems, which increase efficiency by reducing inventory buffers, but which also mean that a strike in a single plant can rapidly close a whole network of plants. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Unless the coupled structure of the situation is changes, interventions to stave off catastrophic releases can only be expected to be briefly effective. Snow fences, emergency interventions for threatened species, and efforts to control individual bad drivers on a freeway all avoid trouble only in the short run. For systems in the critical state, an event from some quarter will eventually trigger a huge chain of effects. Of course, one might be concerned mainly about what happens during the period when the preventative measure postpones a big release. The treatment of self-organized criticality does not argue that there is no postponement, only that a local intervention will provide no relief in the long run. To change the basic character of the system, short-term interventions are not effective. The relative frequency of big and small events stems from the nature of the interdependence between the elements: the stickiness of the sand or snow, the variety of other species that a given species consumes, the reaction times of freeway drivers, or the borrowing privileges of power grid regions. These linkages among the artifacts or agents are the means by which events change the probability of future events. While the design principles for systems that propagate stress are not well developed, several ideas do seem relevant. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

First, the entire problem can be avoided if the elements of the system can be prevented from transferring stress to each other. For example, if unmet loads from failing elements were not automatically passed along to other elements, cascades of failure would be prevented. Another, related, approach is to prevent large “avalanches” by partitioning the system and preventing load transfers from elements in one part to elements in another. A third approach is to build more slack into the system so that individual elements fail less often, making cascades of a given magnitude less frequent. All these methods work at some cost in lost opportunities for load sharing or other efficiencies. However, as we saw in our data on wars, rare large events can have extremely severe consequences. For this reason, it pays to search for effective ways to reduce stress propagation at the cost of only modest reductions of efficiency. So far, our consideration of modes of failure in information systems has focused on “natural” shocks, whether they are local, correlated, or caused by the propagation of stress. We next consider shocks that are deliberately caused by attack from other agents int eh system. The most dangerous attacks are often ones that exploit some vulnerability in a surprising new way. For the attacker, surprise is frequently possible only by risking the revelation of the means of surprise. For example, using a new way of overloading a computer system might work the first time but probably not a month later. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Thus, anyone who has the means to surprise an opponent faces the problem of when the resource for surprise should be exploited and when it should be conserved for a time at which the stakes are higher and the surprise would be more valuable. A classic example of a resource for surprise is the British control of all the German agents in Britain in 1942. The British recognized that the German intelligence system was vulnerable due to its heavy reliance on spies. For two years, the British waited to exploit their ability to mislead the Germans, until D Day, when the stakes were very large. Their patience was amply rewarded. False information given simultaneously to all the spies produced for the Germans a correlated shock. The message from each of “their” spies reinforced the credibility of the others. The Germans fell for the grand deception and kept a large number of troops at Pas de Calais—even several days after the real attack at Normandy. There are several important implications of the fact that information systems may be attacked precisely when the stakes are very high. First, for the attacker, patience is a virtue since it may pay to exploit surprise by waiting for rare events with very large stakes. Second, for the defender, it would be a mistake to evaluate the risk of being surprised by what was seen when the stakes were low or moderate. Actual or potential opponents may be waiting for an opportunity of sufficiently large stakes to justify the exploitation of whatever resource for surprise they may have. Thus, judging the reliability of a spy, or the reliability of a crucial computer system, by its performance in a series of relatively low stakes circumstances could be quite misleading. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Third, when the stakes get very large, the risk of being surprised is greatest. Immunology provides some valuable insights in the resistance of a Complex Adaptive System against malevolent attacks. In the case of attacks by pathogens, the mammalian immune system is able to protect the host by distinguishing between foreign material and self. Distinctive protein patterns serve as tags that permit immune system cells to identify what is a part of the self. Experience with particular pathogens often results in immunity against further attacks of the same or similar kind. Conversely, the human populations that have been the most vulnerable to disease are those that have been isolated on continents or islands and then have suddenly become exposed to pathogens that are new to them. It has become clear through the term “computer virus” that considerations of immunity also apply to information systems. A reasonable speculation is that information systems that have been exposed to numerous attacks from hackers have had many of their weaknesses exposed and corrected. Conversely, information systems that are isolated may actually be more vulnerable to attacks if they ever do become exposed. There are two policy implications for information security. First, the effort to protect critical information systems by isolating them may actually make them more vulnerable if their isolation can not be guaranteed. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Second, if security is to be achieved through redundancy, it can help to have the redundant systems be as different as possible (rather than exact copies of each other) so that some system might be able to resist an attack that is fatal to the others. This second principle has played a central role in the research of our colleague Stephanie Forrest, who has worked to devise immune systems for computers as an alternative to standard approaches that vaccinate against identified threats. She has show promising results for systems that can uniquely tag their own processes so that they can distinguish self from other in order to identify attacking programs without the attackers having to be previously identified. As we are focusing on immune systems, it is also a good idea to consider new organs and limbs for humans. So far, we have seen how medical nanotechnology would be used in the simpler applications outside tissues—such as in the blood—then inside tissues, and finally inside cells. Consider how these abilities will fit together for victims of automobile and motorcycle accidents. Nnomanufactured medical devices will be of dramatic value to those who have suffered massive trauma. Take the case of a patient with a crushed or severed spinal cord high in the back or in the neck. The latest research gives hope that when such patients re treated promptly after the injury, paralysis may be at least partially avoidable, sometimes. However, those whose injuries were not treated—including virtually all of today’s patients—remain paralyzed. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

While research continues on a variety of techniques for attempting to assist a spontaneous healing process, prospects for reversing this sort of damage using conventional medicine remain bleak. With the techniques discussed above, it will become possible to remove scar tissue and to guide cell growth so as to produce healthy arrangements of the cells on a microscopic scale. With the right molecular-scale poking and prodding of the cell nucleus, even nerve cells of the sorts found in the brain and spinal cord can be induced to divide. Where nerve cells have been destroyed, there need be no shortage of replacements. These technologies will eventually enable medicine to heal damaged spinal cords, reversing paralysis. The ability to guide cell growth and division and to direct the organization of tissues will be sufficient to regrow entire organs and limbs, not merely to repair what has been damaged. This will enable medicine to restore physical health despite the most grievous injuries. If this seems hard to believe, recall that medical advances have shocked the World before now. To those in the past, the idea of cutting people open with knives painlessly would have seemed miraculous, but surgical anesthesia is now routine. Likewise with bacterial infections and antibiotics, with the eradication of smallpox, and the vaccine for polio: each tamed a deadly terror, and each is now half-forgotten history. Our gut sense of what seems likely has little to do with what can and cannot be done by medical technology. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

It has to do more with our habitual fears, including the fear of vain hopes. Yet what amazes one generation seems obvious and even boring to the next. The first baby born after each breakthrough grows up wondering what all the excitement was about. Besides, nano-scale medicine will not be a cure-all. Consider a fifty-year-old mentally ill man, with a mind like a two-year-old’s, or a woman with a brain tumour that has spread to the point that her personality has changed: How could they be “healed”? No healing of tissues could replace missed a lifetime of adult experience, nor can it replace lost information from a severely damaged brain. The best physicians could do would be to bring the patients to some physically healthy condition. One can wish for more, but sometimes it will not be possible. “What are some of the forms which the first conscious effort takes?” Being aware of yourself. The realization of “I am here.” However, not words. Feeling. The realization of who you are and where you are. I advise you to think chiefly about consciousness. How to approach, how to start to understand what consciousness is. We can find examples of consciousness in our own strong memory, so that if we can find moments of clear and vivid memory in the past, we can know that this is the result of being conscious. With a flash of consciousness you have very clear memories; places, time, of day, day of the week and so on. These moments of consciousness give very bright memory. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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This is Our Very Soul We are Involved with

Men lean on increase and creation ritual especially when times are bad; it is then that their spiritual technology has to work. Witness the streets of Sodom, and that night in Gibeah, when the hospital door exposed a matron to avoid worse rape. These were the prime in order and in might; the rest were long to tell, though far renowned, the Ionian gods, of Javan’s issue held Gods, yet confessed later than Heaven and Earth their boasted parents; Titan Heaven’s first-born with his enormous brood, and brithright seized by younger Saturn, he from mightier Jove his own and Rhea’s son like measure found; so Jove usurping reigned: these first in Crete and Ida known, thence on the snowy top of cold Olympus ruled the middle air their highest Heaven; or on the Delphian cliff, or in Dodona, and through all the bounds of Doric land; or who with Saturn old feld over Adria to the Hesperian fields, and over the Celtic roamed the utmost isles. All these and more came flocking; but with looks of downcast and damp, yet such wherein appeared obscure some glimpse of joy, to have found themselves not lost in loss itself; which on his countenance cast like doubtful hue: but he his wonted pride soon recollecting, with high words, that bore semblance of worth, not substance, gently raised their fainting courage, and dispelled their fears. Then straight commands that at the warlike sound of trumpets loud and clarions be upreared his mighty standards; that proud honour claimed Azazel as his right,  Cherub tall: who forthwith from the glittering staff unfurled the imperial ensign, which will full high advanced shone like a meteor streaming to the wind with gems and golden luster rich emblazed, seraphic arms and trophies: al the while sonorous metal blowing sounds: at which the universal host upsent a shout that tore hell’s concave, and beyond frighted the reign of Chaos and old Night. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

All in a moment through the gloom were seen ten thousand banners rise into the air with orient colours waving: with them rose a forest huge of spears: and thronging helms appeared, and serried shields in thick array of depth immeasurable: anon they move in perfect phalanx to the Dorian mood of flutes and soft recorders; such as raised to highth of noblest temper heroes old arming to battle, and instead of rage deliberate valour breathed, firm and unmoved with dread of death to flight or foul retreat, nor wanting power to mitigate and swage with solemn touches, troubled thoughts, and chase anguish and doubt and fear and sorrow and pain from mortal or immortal minds. Thus they breathing united force with fixed thought moved on in silence to soft pipes that charmed their painful steps over the burnt soil; and now advanced in view they stand, a horrid front of dreadful length and dazzling arms, in guise awaiting what command their mighty chief had to impose: he through the armed files darts his experienced eye, and son traverse the whole battalion views, their order due, their visages and statures as of gods, their number last he sums. And now his heart distends with pride, and hardening in his strength glories: for never since created man, met such embodied force, as named with these could merit more than that small infantry warred on by cranes: though all the giant brood of Phlegra with the heroic race were joined that fought at Thebes and Ilium, on each side mixed with auxiliar gods; and what resounds in fable or romance of Uther’s son Begirt with British and Armoric knights; and all who since, baptized or infidel jousted in Aspramont or Montalban, Damasco, or Marocco, Trebisoned, or whom Biserta sent from Afric shore when Charlemain with all his peerage fell by Fontarabbia. Men fashion unfreedom as a bribe for self-perpetuation. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

In every situation, those present will be obliged to retain some readiness for potential face engagements. (This readiness has already been suggested as one way in which situational presence is expressed.) There are many important reasons why the individual is usually obliged to respond to requests for face engagements. In the first place, one owes this to oneself because often it will be through such communication that one’s own interests can be served, as when a stranger accosts one to tell one that one has dropped something, or that the bridge is out. For similar reasons one owes this accessibility to others present, and to persons not present for whom those present may serve as a relay. (The need for this collective solidarity is heightened in urban living, which brings individuals of great social distance withing range of one another.) Further, as previously suggested, participation in a face engagement can be a sign of social closeness and relatedness; when this opportunity to participate is proffered by another, it ought not to be refused, for to decline such a request is to reject someone who has committed oneself to a sign of desiring contact. More than this, refusal of an offer implies that the refuser rejects the other’s claim to membership in the gathering and the social occasion in which the gathering occurs. It is therefore uncommon for persons to deny these obligations to respond. Although there are good reasons why an individual should keep oneself available for face engagements, there are also good reasons for one to be cautions of this. In allowing another to approach one for talk, the individual may find that one has been inveigled into a position to be attacked and assaulted physically. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

In societies where public safety is not firmly established, especially in places such as the desert, where the traveler is for long periods of time remote from any source of help, the danger that a face engagement may be a prelude to assault becomes appreciable, and extensive avoidance practices or greetings at a distance tend to be employed. Here, of course, the “physical safety” component of civic order and the communication component overlap. However, apart from this extreme, we should see that when an individual opens oneself up to talk with another, one opens oneself up to the pleadings, commands, threats, insult, and false information. The mutual considerateness characteristic of face engagements reinforces these dangers, subjecting the individual to the possibility of having one’s sympathy and tactfulness exploited, and causing one to act against one’s own interests. Further, words can act s a “relationship wedge”; that is, once an individual has extended to another enough consideration to hear one out for a moment, some kind of bone of mutual obligation is established, which the initiator can use in turn as a basis for still further claims; once this new extended bond is granted, grudgingly or willingly, still further claims for social or material indulgence can be made. Hence, in one important example, a man and a woman can start out as strangers and, if conditions are right, progress from an incidental encounter to matrimony. We need only trace back the history of many close relationships between adults to find that something was made of face engagements when it need not have been. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

Of course, persons usually form “suitable” relationships, not allowing casual encounters to be a wedge to something else. However, there is sufficient slippage in systems of conviviality segregation to give mothers concern about their daughters and to provide one of the basic romantic themes of light fiction. There are two opposing tendencies that occur when individuals keep themselves available for face engagements, and there are some dangers when persons open themselves up in so doing. There opposing tendencies are reconciled in society, apparently, by a kind of implicit contraction or gentleman’s agreement that persons sustain given the fact that the other will be under some obligation, often unpleasant, to respond to overtures, potential initiators are under obligation to stay their own desires. A person can thus make oneself available to others in the expectation that they will restrain their calls on one’s available and not make one pay too great a price for one’s being accessible. Their right to initiate contact is checked by their duty to take one’s point of view and initiate contact with one only under circumstances that one will easily see to be justified; in short, they must not “abuse” their privileges. This implicit communication contract (and the consequence of breaking it) receive wide mythological representation, as in our own “cry wolf” tale. Understandably, infractions of the rule against undesired overture do cause some anxiety, for the recipient must either accede to the request or demonstrate to oneself and the others present that one’s availability for face engagements was not part of one’s character but a false pose, to be maintained only when no price was involved in maintaining it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

In noting the implicit contract that makes persons present delicately accessible and inaccessible to each other, we can go on to note a basic margin of appetite and distaste to be found in social situations. The reasons why individuals are obliged to restrain themselves from making encounter overtures provide many of the reasons why they might want to do so. And the obligation to be properly accessible often covers a desire to be selectively quite unavailable. Hence, many public and semipublic places, such as cocktail lounges and club cars, acquire a special tone and temper, a special piquancy, that blurs the communication lines, giving each participant some desire to encroach where perhaps one does not have a right to go, and to keep from being engaged with others who perhaps have a right to engage one. Each individual, then, is not only involved in maintaining the basic communication contract, but is also likely to be involved in hopes, fears, and actions that bend the rules if they do not actually break them. It has been suggested, then, that as a general rule the individual is obliged to make oneself available for encounters even though one may have something to lose by entering them, and that one may well be ambivalent about this arrangement. Here mental patients provide a lesson in reverse, for they can show us the price that is paid for declining to make oneself available and force us to see that there are reasons why someone able to be accessible should be willing to pay the price of remaining inaccessible. A patient who declines to respond to overtures is said to be “out of contact,” and this state is often felt to be full evidence that one is very sick indeed, that one is, in fact, cut off from all contact with the World around one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

In the case of some “organic” patients, this generalization from inaccessibility appears quite valid, as it does with certain “functionals.” There are patients, for example, who, before admission, had progressively withdrawn from responding to such things as the telephone and doorbell, and, once in the hospital, decline all staff overtures for engagement, this being but one instance of a general withdrawal of concern for the life about them. In the case of other patients, however, refusal to enter proffered engagements cannot be taken as a sign of unconcern for the gathering, but rather as a sign of alienation based on active feelings such as fear, hate, and contempt, each of which can be understandable in the circumstances, and each of which can allow the patient to show a nice regard for other situational proprieties. Thus, there are patients who coldly star through direct efforts to bring them into a state of talk, declining all staff overtures, however seductive, teasing, or intensive, who will nonetheless allow themselves face engagements carefully initiated and terminated by themselves without the usual courtesies. Still other patients who are out of contact to most persons on the ward will engage in self-initiated encounters with a small select number of others, by means of coded messages, foreign language, whispering, or the exchange of written statements. Some patients, unwilling to engage in spoken encounters with anyone, will be ready to engage in other types of encounters, such as dancing or card playing. Similarly, I knew a patient who often blankly declined greetings extended one by fellow patients on the grounds, but who could be completely relied upon not to miss a cue when performing the lead in a patient dramatic production. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

As might then be expected, a patient declining to conduct oneself properly in regard to face engagements might be well conducted in regard to unfocused interaction. Many people whose “acting” manners are good have poor “talking” manners. They may be gossipy or they may tell stories that are in poor taste; or say things that hurt people’s feelings, or they may even chatter on so continuously that no one else can get a word in “edgewise.” One illustration was provided by a patient I observed, a young woman of thirty-two, who at one point in her “illness” was ready to handle her dress and deportment with all the structured modesty that is required of her gender, while at the same time her language was foul. During another phase of her illness, this patient, in the company of a friendly nurse, enjoyed shopping trips to the neighbouring town, during which she and her keeper got wry pleasure from the fact that the patient was “passing” as a “normal” person. Had anyone made an opening statement to the patient, however, the masquerade would have been destroyed, for this was a time when the patient was mute in all verbal interaction or, at best, spoke with very great pressure. A touching illustration of the same difference in capacity for focused and unfocused interaction was provided at Central Hospital by patients who were fearful and anxious of their whole setting, but who nonetheless made elaborate efforts to show that they were still what they had been before coming to the hospital and that they were in poised, business-like control of the situation. One middle-aged man walked busily on the grounds with the morning newspaper folded under one arm and a rolled umbrella hooked over the other, wearing an expression of being late for an appointment. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

A young man, having carefully preserved his worn grey flannel suit, bustled similarly from one place he was not going to another. Yet both men stepped out of the path of any approaching staff person, and painfully turned their heads away whenever someone proffered an exchange or greeting of some kind, for both employed the tack of being mute with many of the persons whom they met. The management of a front of middle-class orientation in the situation, in these circumstances, was so precarious and difficult that (for these men) it apparently represented the day’s major undertaking. Just as it is evident that the individual may comply with rules regarding unfocused interaction while failing to comply with regulations regarding focused interaction, so cases can be found of mental patients who dress in a spectacularly improper manner but who are nonetheless ready to be socially tractable as conversationalists. Here are two pieces of evidence in favour of distinguishing conceptually between focused and unfocused interaction. In other cases, of course, it is not fear that seems to account for the inaccessibility of otherwise properly mannered persons, but rather hostility: to acknowledge a staff overture is partly to acknowledge the legitimacy of the staff person making the overture, and if one is a serious worthy person then so much be one’s implied contention that the individual with whom one is initiating contact, namely, oneself, is a mental patent properly confined to a mental ward. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

To strengthen one’s feeling that one is really sane, it may thus seem reasonable to disdain encounters in which the opposite will be assumed—even though this results in exactly the kind of conduct, namely, inaccessibility, that confirms the hospital’s view tht one is mentally ill. As previously suggested, conversational engagements are often carried out as involvements subordinated to some other business at hand, just as side involvements, such as smoking, are often carried out as activities subordinated to a conversational main involvement. The question arises as to the limits placed upon this coexistence in middle-class society. There are, for example, records of middle-class Navy personnel postponing a visit to the “head” until others have left so as not to have to defecate while being accessible to others for talk. I have also been told by a middle-class informant that she was always uneasy about painting her toenails while in the presence of her husband, since the painting involved too much attention to leave her sufficiently respectful of the talk. Do you have much more faith in ideas that you discover for yourself than in ideas that are handed to you on a silver platter? If so, is it not bad judgment to try to ram your opinions down the throats of other people? Is it not wiser to make suggestions—and let the other person thin out the conclusions? People expect others they interact with to be: loyal, honest, initiative, optimistic, display teamwork, and to be enthusiastic most of the day. As long as a person can meet these standards, the people in their circle will be willing to do the same. When an individual consults others about their wishes and desires, that is, in many cases, just the confidence builder they need. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

No one like to feel that one is being sold something or told to do a thing. We much prefer to feel that we re buying of our own accord or acting on our own ideas. We like to be consulted about our wishes, our wants, our thoughts. If instance, if you make paintings that you like and try to sell them to a person, they may not buy them. However, if you find out what kind of paintings a person likes and show the individual those, they may want to buy them. Letting the other person feel that the idea is his or hers not only works in business and politics, it works in life as well. Our mind is a very limited machine. We must think in the easiest way and make allowance for it. It is easier to think of repetition than of the eternal existence of the moment. You must understand that our mind cannot formulate rightly things as they are. We can only make approximate formulations which are nearer to trith than our ordinary thinking. That is all that is possibe. Our mind and our language are very rough instruments and we have to deal with very fine matters and fine problems. All acquired tendencies repeat themselves. One person acquires a tendency to run away from cetain things. One wil run away again. These tendencies may grow stronger or they may grow in a different direction. There is no guarantee until one reaches some kind of conscious action when one has a certain possibility of trusting oneself. There are many things that look impossible but that is because our thinking apparatus is not good enough to think about such things. It simplifies things too much. These problems need mathematical thinking. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

For instance, we cannot think about time as a curve but only as a straight line. If we could think of time as a curve, and understand all that that implied, questions about co-existent lives would not exist. The aim of all our work is to reach the third and fourth states of consciousness, which means to think through high centers. If we could do this, then problems of the future life, absurdities like questions about time, and so on, would not arise. As things are, we can only make theories. We know more or less how to approach these problems, but we can know nothing definite. Often times, we have no experience about the past, but you will notice how literature, history and philosophy people return again and again to the idea of recurrence. They never fully forget it, but it is very difficult to fit into a three-dimensional World. It needs a five-dimensional World, and the question of remembering really refers already to six dimensions. In the fifth-dimension man returns and returns without knowing. Remembering means a certain growth in the six-dimension. Dimensions can be understood simply in this way. The fourth-dimension is the realization of one possibility of each moment; what we call time. The fifth-dimension is repetition of this. The six-dimension is the realization of different possibilities. However, it is difficult to think about this so long as we think about time as a straight line. The problem is not a real thing; it is just our weakness, nothing more. Life is the fourth-dimension, a circle, the realization of one possibility. When this comes to an end it meets its own beginning. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

The moment of death corresponds to the moment of birth, and then life begins again, maybe with slight deviations, but they do not mean anything. It always returns to the same line. Breaking a chief tendency, starting this life in a quite different way will be the sixth-dimension. We cannot think of simultaneous moments, we have to think of one moment following another, though actually they are simultaneous on another scale. For instance, our own experience in relation to small particles such as electrons is that their eternity is our time. So why can our repetition not be in Earth’s time? Once we understand this, we can see further why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that includes straight men for “joking relationships” and talented rivals with whom to content for social honour in games, feats of strength, hunting and warfare. To understand a system that relies on highly interactive elements, whether agents or artifacts, one needs to take into account the possibility of major stresses that could lead to large-scale failures. The possibility of large-scale failures is in especially important problem for the information domain for three reasons. First, information systems have typically undergone very rapid evolution. They often involve both new and technology and new institutional arrangements. Therefore, they have not existed long enough for the development of a good empirical foundation for risk assessment and management. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Second, information systems continually undergo major changes, so that a good empirical foundation for risk assessment and management may never become available. The final reason that the possibility of large-scale failures is important in information systems is that vital economic and military functions are highly on these systems. As we shall see, some types of failure are well understood and relatively easy to design against. Other types of failure are less well understood and more difficult to design against. The simplest type of challenge occurs when failures are strictly independent. For example, if a basement room is lit by four lightbulbs, and one burns out, the others will continue to supply light. The loss of one bulb does not make the others fail any sooner than they otherwise would have. The primary method of risk management for independent failures is to build redundancy into the system. In the case of lightbulbs, enough bulbs are used so that if one (or even two or three) burn out, there will be enough light for activities to continue until the blubs can be replaced. In a more sophisticated manner, redundancy makes possible reliable traffic flows through information networks by channeling traffic around node that fail. In addition to redundancy, a useful design feature to deal with local failures is to avoid having any one element of the system be essential to its overall performance. This is typically achieved by making the system highly decentralized, like the Internet. Indeed, one of the primary advantages of Complex Adaptive Systems over more rigidly centralized organizations is their resilience in the face of local failures. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Design problems become much more difficult when local failures are not independent of each other. The first problem to consider is correlated shocks. These are failures that occur when the elements of the system tend to fail at the same time for the same reason. For example, suppose there are ten radio transmitters, each of which works 99 percent of the time. If the failures were not correlated, at any given time at least one of the transmitters would almost certainly be working. However, if sunspots are the reason the radio transmission fail 1 percent of time, then all ten radio links may well fail at the same time. Typically, the design against correlated failures involves identifying the source of shock that are external to the elements and that might therefore cause failures in several elements at the same time. Sunspots are such a source of shock for the radio transmissions. Once these correlated sources or error are identified, redundancy can often be attained by building new elements of the system that are not susceptible to these particular shocks. For example, landlines are not affected by sunspots. Even when the source of external shocks cannot all be identified, a general principle is that the more diverse the elements, the less the chance that they will all be vulnerable to the same kinds of external shock. Diversity in Complex Adaptive Systems not only allows exploration of new options but also provides resiliency against common shocks. The risk monoculture, which we mentioned in discussing variation, provides a good example of the need to avoid common shocks. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

If vast tracts of agricultural land are planted with the same strain of a crop, then an unusual environmental condition, such as a new pest, can cause devastation. While monoculture may be efficient in the short run because it exploits the very best strain of crop, it tends to be fragile. Likewise, information systems that rely on widespread use of common hardware or software components also risk fragility. They provide vast, fertile targets for viruses and other virtual pests. When it comes to healing body and limb, the ability to herd cells and to perform molecular repairs and cell surgery will open new vistas for medicine. These abilities apply on a small scale, but their effects can be large scale. In many diseases, the body as a whole suffers from misregulation of the signaling molecules that travel through its fluids. Many are rare: Cushing’s disease, Grave’s disease, Paget’s disease, Addison’s disease, Conn’s syndrome, Prader-Labhart-Willi syndrome. Others are common: Millions of older women suffer from osteoporosis, the weakening of bones that can accompany lowered estrogen levels. Diabetes kills frequently enough to rank in the top ten causes of death in the United States of America; the number of individuals known to have it doubles every fifteen years. It is the leading cause of blindness in the United States of America, with other complications including kidney damage, cataracts, and cardiovascular damage. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

Today’s molecular medicine tries to solve these troubles by supplying missing molecules: diabetics inject additional insulin. While helpful, this does not cure the disease or eliminate all symptoms. In an era of molecular surgery, physicians could choose instead to repair the defective organ, so it can regulate its own chemicals again, and to readjust the metabolic properties of other cells in the body to match. This would be a true healing, far better than today’s partial fix. Only now are researchers making progress on another frequent problem of metabolic regulation: obesity. Once this was thought to have one simple cause (consuming excess calories) and one main result (greater roundness than favoured by today’s aesthetics), but both assumptions proved wrong. Obesity is a serious medical problem, increasing the risk of diabetes mellitus, osteoarthritis, degenerative diseases of the heart, arteries, and kidneys, and shortening life expectancy. And the supposed cause, simple overeating, has been shown to be incorrect—something dieters had always suspected, as they watched their thinner colleagues gorge and yet gain no weight. The ability to lay in store of fat was a great benefit to people once upon a time, when food supplies were irregular, nomadism and marauding bands made food storage difficult and risky, and starvation was a common cause of death. Our bodies are still adapted to that World, and regulate fat reserves accordingly. This is why dieting often has perverse effects. The body, when starved, responds by attempting to build up greater reserves of fat at its next opportunity. The main effect of exercise in weight reduction is not to burn up calories, but to signal the body to adapt itself for efficient mobility. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

Obesity therefore seems to be a matter of chemical signals within the body, signals to store fat for famine or to become lean for motion. Nanomedicine will be able to regulate these signals in the bloodstream, and to adjust how individual cells respond to them in the body. The latter would even make possible the elusive “spot reduction program” to reshape the distribution of body fat. Here, as with many potential applications of nanotechnology, the problem may be solved by other means first. Some problems, though, will almost surely require nanomedicine. When it comes to reestablishing credibility, burning bridges behind you may be a good strategy. Armies often achieve commitment by denying themselves an opportunity to retreat. This strategy goes back at least to 1066, when William the Conqueror’s invading army burned its own ships, thus making an unconditional commitment to fight rather than retreat. Cortes followed the same strategy in his conquest of Mexico. Upon his arrival in Cempoalla, Mexico, he gave orders that led to all but one of his ships being burnt or disabled. Although his soldiers were vastly outnumbered, they had no other choice but to fight and win. Had Cortes failed, it might well seem an act of madness. Yet it was the fruit of deliberate calculation. There was no alternative in his mind but to succeed or perish. Destroying the ships gave Cortes two advantages. First, his own soldiers were united, each knowing that they would all fight until the end since desertion (or even retreat) was an impossibility. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

 Second, and more important, is the effect this commitment had on the opposition. They knew that Cortes must either succeed or perish, while they had the option to retreat into the hinterland. They chose to retreat rather than fight such a determined opponent. For this type of commitment to have the proposed effects, it must be understood by the soldiers (yours and the enemy’s), not just by the armchair strategists. Thus it is especially interesting that “the destruction of the fleet [was] accomplished not only with the knowledge, but the approbation of the army, though at the suggestion of Cortes. This ide of burning one’s own ships demonstrates the evolution of strategic thinking over time. The Trojans seemed to get it all backward when the Greeks sailed to Troy to rescue Helen.  (Although the Trojans may have gotten it backward, the Greeks were ahead of the game. Schelling cites the Greek general Xenophon as an early example of this type of strategic thinking. Although Xenophon did not literally burn his bridges behind him, he did write about the advantages of fighting with one’s back against a gully.) The Greeks tried to conquer the city, while the Trojans had succeeded in burning the Greek fleet, they would simply have made the Greeks all the more determined opponents. In fact, the Trojans failed to burn the Greek fleet and saw the Greeks sail home in retreat. Of course the Greek left behind a gift horse, which in retrospect the Trojans were a bit too quick to accept. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

In modern times, this strategy applies to attacks on land as well as by sea. For many years, Edwin Land’s Polaroid corporation purposefully refused to diversity out of the instant photography business. With all its chips in instant photography, it was committed to fight against any intruder in the market. On April 20, 1976, after twenty-eight years of Polaroid monopoly on the instant photography market, Eastman Kodak entered the fray: it announced a new instant film and camera. Polaroid responded aggressively, suing Kodak for patent infringement. Edwin Land, founder and chairman, was prepared to defend his turf: “This is our very soul we are involved with. This is our whole life. For them it is just another field. We will stay in our lot and protect that lot.” Mark Twain explained this philosophy in Pudd’nhead Wilson: “Behold, the fool saith, ‘Put not all thine eggs in one basket’ but the rise man saith, ‘Put all your eggs in one basket and WATCH THAT BASKET.’” The battle ended October 12, 1990. The courts awarded Polaroid a $909.4 million judgment against Kodak. (Polaroid’s stock actually fell in response to this award, as the market was expecting a judgement closer to $1.5 billion.) Kodak was forced to withdraw its instant film and camera from the market. Although Polaroid restored its dominance over the instant photography market, it lost ground to competition to competition from portable videocassette recorders and minilabs that developed and printed conventional film in one hour. Lacking bridges, Polaroid began to feel trapped on a sinking island. With change in philosophy, the company has begun to branch out into video film and even conventional film. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

One need not literally burn bridges, nor ships that bridge oceans. One can burn bridges figuratively by taking political position that will antagonize certain voters. When Walter Mondale said in accepting the 1984 Democratic presidential nomination that he would rise taxes if elected, he was making such a commitment. Voters who believed in supply-side economics were irretrievably lost, and this made Mondale’s position more credible to those who favoured a tax increase in order to reduce the deficit. Unfortunately (for Mondale) the group of voters antagonized by this move turned out to be far too large. Finally, building rather than burning bridges can also serve as a credible source of commitment. In December 1989 reforms in Eastern Europe, building bridges meant knowing down walls. Responding to massive protests and emigration, East Germany’s Prime Minister Egon Krenz wanted to promise reform would be genuine and far-reaching? Even if Krenz was truly in favour of reform, he might fall out of power. Dismantling parts of the Berlin Wall helped the East German government make a credible commitment to reform without having detail all the specifics. By (re)opening a bridge to the West, the government forced itself to reform or risk an exodus. Since it would be possible to leave in the future, the promise of reform was both credible and worthy waiting for. Reunification was to be less than a year away. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

As the super-symbolic economy develops, it is accompanied by population shifts and migrations. Immigration politics—fiercely controversial at any time—will be fought against background marked by atavistic nationalism and ethnicism, not merely in remote places like Armenia and Azerbaijan, or in Albania and Serbia, but in New York and Nagoya, Liverpool and Lyon. In industrial mass societies, racism typically took the form of a majority persecuting a minority. This form of social pathology is still a threat to democracy. White street toughs, skinheads, admirers of the Nazis and even Black, Asian, and Hispanic gangs are on their way to becoming domestic terrorists. However, the new system for creating wealth brings with it economic de-massification and much higher levels of social diversity. Thus, in addition, to traditional conflict between majority and minorities, democratic governments must now cope with open warfare between rival minority groups, as happened in Miami, for example, between Cuban and Haitian immigrants, and elsewhere in the United States of America between African-Americans and Hispanics. In Los Angeles, Mexican-Americans fight for jobs held by Cuban-Americans. In affluent Great Neck, on Long Island, near New York City, tensions rise between American-born Jewish people and Iranian Jewish immigrants who refuse to surrender their old life-ways. African-American rap groups sell anti-Semitic records. Koran shopkeepers and African-Americans collide in their inner cities. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

Under the impact of the new production system, resistance to the “melting pot” is rising everywhere. Instead, racial, ethnic, and religious groups demand the right to be—and to remain—proudly different. Assimilation was the ideal of industrial society, corresponding to its need for a homogenous workforce. Diversity is the new ideal, corresponding to the heterogeneity of the new system of wealth creation. Governments may, in an atmosphere of hostility, have to accommodate certain groups who insist on preserving their cultural identity—everyone from Turks in Germany, or Koreans, Filipinos, and South Sea Islanders in Japan, to North Africans in France. At the same time, governments will also have to mediate among them. This will become progressively harder to do, because the ideal of homogeneity (in Japan, for example), or of the “melting pot” (in the United States of America) is being replaced by that of the “salad bowl”—a dish in which diverse ingredients keep their identity. Los Angeles with its Koreatown, its Vietnamese suburbs, its heavy Chicano population, its roughly seventy-five ethically oriented publications, not to mention its Jewish population, African-Americans, Japanese, Chinese, and its large Iranian population, provides an example of the new diversity. However, the salad-bowl ideal means that governments will need new legal and social tools they now lack, if they are to referee increasingly complex, potentially violent disputes. The potential for antidemocratic extremism and violence rises even as regions, nations, and supra-national forces battle for power. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23


Cresleigh Homes

We’re holding close-out sales in this community, so time is running out! 👍 Don’t miss your opportunity to join us at #CresleighRanch – #MillsStation is an incredible neighborhood to enjoy. 😍


This pic from Residence 3 beautifully showcases the open floor plans and spacious layouts – these homes are an entertainer’s dream!

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One Who Treads Softly Goes Far

For man the emanations of light and heat from the sun were the archetypes of all miraculous power. And then various idols came into the heathen World. Say, Muse, their names then known, who first, who las, roused from the slumber on that fiery cough, at their great emperor’s call, as next in worth came singly where he stood on the bare strand, while the promiscuous crowd stood yet aloof. The chief were those who from the pit of hell  roaming to seek their prey on Earth, durst fix their seats long after next the seat of God, their altars by his altar, gods adored among the nations round, and durst abide God thundering out of Zion, throned between the Cherubim; yea, often placed within his sanctuary itself their shrines, abomination; and with cursed things his holy rites, and solemn feasts profaned, and with their darkness durst affront his light. First Moloch, horrid king besmeared with blood of human sacrifice, and parents’ tears, though for the noise of drums and timbrels loud through for the noise of drums and timbrels loud their children’s cries unheard, that passed through fire to his grim idol. Him the Ammonite worshipped in Rabba and her watery plain, in Argob and in Basan, to the stream of Utmost Arnon. Nor content with such Audacious neighbourhood, the wisest heat of Solomon he led by fraud to build his temple right against the temple of God on that opprobrious hill, and made his grove the pleasant valley of Hinnom, Tophet thence and black Gehenna called, the type of hell. Next Chemos, the obscene dread of Moab’s sons, from Aroer to Nebo, and the wild of southmost Abarim; in Hesebon and Horoanim, Soen’s realm, beyond the flowery dale of Sibma clad with vines, and Eleale to the Asphaltic Pool. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Peor his other name, when he enticed Israel in Sittim on their march from Nile to do him wnton rites, which cost them woe. Yet thence his lustful pleasures of the flesh he enlarged even to that hill of scandal, by the grove of Moloch homicide, lust hard by hate; till good Josiah drove them thence to hell. With these came they, who from the bordering flood of old Euphrates to the brook that parts Egypt from Syrian ground, had general names of Baalim and Ashtaroth, those male, these feminine. For Spirits when they please can either gender assume, or both; so soft and uncompounded is their essence pure, not tied or manacled with joint or limb, nor founded on the brittle strength of bones, like cumbrous flesh; but in what shape they choose dilated or condensed, bright or obscure, can execute their airy purposes, and works of love or enmity fulfill. For those the race of Israel oft forsook their Living Strength, and unfrequented left his righteous altar, bowing lowly down to bestial gods; for which their heads as low bowed down in battle, sunk before the spear of despicable foes. With these in troop came Astoreth, whom the Phoenicians called Astarte, queen of heaven, with crescent horns; to whose bright image nightly by the moon Sidonian virgins paid their vows and songs, in Sion also not unsung, where stood her temple on the offensive mountain, built by that uxorious king, whose heart though large, beguiled by fair idolatresses, fell to idols foul. Once you admit that a man can become one with the sun, it follows that the actions of the one are the actions of the other, that the king himself in his person, will vivify the Earth. Life, prosperity, health—these are the timeless and universal hunger of men. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

When it comes to focused interaction, once a set of participants have avowedly opened themselves up to one another for an engagement, an eye-to-eye ecological huddle tends to be carefully maintained, maximizing the opportunity for participants to monitor one another’s mutual perceivings. The participants turn their minds to the same subject matter and (in the case of talk) their eyes to the same speaker, although of course this single focus of attention can shift within limits from one topic to another from one speaker or target to another. The conversation generally proceeded so that one person talked at a time, and all members in the particular group were attending the same conversation. In this sense, these groups might be said to have a “single focus,” that is, they did not involve a number of conversations proceeding at the same time, as one finds at a cocktail party or in a hotel lobby. The single focus is probably a limiting condition of fundamental importance in the generalizations reported here. To this the caution should be added that the multiple focuses found in places like hotel lobbies would occur simultaneously with unfocused interaction. A shared definition of the situation comes to prevail. This includes agreement concerning perceptual relevancies and irrelevancies, and a “working consensus,” involving a degree of mutual considerateness, sympathy, and a muting of opinion differences. When closeness and sympathy are to be held to a minimum, as when a butler talks to a house guest, or an enlisted man is disciplined by an officer, eye-to-eye communion may be avoided by the subordinate holding his eyes stiffly to the front. An echo of the same factor is to be found even in mediated conversation, where servants are obliged to answer the telephone by saying, “Mrs. Hilton’s residence” instead of “Hello.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Often a group atmosphere develops—what is called ethos. In spite of the auspicious rumours about the Cossacks, perhaps slightly exaggerated, the crowd’s attitude toward the mounted men remains cautious. A horseman sits high above the crowd; his soul is separated from the soul of the demonstrator by the four legs of his beast. A figure at which one must gaze from below always seems more significant, more threatening. The infantry are beside one on the pavement—closer, more accessible. The masses try to get near them, look into their eyes, surround them with their hot breath. A great role is played by women workers in the relations between workers and soldiers. They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: “Put down your bayonets—join us.” The soldiers are excited, ashamed, exchange anxious glances, waver; someone makes up one’s mind first, and the bayonets rise guiltily above the shoulders of the advancing crowd. The barrier is opened, a joyous and grateful “Hurrah!” shakes the air. When a group of young intellectual English men or women are talking and joking together wittily and with a touch of light cynicism, there is established among them for the time being a definite tone of appropriate behaviour. Such specific tones of behaviour are in all cases indicative of an ethos. They are expressions of a standardized system of emotional attitudes. In this case the men have temporarily adopted a definite set of sentiments towards the rest of the World, a definite attitude towards reality, and they will joke about subjects which at another time they would treat with seriousness. If one of the men suddenly intrudes a sincere or realist remark it will be received with no enthusiasm—perhaps with a moment’s silence and a slight feeling that the sincere person has committed a solecism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

On another occasion the same group of persons may adopt a different ethos; they may talk realistically and sincerely. Then if the blunderer makes a flippant joke, it will fall flat and feel like a solecism. A “we-rationale” develops, being a sense of the single thing that we the participants are avowedly doing together at the time. Further, minor ceremonies are likely to be employed to mark the termination of the engagement and the entrance and departure of the engagement and the entrance and departure of particular participants (should the encounter have more than two members). These ceremonies, along with the social control exerted during the encounters to keep the participants “in line,” give a kind of ritual closure to the mutual activity sustained in the encounter. An individual will therefore tend to be brough all the way into an ongoing encounter or kept altogether out of it. One well-established way of confirming and consolidating a leave-taking is for the leave-taker to move away physically from the other or others. In places like Midtown Sacramento this can cause a problem when two persons pause for a moment’s sociability and then find that their directions of movement do not diverge sharply. If the two persons walk at a normal pace, they find themselves attempting to close out the encounter while still having easy physical access to each other. Sometimes one individual offers and excuse to break into a run; sometimes, even if it takes one out of one’s way, one may take a path diverging sharply from that taken by one’s erstwhile coparticipant. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Engagements of the conversational kind appear to have, at least in our society, some spatial conventions. A set of individuals caused to sit more than a few feet apart because of the furniture arrangements will find difficulty in maintaining formal talk; those brought within less than a foot and a half of each other will find difficulty in speaking directly to each other, and may talk at an off angle to compensate for the closeness. It appears that American, when standing face to face, stand about arm’s length from each other. When they stand side by side, the distance demanded is much less. When “middle majority Americans” stand closer than this in a face-to-face position they will either gradually separate or come toward each other and begin to emit signs of irritation. However, if they are put in a situation in which they are not required to interact—say on a street car—they can stand quite close, even to the point of making complete contact. The amount of this territory sees to vary culturally. So, there can be a situation where two or three ethnic groups occupy different territories, that is, varying amounts of personal space. For example, put together a Germany (who occupies about half the area of personal space) and a middle class American keeps drifting around to the side, in order not to be insulting, and the German man tries to move around to get face-to-face relationships. You get an actual dance, which very often turns into what is practically a fight. From all of this it follows that among persons arranged in a discussion circle, persons adjacent to each other may tend not to address remarks to each other, except to pass side comments, since a voice full enough to embrace the circle would be too full or the distance between them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

In brief, then, encounters are organized by means of a special set of acts and gestures comprising communication about communicating. There are messages primarily serving to establish, to prolong, or to discontinue communication, to check whether the channel works (“Hello, do you hear me?”), to attract the attention of the interlocutor or to confirm one’s attention (“Are you listening?” or in Shakespearean diction, “Lend me your ears!”—and on the other end of the wire “Um-hum!). Everyday terms refer to different aspects of encounters. “Cluster,” “knot,” “conversational circle”—all highlight the physical aspects, namely, a set of persons physically close together and facially oriented to one another, their backs toward those who are not participants. “Personal encounter” refers to the unit in terms of the opportunity it provides or enforces for some kind of social intimacy. In the literature, the term “the interaction” is sometimes used to designate either the activity occurring within the cluster at any one moment or the total activity occurring from the moment the cluster forms to the moment at which it officially disbands. And, of course, where spoken messages are exchanged, especially under informal circumstances, the terms “chat,” “a conversation,” or “a talk” are employed. It may be noted that while all participants share equally in the rights and obligations described, there are some rights that may be differentially distributed within an encounter. Thus, in spoken encounters, the right to listen is one shared by all, but the right to be a speaker may be narrowly restricted, as, for example, in stage performances and large public meetings. Similarly, children at the dinner table are sometimes allowed to listen but forbidden to talk; if not forbidden to talk, they may be “helped out” and in this way denied the communication courtesy of being allowed to finish a message for themselves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

It often seems as if people get a sense of their own importance by antagonizing others at the outset. Therefore, in some engagements, one category of participant may be allowed to say only “Yes, sir,” or “No, sir,” or restricted to the limited signalling that a modulation of applause allows.  In talking with people, please do not begin by discussing the things on which you differ. Begin by emphasizing—and keep emphasizing, if possible, tht you are both striving for the same end and that your only difference is one of method and not of purpose. It took me years and cost me countless thousands of dollars in lost business before I finally learned that it does not pay to argue, that it is much more profitable and much more interesting to look at things from the other person’s viewpoint and try to get that person saying ‘yes.’” Do not tell people they are wrong. Try talking to them and see if you can get them into agreement, but do so gently. One who treads softly goes far. Memory is a strange thing. Everyone has one’s own combination of capacities for memory. One person remembers some things more; another remembers other things better. You cannot say that one is better than the other. Memory may disappear; there are many different degrees of it. Something may be forgotten and then brought up again by special methods, or it may disappear altogether. “Why do some people have a greater facility for playing ball games than others?” There are many different kinds of moving center with different kinds of memory. There is not a single human similar to another human. One can do one thing better; another, another thing. There are thousands of impressions so that the combinations are always different. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

I have spoken several times about the different kinds of humans—no. 1, no. 2, no. 3, and so on. One remembers one kind of impression better; another, another kind. “Does a life consist of memories from one moment to another?” No that is too complicated. You know that there are many different sorts of memory. And memory is passive; you do not use it. Life can be said to be a process. “What can one do to increase one’s memory?” If you remember yourself more, your memory will be better. “Until I came into the system I had a very clear memory of something which happened some time ago. Now, if I recall it, it is just a memory of a memory. Is this due to being a little more awake?” It probably connected with strong identification. When you look at it without identification it becomes fainter and may disappear. “Is complete non-identification self-consciousness?” Identification and self-consciousness are two different sides of the same thing. “Is it of practical use to think of the events of one’s past life when trying to self-remember? I mean, with a view to fixing them for any future recurrence.” No, this is not practical. First it is necessary for you to be sure that future recurrence exists. Secondly, it is necessary for you to be sure of remembering yourself. If you put it to yourself as you did in your question, it will turn into imagination, nothing else. However, if you try first of all to remember yourself without adding anything to it, and then—when you can—also to remember about your past life, and try to find cross-roads; then, in combination, they will be very useful. Only do not think that you can do it; you cannot do it yet. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

“What are cross-roads?” Cross-roads are moments when one can “do.” A moment comes when one can help in this work or not. If an opportunity comes and one misses it, another may not come for a year or even longer. There are periods in ordinary conditions when nothing happens, and then there come cross-roads. All life consists of streets and cross-roads. Recurrence can be useful if one begins to remember and if one begins to change and not go by the same circle each time, but do what one wants and what one thinks better. However, if one does not know about recurrence, or even if one knows and does not do anything, then there is no advantage in it at all. Then, it is generally the same things repeated and repeated. “Am I right in supposing that it is man’s essence which recurs?” Quite right. We know very little about recurrence. Some day we may try to collect what can be taken as reliable in all that is said about recurrence, and see how we can think about it. However, it is only theory. Recurrence is in eternity; it is not the same life. This life ends and time ends. There is a theory, and this system admits the theory, that time can be prolonged. I have no evidence. Think how many attempts to find out about time have been made by spiritualists and others. However, there is no evidence. The easiest way of studying recurrence is by studying children. If we had enough material we could answer may questions. Why, for instance, do strange tendencies appear in children, quite opposed to their surrounding circumstances and quite new to the people who surround them? That happens sometimes, in many different ways. And they may be very strong tendencies that change life and go in quite unexpected directions, when there is nothing in heredity to account for them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

As I have often said, the idea of heredity in man does not work. It is a fantastic idea. It works in dogs and horses but not in man. “Does the question of types come into that?” Yes, but we know nothing about types. At least not enough to speak about them. This is why in most cases it happens that parents do not understand their children and the children do not understand their parents. They never could really understand one another sufficiently or rightly, because they are quite different people, strangers to one another, who have just happened to meet accidentally at a certain station and then go in different directions again. The study of recurrence must begin with the study of children’s minds; particularly before they begin to speak. If children could remember this time, they would remember very interesting things. However, unfortunately, when they begin to speak, they become real children and they forget after six months or a year. It is very seldom that people remember what they thought before that, at a very early age. If they could do so, they would remember themselves such as they were when grown up. They were not children at all; then, later they became children. If they could remember their early mentality, it would be the same mentality as grown-up people have That is what is interesting. Our examples have centered largely on movement (and barriers) in spaces, physical and conceptual—with the exception of our short discussion of reading and writing as technologies of interaction across time. A quite different mechanism also exists. We have examined the tendences of many biological and social systems to assume hierarchical (or “pyramidal” or “inverted tree”) shape. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

We have noticed that the upper layers of such systems typically involve processes that span longer time intervals, while the lower levels are more often involved with processes that run relatively quickly. CEOs and board members concern themselves with the question of what markets should be entered in the coming years, while factory floor supervisors concern themselves with the production schedule for the coming week. A brain may take one or two seconds to compose a sentence, but the nerve cells within one of its many cooperating parts, say the left cerebral cortex, discharge in times measured in milliseconds. The debate remains that this hierarchical arrangement of times scales supports effective governance in a system, which is why it is often seen in armies and bureaucracies. The reason that the slower activity at the upper levels establishes a stable context for faster processes running at lower levels. It helps in providing a social service if the definition of who the client is does not change while you are providing it. Likewise, it helps in taking a defended hilltop if the definition of the enemy does not change while you are attacking it. Hierarchies have the property that every element of the system (but the bottom ones) have several subordinates. So whenever a “superordinate” element acts, it establishes a context that allows its subordinates to act in concert. This is tremendously useful in achieving the benefits of coordination. Napoleon had the same idea when he said, “One bad general is better than two good generals.” In this view, this separation of time scales is so advantageous that we should expect evolution to produce it frequently. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

Actions with long time frames should tend to become assigned to positions that govern levels in which actions have shorter time frames. Systems that organize this way will have a competitive advantage, and there should be more of them over time. We stand far back to discern this tendency across a wide range of what we call Complex Adaptive Systems. However, standing close-up to organizational cases shows that the assignment of actions to levels is generally done by the agents within them. If those agents understand the principle, it offers them another opportunity to influence events. One might argue that “in our consumer products business, products now should come and go very rapidly. The CEO should no longer make those decisions for our company. At that level, the concern should be for our long-run reputation with consumers and for the research and development that generates new products. Our reputation should shape our products more than the other way around.” As usual, we do not claim that an argument like this is always right. We do not think that it comes from—and lead to—the right kinds of questions. If you fail to follow through, a straightforward way to make your commitment credible is to agree to a punishment. If your kitchen remodeler gets a large payment upfront, one is tempted to slow down the work. However, a contract that specifies payment linked to the progress of the work and penalty clauses for delay can make it in one’s interest to stick to the schedule. The contract is the commitment device. Actually, it is not quite that simple. Imagine that a dieting man offers to pay $500 to anyone who catches him eating unhealthy food. Every time the man thinks of a dessert, he knows it is just not worth $500. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Do not dismiss this example as incredible; just such a contract was offered by a Mr. Nick Russo—except the amount was $25,000. So, fed up with various weight-loss programs, Mr. Russo decided to take his problem to the public. In addition to going on a 1,000-calorie-a-day diet, he is offering a bounty–$25,000 to the charity of one’s choosing—to anyone who spots him eating in a restaurant. He has peppered local eateries…with “wanted” pictures of himself. However, this contract has a fatal flaw: there is no mechanism to prevent renegotiation. With visions of eclairs dancing in his head, Mr. Russo should argue that under the present contractual agreement, no one will ever get the $25,000 penalty since he never violated the contract. Hence, the contract is worthless. Renegotiation would be in their mutual interest. For example, Mr. Russo might offer to buy a round of drinks in exchange for being released from the contract. The restaurant diners prefer a drink to nothing and let him out of the contract. For the contract approaching to be successful, the party that enforces the action or collects the penalty must have some independent incentive to do so. In the dieting problem, Mr. Russo’s family might also want him to be skinner and thus not be tempted by a mere free drink. The contracting approach is better suited to business dealings. A broken contract typically produces damages, so that the injured party is not willing to give up on the contract for naught. For example, a producer might demand a penalty from a supplier who fails to deliver. The producer is not indifferent about whether the supplier delivers or not. He would rather get his supply than receive the penalty sum. Renegotiating the contract is no longer a mutually attractive option. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

What happens if the supplier tries the dieter’s argument? Suppose he attempts to renegotiate on the grounds that the penalty is so large that the contract will always be honoured and the producer will never receive the penalty. This is just what the producer wants, and hence he is not interested in renegotiation. The contract works because the producers is not solely interested in the penalty; he cares about the actions promised in the contract. It is possible to write contracts with neutral parties as enforcers. A neutral party is someone who does not have any personal interest in whether the contract is upheld. To make personal interest credible, the neutral party must be made to care about whether or not the commitment is kept by creating a reputation effect. In some instances, the contract holder might lose his job if he allows the contract to be rewritten. Another example, in Denver, one rehabilitation center treats wealthy cocaine addicts by having them write a self-incriminating letter which will be made public if they fail random urine analysis. After placing themselves voluntarily in this position, many people will try to buy their way back out of the contract. However, the person who holds the contract will lose his if the contract is rewritten; the center will lose its reputation if it fails to fire employees who allow contract to be rewritten. The moral is that contracts alone cannot overcome the credibility problem. Success requires some additional credibility tool, such as employing parties with independent interests in enforcement or a reputation at stake. In fact, if the reputation effect is strong enough, it may be unnecessary to formalize a contract. This is the sense of a person’s word being his bond. On the other hand, among college professors, there is a saying, “A handshake is good enough between businessmen. However, when your university’s dean promises you something, get it in writing.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

The age of mass democracy was also the age of immense concentrations of power at the level of nation. This concentration reflected the rise of mass-production technology and national markets. Today’s short-run technologies change things. Take a loaf of bread. Baked goods originally came from local bakeries. However, with industrialization, mom-and-pop bakeries were overwhelmed by supermarkets that bought baked goods from giant national companies like Nabisco in the United States of America. Today, surprisingly, many U.S.A. supermarkets, in addition to selling the national brands, have begun to bake on their own premises. We are coming full circle—but on the basis of more sophisticated technology. Photos, once sent to Rochester, New York, to be centrally processed by Kodak, can now be developed and printed on every street corner. Commercial printing, which once required heavy investment and complex machinery, can now be done using small, advanced coping equipment in shops in every neighbourhood. New technologies are thus making local production competitive again. Simultaneously, however, the advanced economy transfers other forms of production to the global level. Cars, computers, and many other products are now no longer made in a single country, but require components and assembly in many nations. These twin changes, one driving production down and the other up, have direct political parallels. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Together they explain why we see pressures for political decentralization in all the high-tech nations, from Japan and the United States of America, across Europe—along with simultaneous attempts to shift power upward to supra-national agencies. The most significant of the latter is the European Community’s drive to re-centralize power at a higher level by creating a single integrated market, along with a single currency and a single central bank. However, even as the EC steamroller attempts to flatten difference and concentrate political and economic decision-making, various regions are taking advantage of its attack on national power from above to launch a parallel attack from below. The single European market offers us a great opportunity to break the centralization of Paris. In fact, the entire Rhone-Alpes region is hooking up with regions outside France—Catalonia, Lombrdy, and Baden Wurttemberg—in pursuit of mutual interests. As the super-symbolic economy spreads, it will create constituencies for radical shifts of power among local, regional, national, and global levels. The “politics of levels” can be expected to split voters into four distinct groupings: “globalists,” “nationalists,” “regionalists,” and “localists.” Each will defend its perceived identity (and its economic interests) with ferocity. Each will seek allies. Each group will attract different financial and industrial supporters, depending on self-interest, but each will also attract talented artists, writers, and intellectuals who will manufacture appropriate ideological rationales for them. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

What is more—contrary to conventional opinion—regions and localities, instead of becoming more uniform, are destined to grow more diverse. If you look at the U.S.A as an entity, you make a serious error. Different parts of the United States of America are as different as night and day. One might not go as far to suggest that the United States of America is on its way to becoming a nation of city-states. However, a close look at statistics for the 1980s already shows widening differences between the two coasts, the Midwest, and the oil patch, and between the big urban centers and the suburbs. Whether measures in housing starts, rates of growth, employment levels, investment, or social conditions, these differences are likely to widen further, rather than narrow, under the impact of a new economy that runs counter to the homogenization of the smokestack era. As regions and localities take on their own cultural, technological, and political character, it will be harder for governments to manage economies with the traditional tools of central bank regulations, taxation, and financial controls. Rising or lowering interest rates or setting a new tax rate will produce radically different consequences in different parts of the same country. And as these disparities widen, they may well trigger an explosion of extremist movements demanding regional or local autonomy or actual secession. The bombs are present, waiting to be detonated in al the advanced economies. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

In every nation some regions already regard themselves as economically cheated by the central authorities. Promises to reduce regional differences have delivered little, as any resident of Glasgow will tell you. (The renewal of secessionists sentiment in America has worried the president enough for him to express private fears about the breakup of the United States of America due to the Southern boarder crises, income and inequality, and weak law enforcement.) Canada hangs together by a thread. Apart from economic inequalities, moreover, there are also long-festering linguistic and ethic cells of secession in places like South Tyrol, Brittany, Alsace, Flanders, Catalonia. A untied Western Europe will have to grant increasing regional and local autonomy—or smash all these movements with a steel fist. In Central Europe, so long as the Hapsburgs ruled, in the 19th and early 20th centuries, hostilities among their German, Italian, Polish, Magyar, Slovak, and Austrian subjects were suppressed (barely) by the central power. Once Hapsburg power disintegrated after World War I, these groups hurled themselves at one another’s throats with a vengeance. The collapse of Soviet power in Central Europe has raised age-old ghosts. Already we see a sharp intensification of the conflict over the Hungarian minority in Romania and the Turks in Bulgaria. Father south, Yugoslavia could break apart as its Serbs, Albanians, Croats, and other nationalities war with one another. And all this ignore the gigantic centrifugal forces that had been threatening to splinter Russia. The smokestack era was the great age of nation-building, which led to central control over small communities, city-states, regions, and provinces. It was this consolidation that made national capitals the centers of enormous state power. The decline of the smokestack era will set loose bone-deep resentments, vast and violent emotional tides, as the locus of power is transferred. In many parts of the World it will multiply extremist groups for whom democracy is a bothersome obstacle, to be destroyed if it stand in the way of their fanatic passions. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

When it comes to working on cells, moving through tissues without leaving a trial of disruption will require devices able to manipulate and direct the motions of cells, and to repair them. Much remains to be learned—and will be easy to learn with nanoscale tools—but today’s knowledge of cells is enough for a start on the problem of how to do surgery on cells. Cell biology is a booming field, even today. Cells can be made to live and grow in laboratory cultures if they are placed in a liquid with suitable nutrients, oxygen, and the rest. Even with today’s crude techniques, much has been learned about how cells respond to different chemicals, to different neighbours, and even to being poked and cut with needles. Conducting a rough sort of surgery on individual cells has been routine for many years in scientific laboratories. Today, researchers can inject new DNA into cells using a tiny needle; small punctures in a cell membrane automatically reseal. However, both these techniques use tools that on a cellular scale are large and clumsy—like doing surgery with an ax or a wrecking ball, instead of a scalpel. Nano-scale tools will enable medical procedures involving delicate surgery on individual cells. Some viral diseases will respond to treatments that destroy viruses in the nose and throat, or in the bloodstream. The flu and common cold are example. Many others would be greatly improved by this, but not eliminated. Al viruses work by injecting their genes into a cell and taking over its molecular machinery, using it to produce more viruses. This is part of what makes viral illnesses so hard to treat—most of the action is performed by the body’s own molecular machines, which cannot be interfered with on a whole basis. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

When the immune system deals with a viral illness, it both attack free virus particles before they enter cells, and attacks infected cells before they can churn out too many more virus particles. Some viruses, though, insert their genes among the genes of the cell, and lay low.  The cell can seem entirely normal to the immune system, for months, or years, until the viral genes are triggered into action and begin the infective process anew. This pattern is responsible for the persistence of viral skin rashes, and for other slow and fast, deadly viruses. These viruses can be eliminated by molecular-level cellular surgery. The required devices could be small enough to fit entirely within the cell, if need be. Calculation imply that molecular sensors, molecular computers, and molecular effectors can be combined into a device small enough to fit easily inside a single cell and powerful enough to repair molecular and structural defects (or to degrade foreign structures such as viruses and bacteria) as rapidly as they accumulate….There is no reason such systems cannot be built and function as designed. Equally well, a cell-surgery device located outside a cell could reach through the membrane with long probes. At the ends of the probes would be tools and sensors along with, perhaps, a small auxiliary computer. These would be able to reach through multiple membranes, unpackage and uncoil DNA, read it, repackage it, and recoil it, “proofreading” the DNA by comparing the sequences in one cell to the sequence of others cells. On reading the genetic sequence spelling out the message of the COVID-19 virus,  molecular-surgery machine could be programmed to respond like an immune machine, destroying the cell. However, it would seem to make more sense simply to cut out the COVID virus genes themselves, and reconnect the ends as they were before infection. By doing this, and killing any viruses found in the cell, the procedure would restore the cell to health. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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There are So Many Degrees of Consciousness

The separation of a completely individualized being is itself complete in a materialistic World. However, love reunites that which is self-centered and individual. It is the fulfilment and triumph of love that is able to reunite the most radically separated beings, namely individual persons. When persons are mutually present and no involved together in conversation or other focused interaction, it is possible for one person to stare openly and fixedly at others, gleaning what one can about them while frankly expressing on one’s face one’s response to what one sees—for example, the “hate stare” that some may give to people of marginalized groups walking past them. It is also possible for one person to treat others as if they were not there at all, as objects not worthy of a glance, let alone close scrutiny. Moreover, it is possible for the individual, by one’s staring or one’s “not seeing,” to alter one’s own appearance hardly at all in consequence of the presence of the others. Here we have “nonperson” treatment; it may be been in our society in the way we sometimes treat children, servants, marginalized groups of people, and those with disabilities. Currently, in our society, this kind of treatment is to be contrasted with the kind generally felt to be more proper in most situations, which will here be called “civil inattention.” What seems to be involved is that one gives to another enough visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is present (and that one admits openly to having seen one), while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention from one as to express that one does not constitute a target of special curiosity or design. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

In performing this courtesy the eyes of the looker may pass over the eyes of the other, but no “recognition” is typically allowed. Where the courtesy is performed between two person passing on the street, civil inattention may take the special form of eyeing the other up to approximately eight feet, during which time sides of the street are apportioned by gesture, and then casting the eyes down as the other passes—a kind of dimming of lights. In any case, we have here what is perhaps the slightest of interpersonal rituals, yet one that constantly regulates the social intercourse of persons in our society. By according civil inattention, the individual implies that one has no reason to suspect the intentions of the others present and no reason to fear the others, be hostile to them, or wish to avoid them. (At the same time, in extending this courtesy one automatically opens oneself up to a like treatment from others present.) This demonstrates that one has nothing to fear or avoid in being seen and being seen seeing, and that one is not ashamed of oneself or of the place of the company in which one finds oneself. It will therefore be necessary for one to have a certain “directness” of eye expression. As one student suggests, the individual’s gaze ought not to be guarded or averted or absent or defensively dramatic, as if “something were going on.” Indeed, the exhibition of such deflected eye expressions may be taken as a symptom of some kind of mental disturbance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Civil inattention is so delicate an adjustment that we may expect constant evasion of the rules regarding it. Dark glasses, for example, allow the wearer to stare at another person without that other being sure that one is being stared at. One person can look at another out of the corner of one’s eyes. The fan and parasol once served as similar assistants in stealing glances, and in polite Western society the decline in the use of these instruments in the last one hundred years has lessened the elasticity of communication arrangements. It should be added, too, that the closer the onlookers are to the individual who interests them, the more exposed one’s position (and theirs), and the more obligation they will feel to ensure one civil inattention. The further they are from one, the more license they will feel to stare at one a little. In addition to these evasions of rules we also may expect frequent infractions of them. Here, of course, social class subculture and ethnic subculture introduce differences in patterns, and differences, too, in the age at which patterns are first employed. The morale of a group in regard to this minimal courtesy of civil inattention—a courtesy that tends to treat those present merely as participants in the gathering and not in terms of the other social characteristics—is tested whenever someone of very divergent social status or very divergent physical appearance is present. English middle-class society, for example, prides itself in giving famous and infamous persons the privilege of being civilly disattended in public, as when the Royal children manage to walk through a park with few persons turning around to stare. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

And in our own American society, currently, we know that one of the great trials of the physically disabled is that in public places they will be openly stared at, thereby having their privacy invaded, while at the same time, the invasion exposes their undesirable attributes. The act of staring is a thing which one does not ordinarily do to another human being; it seems to put the object stared at in a class apart. One does not talk to a monkey in a zoo, or to a performer in a sideshow—one only stares. An injury, as characteristic and inseparable part of the body, may be felt to be a personal matter which the man would like to keep private. However, the fact of its visibility makes it known to anyone whom the injured human meets, including the stranger. A visible injury differs from most other personal matters in that anyone can stare at the injury or ask questions about it, and in both cases communicate to and impose upon the injured person one’s feelings and evaluations. Once’s action is then felt as an intrusion into privacy. It is the visibility of the injury which makes intrusion into privacy so easy. The people are likely to feel that they have to meet again and again people who will question and stare, and to feel powerless because they cannot change the general state of affairs. Perhaps the clearest illustration both of civil inattention and of the infraction of this ruling occurs when a person takes advantage of another’s not looking to one, and then finds that the object of one’s gaze has suddenly turned and caught the illicit looker looking. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

The individual caught out may then shift one’s gaze, often with embarrassment and a little shame, or one may carefully act as if one had merely been seen in the moment of observation that is permissible; in either case we see evidence of the propriety that should have been maintained. To behave properly and to have the right to civil inattention are related: propriety on the individual’s part tends to ensure one’s being accorded civil inattention; extreme impropriety on one’s part is likely to result in one’s being stared at or studiously not seen. Improper conduct, however, does not automatically release others from the obligation of extending civil inattention to the offender, although it often weakens it. In any case, civil inattention may be extended in the face of offensive simply as an act of tactfulness, to keep an orderly appearance in the situation in spite of what is happening. Ordinarily, in middle-class society, failure to extend civil inattention to others is not negatively sanctioned in a direct and open fashion, except in the social training of servants and children, the latter especially in connection with according civil inattention to the physically disabled and deformed. For examples of such direct sanctions among adults one must turn to despotic societies where glancing at the emperor or one’s agents may be a punishable offense, or to the rather refined rules prevailing in some of our Southern states concerning how much of a look certain men can give to a particular woman, over how much distance, before it is interpreted as punishable advance in pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Given the pain of being stared at, it is understandable that staring itself is widely used as a means of negative sanctions, socially controlling all kinds of improper public conduct. Indeed it often constitutes the first warning an individual receives that one is “out of line” and the last warning that it is necessary to give one. In fact, in the case of those whose appearance tests to the limit the capacity of a gathering to proffer civil inattention, staring itself may become a sanction against staring. The autobiography of an ex-dwarf provides an illustration: “There were the thick-skinned ones, who stared like hill people come down to see a traveling show. There were the paper-peekers, the furtive kind who would withdraw blushing if you caught them at it. There were the pitying ones, whose tongue clickings could almost be heard after they had passed you. However, even worse, there were the chatters, whose every remark might as well have been “How do you do, poor boy?” They said it with their eyes and their manners and their tone of voice. I had a standard defense—a cold stare. Thus anesthetized against my fellow man, I could contend with the basic problem—getting in and out of the subway alive.” In order to understand more clearly what I am going to say, you must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I said that we can become more conscious, or that a human can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking one if one is conscious or not, I used the words “conscious” and “consciousness” in relative sense. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means more “conscious” in relation to a lower degree. However, although we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, as we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. By giving our thoughts a direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness. Now try to formulate what you noticed when you tried to observe yourself. You should have noticed three things. First, that you do not remember yourself, that is to say, you are not aware of yourself at the time when you try to observe yourself. Secondly, that observation is made difficult by the incessant stream of thoughts, images, echoes of conversation, fragments of emotions flowing through your mind and very often distracting your attention from observation. And thirdly, that as soon as you start self-observation—if you really tried it—is a constant struggle with imagination. Now this is the chief point in work upon oneself. If one realized that all the difficulties in the work depend on the fact that one cannot remember oneself, one already knows what one must do. One must try to remember oneself. In order to do this one must struggle with mechanical thoughts and one must struggle with imagination. If one does this conscientiously and persistently one will see results in a comparatively short time. However, one must not think that it is easy or that one can master this practice immediately. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

Self-remembering, as it is called, is a very difficult thing to learn to practice. It must not be based on expectation of results, otherwise one becomes lost in thinking about one’s efforts. It must be based on the realization of the fact that we do not remember ourselves if we try sufficiently hard and in the right way. We cannot become conscious at will, at the moment when we want to, because we have no command over states of consciousness. However, we can remember ourselves for a short time at will because we have a certain command over our thoughts. And if we start remembering ourselves by the special construction of our thoughts, that is, by the realization that we do not remember ourselves; that no one remembers oneself, and by the realizing what this means, this realization will bring us to consciousness. You must understand that we have found the weak spot in the wall of our mechanicalness. This is the knowledge that we do not remember ourselves and the realization that we can try to remember ourselves. With the understanding of the necessity for actual change in ourselves, the possibility of work begins. The practice of self-remembering, connected with self-observation and with the struggle against imagination, has not only a psychological meaning, but it also changes the subtlest part of our metabolism and produced definite chemical, or perhaps it is better to say alchemical, effects in our body. So from psychology we come to alchemy; to the idea of the transformation of coarse elements into finer ones. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Heavenly Father knew we would all make mistakes in this mortal life. So, He loves us and forgives us so we can learn from our mistakes and realize they are opportunities to grow. Mistakes are a fact of life. Learning to skillfully play the piano is essentially impossible without making thousands of mistakes. Success is not the absence of failure, but going from failure to failure to failure without any loss of enthusiasm. Think about a time when you made a mistake or failed at something. Were you sad? Did you want to give up? What did you do? Often times, if you are wrong, it is best to admit it. People, being human, sometimes want a sense of being important; so when one apologizes for making a mistake, it allows them to nourish their self-esteem, and that may take them to the magnanimous attitude of showing mercy. There is a certain degree of satisfaction in having the courage to admit one’s errors, and it will keep you from becoming a liar and making even larger errors. Admitting a mistake not only clears the air of guilt and defensiveness, but often helps solve the problem created by error. Any fool can try to defend one’s mistakes—and most fools do—but it raises one above the herd and gives one a feeling of nobility and exultation to admit one’s mistakes. None of us are perfect. We make mistakes. What comes next can mean the difference between success and endless spinning our wheels. It is easy to say you are sorry or to make amends when you accidentally bump into somebody or misinterpret something that someone said. However, what about the big mistakes? #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

 Some larger companies can make mistakes that have significant consequences—like contaminating their air we breathe, making thousands of faulty pieces of furniture, or accidently renting apartments with electrical appliances that leak water on the floor. These errors are extremely difficult to put right and can harm others if company leaders do not take responsibility. These leaders face a moral dilemma: Do they alert customers and fix the issues, dealing with the extra costs and embarrassment, or do they do nothing, hoping to avoid any negative affect to their profits? The answer should always be to do what is best for customers. The same is true in small business. We should always take the initiative to recall any piece of our work that is not up to standard. Therefore, set core values early. Core values are values you believe in and try to live by: honesty, trustworthiness, fairness. You do not want to get caught questioning what you believe in when you are in the middle of a crisis. Set your values. Write them down. Believe them. Trust that if you follow them, your business will thrive. Who you are is what your company will stand for. Do not be afraid to repent. You may want to do this in the spiritual sense and a physical sense. The original meaning of repent is “to change.” So when you have made a mistake with a customer, take responsibility, make it right, and figure out how to change your process so you do not do it again. Make the customer happy and save yourself a lot of future headaches. Listen even when you are not wrong. It takes a lot of patience to hear out complaints. Rather than starting the blame game, listen carefully and take notes. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Establish an environment where employees trust you enough to voice their concerns. Then patiently review responsibilities with them so that everyone understands what one is accountable for. Remember, it is the people you should care about most. Big mistakes lead to big solutions. Many products are safer today because companies took responsibility for early mistakes in design or production and made changes. These changes sometimes came at great cost in the short run, but the investment paid off in the long run. Remember, God wants us to improve and grow. Sometimes it is painful to accept responsibility and make things right, but it does pay off spiritually as well as temporally. When we are right, let us try to win people gently and tactfully to our way of thinking, and when we are wrong—and that will be surprisingly often, if we are honest with ourselves—let us admit our mistakes quickly and with enthusiasm. Not only will that technique produce astonishing results; but, believe it or not, it is a lot more fun, under the circumstances, than trying to defend oneself. By fighting you never get enough, but by yielding you get more than you expected. Signals are usually associated with locations rather than agents. Restaurants are crowded. Neighbourhoods are well kept. Jobs have pay scales. This is an important contrast with agent following. If you make friends with someone who is a good musician, you may meet people who visit the restaurants musicians like. However, your friend may choose places on a completely different basis, unrelated to a signal such as whether they are popular and busy. If you like jazz, you may meet jazz lovers who go to restaurants where it is played. You are less likely to meet people who like whatever restaurant is currently in vogue. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Following a signal relies implicitly—and sometimes even explicitly—on a belief that the signal goes together with consequences an agent will prefer. Some of those consequences are directed—lower noise, to return to the example of choosing apartments. However, usually there are indirect consequences as well, among those are interactions with others who follow the same signal. In a building with quiet apartments you may have neighbours who prize quiet. At the tops of treacherous mountains, you meet people who are devoted to mountain climbing. Signal following leads to locations that attract others who follow the same or related signals. Agents following leads to others an agent interacts with, through whatever mechanism. The former leads to interaction associated with the signal, the latter to interactions associated with the leading agent. Often agents themselves have a property that can serve as a signal to other agents. Amazingly enough, even if such a property is assigned to the agents completely arbitrarily, it can still serve to help the agents organize their interaction patterns and thereby achieve greater success. We call such a property a tag—an initially arbitrary property of an agent (say, a number between 0 and 1) that is detectable by other agents and that can be copied by other agents. Examples of tags might include accents and styles of clothing. Tags work by allowing agents to interact with others having desirable tags—in many cases this will be their own. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

When agents with mutually desirable tags interact a lot, they create a neighbourhood. Even if those in a neighbourhood initially have nothing in common but their tags, the fact that they interact with each other more than with others can make a big difference. The interesting thing is that tags allow compatibility of rules to be created from within the population itself. The key is that imitation of the tags of successful others helps neighbourhoods to form, focusing the interaction patterns of an agent among those with similar tags, making the tag a meaningful basis for selective cooperation. Unfortunately, agents can make errors in copying strategies, and so over time rules accumulated in a cooperative neighbourhood may be misunderstood and improperly implemented. Arbitrary tags will not always allow for populations to form cooperative neighbourhoods. Nor are all such neighbourhood destined to break down over time. However, these dynamics do occur. Rates of copying errors can prevent cooperation from emerging by being either too high or too low. This illustrates a characteristic virtue, as well as a difficulty, of simulating a Complex Adaptive System. While the results do not tell us what will always happen, they do show us one way that complexity can sometimes be harnessed to help a population break out of mutually reinforcing selfishness. There is also a weakness in tags as a method of harnessing complexity: they are not able to maintain “policing” of the cooperative neighbourhoods they create. The success of this tag space method of harnessing complexity depends on mutual support among the rules of the agents. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

A similar dynamic can occur in other cases. In the infancy of a social movement, for example, each new supporter who is gained increases the value of the movement for existing supporters and increases the attractiveness of the movement to those who might subsequently join. However, if some rules are exploited, things will not remain simple. Then a signal can be followed to build a concentration of one kind of rule, but it may subsequently serve as a guide to agents who would prey upon that concentration. Senior citizens may name an Internet newsgroup for discussing their common interest in travel. However, later, when they have built up its membership, unscrupulous fraud artists can use the list to sell worthless vacation bargains. Beyond the work on tags that we have described, there are many other dynamics of neighbourhoods based on signals. For example, cases occur among fashion leaders and fashion imitators in many fields such as clothing, music, hairstyles, and advertising techniques. In this interesting form of signal following, the logic is that some agents want to be among the distinctive few. Eventually, however, the fashion leaders attract others who want to be like them. This imitation reduces their distinctiveness. Finally, the fashion leaders must move on to new bases of distinction, only to be followed again. Signal following may have advantages and disadvantages. On the beneficial side of the ledger, the followed signal itself sets a context for interpreting what happens. If you worked to obtain a promotion and now you are enjoying your new colleagues, the improved job status may seem a likely cause. A weakness of signal following is that the signal may be a bad predictor of the quality of the interactions that follow. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

The residents of a more expensive neighbourhood may prefer privacy or travel heavily and so they do not interact with you. The signal may not be casually associated with the interactions experienced, as when your child goes to a better school but has a bad year because of a teacher’s undiagnosed health problems. Since you do not know the true cause, you might conclude that the problem stemmed from some distinctive feature of the school you that was “better,” such as its (oversized?) new building or its students with (overly?) ambitious parents. The two mechanisms of following an agent and following a signal do not exhaust the possibilities for changing interaction patterns by moving through space. They are, nevertheless, the most important causes. Making your strategic moves credible is not easy. However, it is not impossible, either. When we first raised this issue, we said that to make a strategic move credible, you must take a supporting or collateral action. We called such an action commitment. We now offer eight devices for achieving credible commitments. This is called the “eightfold path” to credibility. Depending on the circumstances, one or more of these tactics may prove effective for you. Behind this system are three underlying principles. The first principle is to change the payoffs of the game. The idea is to make in in your interest to follow through on your commitment: turn a threat into a warning, a promise into an assurance. This can be done through a variety of ways. First, establish and use a reputation, and write contracts. Both these tactics make it more costly to break the commitment than to keep it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

A second avenue is to change the game to limit your ability to back out of a commitment. In this category, we consider three possibilities. Them most radical is simply to deny yourself any opportunity to back down, either by cutting yourself off from the situation or by destroying any avenues of retreat. There is even the possibility of removing yourself from the decision-making position and leaving the outcome to chance. Cut off communication. Burn the brides behind you. Leave the outcome to change. These two principles can be combined: both the possible actions and their outcomes can be changed. If a large commitment is broken down into many smaller ones, then the gain from breaking a little one may be more than offset by the loss of the remaining contract. Thus we have: Move in small steps. A third route is to use others to help you maintain commitment. A team may achieve credibility more easily than an individual. Or you may simply hire others to act in your behalf. Develop credibility through teamwork. Employ mandated negotiating agents. If you try a strategic move in a game and then back off, you may lose your reputation for credibility. In a once-in-a-lifetime situation, reputation may be unimportant and therefore of little commitment value. However, you typically play several games with different rivals at the same time, or the same rivals at different times. Then you have an incentive to establish a reputation, and this serves as a commitment that makes your strategic moves credible. During the Berlin crisis in 1961, President John F. Kennedy explained the importance of the U.S.A. reputation: If we do not meet our commitments to Berlin, where will we later stand? If we are not true to our word there, al that we have achieved in collective security, which relies on these words, will mean nothing. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Another example is Israel’s standing policy not to negotiate with terrorists. This is a threat intended to deter terrorists from taking hostages to barter for ransom or release of prisoners. If the no-negotiation threat is credible, terrorists will come to recognize the futility of their actions. In the meantime, Israel’s resolve will be tested. Each time the threat must be carried out, Israel suffers; a refusal to compromise may sacrifice Israeli hostages’ lives. Each confrontation with terrorists puts Israel’s reputation and credibility on the line. Giving in means more than just meeting the current demands; it makes future terrorism more attractive. (Even the Israelis have lost some of their reputation for toughness. Their willingness to swap 3,000 Arab prisoners for 3 of their air force pilots suggests that exceptions will sometimes be made.) More discussion on the path to credibility will be discussed in the future. In Bluefield, West Virginia USA, on November 9, 1989, a school teacher wept. All across the World, millions shared her moment of joy. Glued to their television screens, they saw the Berlin Wall brought down. For an entire generation, East Germany had been imprisoned, maimed, or shot for trying to get past that twenty-eight-mile wall. Now they were pouring through it into West Germany, eyes gleaming, faces registering everything from exhilaration to culture shock. Soon the hammers went to work. And today remnants of the wall that once bisected Berlin, and indeed all of Germany, are souvenirs of stone and cement gathering dust on countless mantelpieces. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Because it concretized, one might say, the end of the Soviet-imposed totalitarianism throughout Central and Eastern Europe, the downfall of the wall drew an elated response in the West. Shortsighted intellectuals and politicians joined in an ode to joy that would have done Beethoven proud. With Marxism on the ropes, they chorused, the future of democracy was now assured. We had reached the very end of ideology itself. Today Easter Europe seethes with instability. Poland faces total economic breakdown. Romanian crows clash in the streets. And Yugoslavia’s president warns that “extreme right parties” and “revanchist forces” could ignite “civil war and the possibility of foreign armed intervention like we are seeing in Ukraine.” Anti-Semitism and ancient ethnic hatred run rampant. Post-war borders are called into question. The collapse of Soviet power over Eastern Europe, far from assuring democracy, has opened a combustive vacuum into which fools and firebrands seem ready to rush. Western Europe’s drive toward integration has been thrown into confusion. Looming over this vast continental spectacle are threats of a Soviet split-up that could easily trigger a generation of wars, raising anew nuclear dangers that were supposed to have been relaxed. Ironically, even as millions who have never had it grope for freedom, the established democracies in North America, Western Europe, and Japan themselves face an expected internal crisis. Democracy is entering its decisive decades. For we are t the end of the age of mass democracy—and that is the only kind that the industrial World has ever known. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

As we consider the human body, in most parts of the body, the finest blood vessels, capillaries, pass within a few cell diameters of every point. Certain white blood cells can leave these vessels to move among the neighbouring cells. Immune machines and similar devices, being even smaller, could do likewise. In some tissues, this will be easy, in some harder, but with careful design and testing, essentially any point of the body should become accessible for healing repairs. Merely fighting organisms in the bloodstream would be a major advance, cutting their numbers and inhibiting their spread. Roving medical nanomachines, though, will be able to hunt down invaders throughout the body and eliminate them entirely. Caners are a prime example. The immune system recognized and eliminates most potential cancers, but some get by. Physicians can recognize cancer cells by their appearance and by molecular markers, but they cannot always remove them through surgery, and often cannot find a selective poison. Immune machines, however, will have no difficulty identifying cancer cells, and will ultimately be able to track them down and destroy them wherever they may be growing. Destroying every cancer cell will cure the cancer. Bacteria, protozoa, worms, and other parasites have even more obvious molecular markers. Once identified, they could be destroyed, ridding the body of the disease they cause. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Immune machines thus could deal with tuberculosis, strep throat, leprosy, malaria, amoebic dysentery, sleeping sickness, river blindness, hookworm, flukes, candida, valley fever, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, and even athlete’s foot. All are caused by invading cells or larger organisms (such as worms). Health officials estimate that parasitic diseases, common in the Third World, affect more than one billion people. For many of these diseases, no satisfactory drug treatment exists. All can eventually be eliminated as threats to human health by sufficiently advanced form of nanomedicine. Destroying invaders will be helpful, but injuries and structural problems pose other problems. Truly advanced medicine will be able to build up and restructure tissues. Here, medical nanodevices can stimulate and guide the body’s own construction and repair mechanisms to restore healthy tissue. What is healthy tissue? It consists of normal cells in normal patterns in a normal matrix all organized in a normal relationship to the surrounding tissues. Surgeons today (with their huge, crude tools) can fix some problems at the tissue level. A wound disrupts the healthy relationship between two different pieces of tissue, and surgical glues and sutures can partly remedy this problem by holding the tissues in a position that promotes healing. Likewise, coronary-artery bypass surgery brings about a more healthy overall configuration of tissues—one that provides working plumbing to supply blood to the heart muscle. Surgeons cut and stitch, but then they must reply on the tissue to heal it wounds as best it can. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

With enough knowledge of how these processes work (and nanoinstruments can help gather that knowledge) and with good enough software to guide the process—a more difficult challenge—medical nanomachines will be able to guide this healing process. The problem here is to guide the motion and behavior of the mob of active, living cells—a process that can be termed cell herding. Cells respond to a host of signals from their environment: to chemicals in the surrounding fluids, to signal molecules on neighbouring cells, and to mechanical forces applied to them. Cell-herding devices would use these signals to spur cell division where it is needed and to discourage it where it is not. They would nudge cells to encourage them to migrate in appropriate directions, or would simply pick them up, move them along, and deliver them where needed, encouraging them to nestle into a proper relationship with their neighbours. Finally, they would stimulate cells to surround themselves with the proper intercellular-matrix materials. Or—like the owner of a small dog who, on a cold day, wraps the beast in a wool jacket—they would directly build the proper surrounding structures for the cells in its new location. In this way, cooperating terms of cell-herding devices could guide the healing or restructuring of tissues, ensuring that their cells form healthy patterns and a healthy matrix and that those tissues have a healthy relationship to their surroundings. Where necessary, cells could even be adjusted internally, as we will discuss later. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21


Cresleigh Homes

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The well-equipped kitchen is highlighted by a large center island with breakfast bar, plenty of counter and cabinet space, and sizable walk-in pantry. 

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The Mystery Has Never Been Solved!

Much of the ceremonial rituals that took place in The Winchester Mansion goes back to the Knights Templar. The Order of the Knights Templar can be traced in part to the Templars. And yet, the Knights Templar are also the claimed ancestors of satanists, a fact which is decidedly hard to prove, though within an organization so large there may well have been diverse groups who followed their own calling. The knights, largely from France and England, joined the order over a period of many years. They had a system of leadership with a Grand Master, knights, chaplains, sergeants, craftsmen, seneschals and commanders. The order had its own clergy and its meetings were held in the strictest secrecy. Unmarried knights wore a white mantle with a red cross while others wore a black mantle with a red cross. Membership was mostly male, and established orders in virtually every Latin country, drawing people from all over Europe. It also became a great trading agency and though originally the Roman Catholic Church actually supported a number of secret societies who were Christian-based, the power of the Templars began to wield became the fear of successive popes and of European noblemen. Philip IV of France began a series of attacks against the Knights Templar and his campaign was given official blessing by the election of Pope Clement V (1305-1314) who renounced the Templars as immoral heretics. Many people know that Mrs. Sarah L. Winchester had a Famous Blue Séance Room where she carried on her rituals and had a series of colourful robes she wore. However, the mystery has never been solved as to why she built the strangest mansion in the World? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Stories were already circulating that Mrs. Winchester, behind the closely guarded doors of her mansion, indulged in the most offensively blasphemous rituals said to be directed totally towards the reversal of Christianity itself. She was said to worship a goat-like idol, the Baphomet, anointing it with the fat of pigs, while the Knights used the fat of murdered children, roasting children and eating them, laying women across their altars for the most violent forms of indecencies to satisfy their lust for life-blood; they were said to have indulged in homosexual rites and other various claims alleged they stamped the Holy Cross under foot, spat and urinated upon it and used the Mass as the basis for their own worship—later to be known universally as the Black Mass. Actual proof of these events is largely contained in the confessions received under torture which followed the arrest of Mrs. Winchester’s butler Albert Pike. He and 140 of his brethren were imprisoned in Santa Clara Valley, tortured and then executed en masse. Algernon Blackwood, under extreme torture, confessed to speaking against Christianity but denied depravity. In 1890, he was brough out on to the nine-story tower of The Winchester Mansion and ordered to repeat his confession in front of the villagers and accept a sentence of life imprisonment. On the balcony of the tower, he burst into a rage of anger and protested innocence of all charges and thus signed his own death warrant. The order was given that he should be taken into the fruit orchard and burned at the stake. As the flames licked his body, he summoned Mrs. Winchester and, in his dying, breathe to meet him at the Bar of Heaven. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Diocesan priest, Father Peter Yorke, who was then editor of the Archiocesan newspaper, The Monitor, emerged sending orders to every village where the Templars operated, instructing that they should be arrested and charges of heresy and sorcery brought against them. He published a series of exposes, and hundreds of knights were brought to trail, tortured, and executed. The vast wealth of the Templars working at The Winchester Mansion were accused of devil worship. What remained to be handed down and revived, especially in the twenty-first century, were the rumors of ritual and dastardly happenings which many of today’s extremist followers of the Knights Templar seem prepared to believe and accept with some enthusiasm. One of the more important traditions handed down by Mrs. Winchester concerns an instruction for future secret societies. On the day the Knights planned to burn to death Father Yorke, a pact was made and communicated to all surviving Knights who had now gone to ground. The instruction was clear—that the Order of the Knight Templar should be continued in perpetuity. It is said that the surviving Templars should thereafter fight for the destruction of the papacy and prevent Mrs. Winchester from being stripped of her wealth and murdered. These orders, it was said, were handed on to descendants of the order and the Winchester family, who at various points in history have included satanists and a diverse calling of occultists. What remained of the Winchester family and the Knights went into the deepest secrecy, surfacing occasionally and surrounded constantly by rumour, but little discernible fact. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

The Illuminati came to fortify The Winchester Mansion, which had reached seven-stories high, with 600 rooms, after the 1906 Earthquake. While it was true that Mrs. Winchester left her mansion, there are more reasons as to the why. The avowed spiritualist, Mrs. Winchester, had constructed a boathouse and erected a huge mountain of Earth upon which a new mansion she had planned to build would be erected. It was to overlook the bay, an immense seawall and costly cannel system, with proper floodgates, through which the Winchester private fleet of launches and yachts were to wend their way. It was said that Mrs. Winchester was being haunted by vicious spirits and that death would be her penalty for leaving her home. Her existence was mythical because only half a dozen people had seen her. A sheriff had been striving for the past three months to serve upon her a summons to appear in court in proceedings that a real estate dealer had brought upon her. Bloodhounds roamed the grounds of the mansion and polite Asian staff answered telephone calls. Mrs. Winchester was always alone save for a bodyguard. She was wealth as few women were and found her pleasure in superintending a half dozen workmen, who for seven years had gone from wing to wing of the mansion, constructing one month what they were called to destroy on the following month. Her mansion was considered the pride of the county and the basis for mysterious legends. The Illuminati came were concerned about a group of subversives who were discovered to be using occult practices and rituals to attack Mrs. Winchester and her mansion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

E.W. McClellan of Burlingame, the contractor of 98 acres of land purchased by Mrs. Winchester, was holding it and refused to give it up because he believed she was the lead of a secret society working to “establish Satan’s kingdom on Earth,” an accusation which was a direct throw-back to the age of the Knights Templar; and that dictum still exists today. The Psychosophical Society stated that The Winchester Mansion had existed since the sixteenth century and comprised the World League of Illuminati. They wanted to prevent Mrs. Winchester from passing on her palatial estates in all their purity to the next generation. The hotbed of intrigue, rumour and gossip directed at The Winchester Mansion supposedly involved the death/assassination of some, the suicide/murder of others over the scandals invariably linked to Propaganda 2 (P2) Lodge and various Intelligence agencies like the KGB and the CIA with a scandal which is too immense to expound here, nor is it suitably for this part of the report. What can be said, however, is that occult groups working within the traditions of the Illuminati represent a definite consideration of these events. Mrs. Winchester’s husband, William Wirt Winchester, was a master of mathematics and the possessor of certain secret occult knowledge. He gathered seven disciples around him and went into the World of the brotherhood to perform good works. Staff have described that 120 years after his death, his perfectly preserved corpse was found in one of the many buildings of The Winchester Mansion. Because of the secrecy and the mystery that surround The Winchester Mansion, thousand want to know more and are desperate to visit it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Sometimes the hysteria surrounding The Winchester Mansion morphed into such hysterical proportions that the authorities have had to shut the mansion down for a day or ban people from entering, even though many do not believe that it actually exists. Fans of The Winchester Mansion have sprouted up all over the World. Some people still regard the story of The Winchester Mansion as a fable, but most know it does actually exist and possesses esoteric knowledge of mystery and mysticism. Some the people who were involved in the construction of The Winchester Mansion were magicians, writers, statesmen and novelist. This mansion has quit a following and has collected members through the ages, in positions of far greater power and influence than the Illuminati. Legend has it that descendants from the founding fathers of the Middle Ages are on the board of trustees. The official secret society in control of the estate have connections throughout Europe and the United States of America, whose membership is an indication of the current revival in the mystery religions and semi-secret societies. The mansion alone boasts of some 60,000 members and operates from its headquarters in San Jose, California with affiliated lodges in Britain, France, Germany, Australia and South Africa. The caretakers are preserving the traditional beliefs of the 19th century. A cipher manuscript was found in one of the libraries of The Winchester Mansion. The author of the manuscript was not identified but it was obviously someone with a very intense knowledge of the supernatural, alchemy, astrology and the magical theories of Eliphas Levi. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Mrs. Winchester’s mansion and gardens reflect her colourful and ornate rituals and its purpose was “to obtain control of the nature and power of my own being.” The might wings of the mansion outspread dove-like sitting brooding on the vast abyss. What is dark in Mrs. Winchester is to be illumined, what is lose raised and supported; the nine-story tower was constructed so that Heaven could hide nothing from Mrs. Winchester’s view, nor the deep tract of hell. Hell said to be a hideous flaming ruin and combustion in a bottomless perdition, there where Satan dwells in adamantine chains and penal fire. Nine times the space that measures day and night to mortal men, Satan and his horrid crew lay vanquished, rolling in the fiery gulf, confounded though immortal: but his doom reserved him to more wrath; for now the thought both of lost happiness and lasting pain torments him; round he throws his baleful eyes that witnessed huge affliction and dismay mixed with obdurate pride and steadfast hate: at once as far as angels ken he views the dismal situation waste and wild, a dungeon of horrible. Many leaders of the Church do not preach about Hell anymore because the Church has become a tax-free business and they do not want to hear about where they may go, nor do they want to scare their dirty money away from the Church. As a result of the loss of real churches who teach about Satan and demons, people are all wild and out of control and no longer fear anything and go around sinning like rain in Seattle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

On a hot and dry Friday the 13th of June 1890, Mrs. Winchester drifted into an uneasy sleep, but not for long. Half an hour later she was wide awake again. Something was wrong; a change was coming over the bedroom. There was a sense of dread. Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, were peace and rest could not dwell entered. Her home started to feel like a place where hope could not come, and all that did come was torture without end. She sat up, fully alert, straining her ears for the slightest untoward sound, but all was silent except for the little trusted noises the home made during the evening. However, Mrs. Winchester noticed something odd: an unnatural coldness was stealing over the room. It had been a hot summer day. How could it be so cold? She shivered and ducked back under the covers, tugging them more snugly about her. It did not help; the cold kept increasing. She pulled the covers over her head, chiding herself for being silly and willing herself into sleep. However, the terrible dread kept gnawing at her. She tried to think pleasant thoughts, tried to ignore her thudding heart, and tried to pray. Her attempts brought little comfort; the fear continued to build. She sensed that something frightful was about to happen. She held her breath and waited, not knowing what to expect. Before too long, she heard a sound: the unmistakable creak of the doorknob. The spring bolt was sliding back with tiny clicks. Mrs. Winchester froze. Very slowly, the door began to open. Her fear quickened further as she heard the tread of heavy, booted feet approaching the bed. She wanted to call out for help, but was too afraid, as if some force was willing her to silence. Mrs. Winchester was helpless in the face of that power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

When she tried to pray, a demon started to speak. “The force of hose dire arms has caused me to fall to a place with floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire. Fierce contention brought along innumerable force of Spirits armed with durst in a dubious battle of unconquerable will, revenge, immortal hate.” Mrs. Winchester was dying and she knew it. This demon had come to claim her soul. She was making gaps, with long spaces between. A perspective of stern and cruel memories stretching away, like its own grey avenues, into a blur of darkness. Certainly no house had ever more completely and finally broken with the present. Mrs. Winchester lit a candle. A little animal stood before her, forbidding, almost menacing: there was anger in his large brown eyes. He came no nearer. As she advanced, he gradually fell back, and she noticed another dog, a vague, rough, brindled thing. At the same moment a third dog, a long-haired white mongrel, slipped out of a doorway and joined the others. All three stood looking at Mrs. Winchester with grave eyes; but not a sound came from them. Zip, had seemed to be observing them with a deeper intentness. Mrs. Winchester endured many long years of the company of many different creatures. They would return again and again. As she was in her morning room, the coldness came back. Her mind was alert but her body seemed paralyzed. The entity seemed to have the power to immobilize her from a distance. She heard the dull footfalls crossing her mahogany floors. There was an evil lurking in her home. Something started pounding on the table. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

The pounding was so fierce that her cup of tea bounced off the table and fell to the floor. Then it stopped. Mrs. Winchester thought maybe she was having delusions. But whatever it was did not want her to drink the tea. More odd things began to happen—occurrences no one could explain. A malignancy pervaded. Often, people would hear a horrible, mocking, evil laugh. Lights would slicker for no reasons; water taps would turn themselves on, then off. She would find her silverware mysteriously rearranged. On several occasions she discovered her solid gold dinner service hidden in a corner of the room. One night, she had a roaring fire in the fireplace of her bedroom, went to the bathroom, and returned the fireplace totally clean with nothing it in burning. The servants began to complain of hearing mice in the night, but Mrs. Winchester was certain there were no mice in the house. On several occasions, one could very clearly hear the floorboards creaking upstairs, as though somebody was walking about the house. The servants heard the creaking too but, as is often the case with servants, they got used to it, and to the other noises and unexplained presences. Mrs. Winchester urged them no to speak of those things outside of the house. It was bd enough that she was subjected to the disturbances and torment; the last thing she wanted was to attract undue attention to her home. People do not, as a rule, react compassionately to reports of supernatural infestations; many tend to suspect that the victim has somehow, whether by word or deed, “brought it on herself.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

At times, Mrs. Winchester felt that the entity was trying to crush the life out of her. She left her light burning all night. Through time, Mrs. Winchester was forced to accept her suffering. There was nothing else she could do. One winter night, one of the butlers was found dead at the head of a narrow flight of stairs leading down from his room. It was Mrs. Winchester who found him and gave the alarm, so distracted with fear and horror—for his blood was all over her—that at first roused household could not make out what she was saying, and thought she was waking from a nightmare. However, there, sure enough, at the top of the stairs lay the butler, stone dead, and head foremost, the blood from his wounds dripping down the steps below him. He had been dreadfully scratched and gashed about the face and throat, as if with curious pointed weapons; and one of his legs had a deep tear in it which had cut an artery, and probably caused his death. Bu how did he come there, and who had murdered him? Mrs. Winchester declared that she had been asleep in her bed, and hearing his cry had rushed out to find him lying on the stairs; but this was immediately questioned. A shadow was rearing up from the body. Mrs. Winchester described it as “a blob, like smoking black cloud, not the shape of a person—just a thing, but a terrible thing. The absolute evil that came from it was overwhelming. I was so gripped with terror, I could not move, and I knew that if it came toward me, I would be swallowed up…destroyed, and that would be the end of me. Imagine what it feels like to know that you are going to be killed, and the specter that is torturing you is deliberately making you suffer beforehand. That is how it was. I felt a level of fear that is beyond words. Then I heard a voice and screamed.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

The male voice was hoarse, stertorous, angry almost. “You have left us this our spirit and strength entire strongly to suffer our pains that we my so suffice his vengeful ire, or do him mightier services as his thralls by right of war, whatever his business be here in the heart of hell to work in fire, or do his errands in the gloomy deep; what can it then avail though yet we feel strength undiminished, or eternal being to undergo eternal punishment?” Mrs. Winchester instantly went to sleep—chilling testimony to the control the demon had over her. When she awoke, she was clean, in her sleeping gown, and in her bed. However, it was with the possibility, and the hope, that the end of her long ordeal might well be in sight. Little of the fast-fading sunlight entered the house through the windows, many of which were partly or entirely covered with drapes. However, it was bright enough for Mrs. Winchester to see that the French Provincial sofa’s upholstery was slashed. Shredded wool spilled onto the floor. A solid oak bookcase had been hammered to pieces against the wall, gouging holes in the lath and plaster walls, running the Lincrusta-Walton Wallcovering. Her silver tea service has been smashed, along with a floor lamp. Books had been taken off the shelves, torn apart, and scattered across the living room. Mrs. Winchester lit a candle. It did not shed much light, just enough to reveal more details of the rubble. Looks like somebody went through here with a wrecking ball and scissors, she thought. The house remained silent. Leaving the door open behind her, she took a couple of steps into the room, and the crumpled pages of the ruined books crunched crispy underfoot. She noticed the dark, rusty stains on some of the paper and on the bone-white foam wool stuffing, and suddenly she stopped, realizing the stains were blood. A moment later, Mrs. Winchester spotted the corpse. It was that of a big man, lying on his side on the floor near the sofa, half-covered by gore-smeared book pages, book boards, and dust jackets. Zip’s growling grew louder, meaner. Moving closer to the body, which was just a few feet from the dining-room archway. Mrs. Winchester remembered that John Hansen had lately been making repairs, including a leak faucet and a broken door lock. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

However, Mrs. Winchester thought because of the way the room looked, he had been killed weeks ago. Her house was so big that it would often take weeks, months, and sometimes years to get around it. Yet, on closer inspection, the corpse proved to be neither bloated with the gas of decomposition nor marked by any signs of decay, so it could not have been there for very long. Perhaps only a day or less. The body had been disemboweled. Zip’s low growling gave wat to ugly snarling punctuated with hard, sharp barks. With a nervous twitch and a sudden pounding of her heart, Mrs. Winchester turned from the corpse and saw that zip was facing into the nearby dining room. The shadows were deep in there because the drapes were drawn shut over all the windows, and only a thin gray light passed through from the kitchen beyond. “Go, get out, leave!” an evil voice told her. It was certainly not the voice of Mr. Hansen. Something in the dining room was moving. There was no doubt of its presence, because it rushed out onto the dining-room tables, and came straight at Mrs. Winchester, emitting a blood-freeze shriek. She saw lantern eyes in the gloom, and nearly a man-sized figure that—in spite of poor light—gave an impression of deformity. Then the demon was coming off the table, straight at her. I Do conjure thee, O Spirit Focalor and your legion of thirty spirits to manifest your spiritual weapon in this corporeal World through my will and might! Empower it so that it may serve me here upon the corporeal plane! May it serve as a key to the realms above and below unlocking power and wisdom for my glory and ascent! Fill this weapon with your powers of wrath and fury that it may seek out spiritual attacks made toward me rendering them useless and impotent! I DO conjure thee Spirit Vephar, pierce the Heavens and cause the seas to be right stormy to cleanse the Earth of sin. Spirit Vizaresh, I DO conjure thee to drag sinful souls into hell, noosing them with the power of their own sins. May the snare be the power of their own evil, words, thoughts, and deeds and let this be you will to drag unwilling souls into Hell. May this cord gain its power through one’s practical application of evil principles.  #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Winchester Mystery House

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Mrs. Winchester never recovered from the 1906 earthquake. Staff said she grew weaker and weaker as the years went by, and that she was often heard talking to her dead husband. The house was already large, but it morphed to be as long as several city blocks and was taller than the tallest trees on the green lawn. I suppose, ultimately, it was the spirits who kept her in this estate by not allowing her to build another one of this magnitude. When Mrs. Winchester passed away in 1922, she left $5,000,000.00 to charity. The mansion is truly special and a national treasure.

There is a Divinity that Shapes Our Ends

The much-vaunted “freedom” of American life may be considered an illusion. Part of the reason is because we are the slaves of technology—technology is no longer an extension of ourselves. Other than that, we can only do what we are told, otherwise we have to fact the consequences for our actions. While outwardly participating in an activity within a social situation, an individual can allow one’s attention to turn from what one and everyone else considers the real or serious World, and give oneself up for a time to a playlike World in which one alone participates. This kind of inward emigration from the gathering may be called “away,” and we find that strict situational regulations obtain regarding it. Perhaps the most important kind of away is that through which the individual relives some past experiences or rehearses some future ones, this taking the form of what is variously called reverie, brown study, woolgathering, daydreaming, or autistic thinking. At such times the individual may demonstrate one’s absence from the current situation by a preoccupied, faraway look in one’s eyes, or by a sleeplike stillness of one’s limbs, or by that special class of side involvements that can be sustained doodling, drumming the fingers on a table, hair twisting, nose picking, scratching. (Incidentally, these fuguelike side involvements are also the ones that can convey that the individual has become carried far away by a meditative task one is performing in.) In any case, reverie constitutes an eloquent sign of departure from all public concrete matters withing the situation. The degree to which individuals ordinarily go away in situations in which they are participants whether concealing this disaffection from the others or not, is little known. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

It can be assumed, however, that every round of life provides at least a few places for getting away with going away. Some occupations are especially rich in this regard. In the tourist hotel on Shetland Isle, for example, dishwashers could keep pace with the work while allowing their minds to wander completely, and would sometimes end up in abstracted singing that was so patently away as to be cut short by the managers. So, too, at the community gatherings, local musicians on the stage were able to play while allowing themselves to drift quite far away; they would come out of their several reveries together at the end of a number with a little wave of joking that showed how far from the dancers they had actually been. Certain jobs, of course, such as that of night watchman, may be chosen with these away possibilities in mind. Some social establishments seem particularly plagued by the fact that members find too many opportunities for reverie. The biographer of an ex-nun, for example, writes as follows about a group of newly professed nuns in a convent: “Her companions came as usual with their little black bags, but some of them, she observed, had the look of sleepwalkers. Their wide-open eyes seemed to be focused on a distant glory as they made their bows to the presiding Mistress and took the nearest unoccupied chair without, as formerly, looking about to choose a place in the circle where their presence might do the most good. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

“The tendency toward mysticism is always a problem in a mixed Order such as ours where work and contemplation must go hand in hand. One sees this often in the newly professed and while it is a very beautiful thing to see a young nun apparently communing directly with God, she is nevertheless lost to the community when in that rapture and someone’s else mind, hands and feet must do her work meanwhile. One can never know, of course, if it is the real thing or simply one of those unconscious singularizations to which we all fall prey from time to time.” The silence of the preoccupied ones did not escape the attention of the presiding Mistress. She drew the dreamers back into the sewing circle with direct questions about their assignments. On some mental hospital wards, aways are not directly penalized and patients may spend years walking up and down the hallways ruminating on the relations they left behind them, coming out of their away only when hospital administration forcibly impinges on them. A good description of this state is called “chronically demoralization” and “despair.” In such settings, awayness may be not only tolerated but also engendered, as when a patient in seclusion finds nothing tangible in the cell to put one’s mind on, or when all the patients on a ninety-bed ward are herded into one of the two dayrooms in order that the other can be mopped or waxed, and thus find themselves bunched so closely together that a useful defense is to withdrawn into oneself and suppress orientation to the others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

In these contexts the participant-observer can soon learn to disattend to incontinence and hallucinations occurring eighteen inches away. And in such settings we know something about how hard it may be for the individual to bring oneself out of one’s away in order to participate in talk with others present. Perhaps these facts can help one to understand the classic back-ward phenomenon of the patient who is sufficiently preoccupied to let the cigarette burn short enough to char his fingers. As was suggested in connection with lolling, individuals develop many untaxing activities as covers behind which to go into a reverie. The coffee-and-cigarette break when taken by oneself is an instance of this. Public eateries have underwritten this practice by placing seats for lone eaters in front of a running mirror, thus enabling the patron to facilitate the away process by covertly looking at oneself. Persons who find themselves disenchanted with the whole system of situational obligations in society may seek out those places where reverie is likely to be tolerated. As one very literate patient in Central Hospital is recorded to have said: “To avoid gossip I began to frequently dives of every type, where I thought no one would see me. I merely sat there for hours thinking and looking off into space, entertaining a confused set of ideas.” While the silent or brown study kind of awayness is perhaps the main type, other kinds are also observable. First, there is what is usually called “talking to oneself,” which can be narrowly defined as holding a vocal or gestural conversation where the person with whom one is conversing is oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

On the stage these actions are termed soliloquies and have been institutionalized as permissible dramaturgical devices. In real life in our society, however, there tends to be the understanding that only the mentally ill, the not yet taught, and the foolish engage in this activity. Actually, there are many circumstances in which persons will talk to themselves and find that this is tolerated. For example, if an individual acts ineptly one may carefully curse oneself audibly to show that one, too, finds such ineptness unacceptable and, in addition, uncharacteristic of oneself, apparently preferring to be someone who talks to oneself rather than someone who characteristically errs as one has just done. Similarly, in what we call “muttering,” the individual seems wiling to be known as someone who talk to oneself rather than as someone who accepts affronts without taking action. Except when this kind of face-saving is occurring, however, persons who talk to themselves typically take care to do so only when they are certain of not being confronted with someone and hence with a social situation. Self-talkers who are particularly wary of being suddenly come upon may shield their potential impropriety by leaving their mouths open a little, so that signs of vocalization can be less readily detected by suddenly appearing witness. Another variety of away occurs when the individual audibly engages in rehearsing or reliving a conversation with a real person other than oneself who happens not to be there. Individuals, of course, frequently converse this way “in their minds,” as when practicing what they will say to their boss or to an audience. However, rarely, it would seem, do they audibly give the show away. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

There is a final type of away that should be mentioned. When an individual finds oneself in a gathering from whose activities one wishes to insulate oneself, one may give up one’s attention to an activity that is of fanciful, fantasy kind (and in this sense similar to the imagined World of the reverie), and yet use materials for the construction of this alienated World that are visible to others. A component of disinterested intellectual pursuit will be present. This type of activity is illustrated by the individual who constructs elaborate doodles, or piles matches on the top of a bottle, or works jigsaw puzzles, and by the child who walks in such a way as to avoid the cracks in the pavement, or hops for a distance on one foot, or hold a stick against fence posts as one passes by, or kicks a can along one’s route. In American society another instance is provided by the mother who takes interactional leave of the situation in which one is physically fixed by playing for a moment with one’s infant, even while another may be directing statements to the conversational cluster of which the parent is a ratified member. The positive sanction behind mother-love, and the nation that, ceremonially speaking, children are not complete persons and hence not complete distractions, help to give impunity to those who employ this strategy. In Shetland Isle the ubiquitous household cat was similarly significant: a Shetlander caught in a social gathering he found undesirable sometimes turned to teasing the cat, repeating half-aloud the responses one’s teasings would presumably call forth could the cat talk. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Thus, a man who was drawn to the kitchen by the warmth and tea available there, but repelled by the circle of women present, could have his comfort in safety by using the cat as a means of removing himself from the women’s circle. Chronic patients in Central Hospital frequently employed these “toy-involvements” as a means of going away. Walking up to the steps in a line of patients coming back from lunch, one person would suddenly stoop and take delight in examining a small fleck of colour in the concrete. Other patients, especially one felt to be extremely regressed and deteriorated, would for long periods of time focus their total attention on little bits of grim adhering to the ends of their fingers, sometimes licking the specks, or, on little mounds of dust on the floor, or they would slowly and carefully trace with their fingertips the grain and other markings on the floor next to where they were crouched. In these ways they effectively pulled the whole World in on them until the circle of reality was not more than a foot in diameter around their noses. Of course, some of the toy-involvements used by the patients were not far from civil practices. For example, when a delivery truck would park outside the patient canteen building, one patient would draw finger patterns on the dust of the panel body; another, on the ward, would while away the time by cutting chains out of newspapers. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

A brief spate of behaviour can, of course, exhibit more than one type of improper involvement, showing in several different ways how the individual has insufficient situational presence. Improper creatures release, for example, are often associated with the state of being away. Thus, at Central Hospital it was possible to observe a patient ejecting chewed chicken from her overstuffed mouth and carefully examining it with both hands in a bemused way, or doing the same with the mucus one had removed from one’s nose. Another individual patient would then spit, but not far enough out to clear her dress, and would then show concentrated interest in watching the spittle slowly spread and disappear into the cloth. An angry elderly male patient would cough up enough phlegm and then play with it abstractly on the table before eventually wiping it off. One thing everyone needs to learn is when to be an expert and when not to be. When you are a guest in someone’s home or someone superior to you makes a statement that you know to be incorrect, the polite thing to do is to agree with them and let it go. Otherwise, you may make someone uncomfortable, and put others in an embarrassing situation. Often times, events will be so much better if one does not become argumentative. Make a note not to argue with people about everything under the Milky Way. The best thing to do is avoid an argument at all costs. Ninety percent of the time, an argument ends with each of the contestants more firmly convinced than ever that one is absolutely right. Young people sometimes like to argue because they do not have much experience in life and have had to be submissive so long, but after they grow up, they do not care to so much. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

You cannot win an argument, even when you are right, because it will make your relationship with another person become negative. So, unless you are paid to argue for a living, try not to. The goal for some people is to refrain from talking and to avoid verbal fights. Sometimes it is better to have one’s good will rather than an empty victory. Some people argue with you because they want a feeling of importance. As soon as they get their importance, they will become a reasonable human being again. Give your opponents a chance to talk. Let them finish. Do not resist, defend or debate. This only raises the barriers. Try to build bridges of understanding. Do not build higher barriers of misunderstanding. The first or the lowest state of consciousness is sleep. Man is surrounded by dreams…Purely subjective pictures—either reflections of former experiences or reflections of vague perceptions of the moment, such as sounds reaching the sleeping man, sensations coming from the body, slight pains, sensations of tension—fly through the mind, leaving only a very slight trace on the memory and often leaving no trace at all. The second degree of consciousness comes when man awakes. This second state—the state in which we are now; the state in which we work, talk, imagine ourselves conscious beings and so forth—we ordinarily call “waking consciousness” or “clear consciousness,” but really it should be called “waking sleep” or “relative consciousness.” In the state of sleep we can have glimpses of relative consciousness. In the state of relative consciousness we can have glimpses of self-consciousness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

However, if we want to have more prolonged periods of self-consciousness and not merely glimpses, we must understand that they cannot come by themselves. They need will action. This means that frequency and duration of moments of self-consciousness depend on the command one has over oneself. So it means too that consciousness and will are almost one and the same thing, or in any case, aspects of the same thing. At this point it must be understood that the first obstacle in the way of the development of self-possesses self-consciousness, or at any rate that one can have it at any time one likes. It is very difficult to persuade a man that he is not conscious, and cannot be conscious, at will. It is particularly difficult because here nature plays a very funny trick. If you ask a man if he is conscious, or if you say to him that he is not conscious, he will answer that he hears and understands you. And he will be quite right, although at the same time quite wrong. This is nature’s trick. He will be quite right because your question or your remark has made him vaguely conscious for a moment. Next moment consciousness will disappear. However, he will remember what you said and what he answered, and he will certainly consider himself conscious. In reality, acquiring self-consciousness means long and hard work. How can a man agree to this work if he thinks he already possesses the very thing which is promised him as the result of long and hard work? #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

Naturally a man will not begin this work and will not consider it necessary until he becomes convinced that he possess neither self-consciousness nor all that is connected with it, that is to say, unity or individuality, permanent “I” and will. The more successful we are in getting ourselves to substitute products for real satisfactions, the stronger becomes the desire to obtain pure and uncontaminated gratifications. The children must be trained into our competitive value system, in which it is immoral for people to hurt one another and immoral for them to give pleasures to one another. Our society was not designed for people. It was designed to make money at any cost, but some people get so caught up in the high that they get from being evil that they lose sight of how much money they are losing by being evil. Life no longer becomes about making profit, but instead making people suffer. Empirical research shows that surprising or important information, such as news about job opportunities, usually does not come from people who are part of your closet group of friends. Instead, it arrives from “acquaintances” who are on the edge of your social World. Frequent interactions among friends who all know one another apparently leads to reduced diversity of the information they hold as a group. Your current friends would tell you about a perfect job for you in a distant town, but they are unaware of it for the same reasons that you are. However, your old college friend, who lives there, can be a source of significant informational variety. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

As data on job-finding shows, a healthy social network should probably contain a mix of strongly and weakly clustered contacts. That is what would provide agents with a better balance of exploitation and exploration. And just such a mix is what is actually found in investigations of social networks. It is sometimes known as a “small-World property.” It can be shown that a modest proportion of ties to distant others suffices to “shrink the social World” dramatically. While individuals who are far apart in physical space or social class seems very unlikely to interact, in fact they are usually separated only by a short chain of social contacts. The research of Stanley Milgram in the 1960s first clarified this closeness. It has entered the language with the phrase “six degrees of separation” as a shorthand for the idea that a short chain of contacts (perhaps no more than six) will generally suffice to connect any two people in the World. An important question is now coming into focus as the Information Revolution penetrated our societies: Does this “distance independent” technology change the mix of clustering in our social networks, giving us more contact with distant persons who do not know the others that we know? The underlying issue is not new, of course. At least as far back as the Roman roads, each gain in information transmission has reinforced the shrinking of the social World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

The reduction of effective distance has continued with postal systems, telegraphs, and telephones. However, the concern remains that there could be a “threshold effect,” a level of connection among “distant” persons at which suddenly the total diversity of the World begins to decrease rapidly, even as the diversity impinging on individuals may continue to increase. Some fear that such a threshold might already have been crossed, even before we have seen the full potential of the Internet. Among the data they cite as evidence are the booming Worldwide markets for Euro-American cultural materials such as music, film, and clothing, which grow at the expense of local traditions, and the mounting rate of extinction among the World’s languages. It may seem a paradox that as individual agents experience more diverse contacts, the system can become less diverse. However, there need be no contradiction. As interaction patterns in a social system become less clustered, giving individuals the experience of interacting with more “distant” others, information (or rumor, or disease) moves more rapidly throughout the entire system. The World becomes so “small” that the sociological “islands” vanish, unable to keep their local ways and remain untouched by events elsewhere. Research has shown that—at least for biological populations—this is not the most favourable situation for adaption. Early innovations spread too fast, and variety that can provide later improvements is lost—the phenomenon we have called premature convergence. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

The ideal breeding ground for novel life-forms seems to be an archipelago or a network of mountain valleys. In these settings semi-isolated populations breed with relatively infrequent exchanges of animals. Improvements occur but spread slowly enough to avoid a too-rapid loss of diversity. Of course, we cannot choose actions based on a simple analogy of human social systems to breeding biological populations. The mechanisms of reproduction are very different, as are the criteria for assessing change. Nevertheless, lowered clustering of social networks may well increase homogenizing pressures. Comparing the costs of lost diversity with other effects is not our subject here. Deciding whether to resist or facilitate the loss of World social variety requires assessing the impacts on such dimensions as changes of nuclear war, spread of disease, efficiency of global business transactions, loss of cultural variety, or possibilities for concerted World initiatives on environmental issues. Our aim here is to pose the question in terms of the structure of human interactions, so that costs, benefits, and interventions can be thought through more fruitfully as issues arising in a Complex Adaptive System. Developing a new commercial airplane is a gigantic gamble. The cost of designing a new engine alone can reach two billion dollars. It is no exaggeration to say that building a new and better place requires “betting the company.” No wonder governments get involved, each trying to make a larger market for its domestic firm. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Here we look at the market for 150-passenger medium-range jets: The Boeing 727 and the Airbus 320. Boeing developed the 727 first. Did it make sense for Airbus to enter the market? The primary market for these aircraft was in the United States of America and in the European Economic Community (E.E.C.) countries. We assume each of these markets is worth $900 million to a monopoly firm. Were the two firms to compete head-on, total profits fall from $900 to $600 million, divided evenly between the two firms. Although profits fall, competition results in less expensive planes and lower airfares, so consumers benefit. These benefits to consumers are worth $700 million in each market. Airbus Industries estimates that it will cost $1 billion to develop the Airbus 320. If they go ahead without any government assistance, they can expect to make a profit of $300 million in each of the markets, American and E.E.C. The total of $600 million is not enough to cover the development costs. The E.E.C governments cannot offer direct assistance in the form of subsidies because their budget is already committed to subsidizing farmers. In the traditional trade-off between guns and butter, the E.E.C. has gone for butter and has little left for either guns or Airbuses. You are called to Brussels and asked for advice on whether the E.E.C should assist Airbus by giving it a protected market, that is, requiring European airlines to buy the Airbus 320 over the Boeing 727. What do you suggest? How do you expect the United States of America’s government to respond? #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

If the E.E.C. protects its home market and the American market stays open, Airbus will earn $900 million as a monopolists in Europe and $300 million as a duopolist in the United States of America. This is enough to cover the development costs of $1 billion. Is this policy in the interests of the E.E.C. as a whole? We have to consider the gain to Airbus versus the loss to European consumers. Without a protected market, Airbus would not enter. Boeing would have a monopoly in Europe. Consumers would be no better off. Therefore there is no less to consumers. The economic gains to the E.E.C. as a whole coincide with the profits of Airbus. It seems that the E.E.C should support the venture by promising a protected market. It is important that the E.E.C. commit itself to protectionist policy. Suppose it keeps its options open, and Airbus enters the market. At this point it does not have an incentive to protect Airbus. Keeping the markets open will reduce Airbus’s expected profit by $600 million (from $200 million to negative $400 million), but the competition from Boeing will raise the E.E.C. consumer’s benefits by $700 million. Knowing this, Airbus will not enter, because it does not have a credible commitment that the E.E.C. governments will maintain a protected market. What about the American response? If the Americans act quickly, they too can commit to protecting their domestic markets before Airbus begins production. Let us look ahead and reason backward. If the American market is kept open, the picture unfolds as before. Boeing is shut out of Europe and makes $300 million in competition with Airbus in the American market. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

The American consumer gets an extra $700 million of benefits from the competition. The total gain to the U.S. economy if it maintains an open market is $1,000 million. Say the United States of America reciprocates and requires American airlines to purchase the Boeing 727 over the Airbus 320. Then even the monopoly profit of $900 million in Europe falls short of the Airbus development costs. So the Airbus 320 will never be built. Boeing will enjoy a monopoly in both markets, making profits of $1,800 million. This total economic gain to the United States of America is considerably higher than when its market is open. The United States of America can defeat the E.E.C support for Airbus by reciprocating protectionism. It is in its interest to do so. When considering the human body, it is important to discuss working outside tissues. One approach to nanomedicine would make use of microscopic mobile devices built using molecular-manufacturing equipment. These would resemble the ecosystem protectors and mobile cleanup machines. Like them, they would either be biodegradable, self-collecting, or collected by something else once they were done working. Like them, they would be more difficult to develop than simple, fixed-location nanomachines, yet clearly feasible and useful. Development will start with simpler applications, so let us begin by looking at what can be done without entering living tissues. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

The skin is the body’s largest organ, and its exposed position subjects it to a lot of abuse. This exposed position, though, also makes it easier to treat. Among the earlier applications of molecular manufacturing may be those popular, quasimedical products, cosmetics. A cream packed with nanomachines could do a better and more selective job of cleaning than any product can today. It could remove the right amount of dead skin, remove excess oils, add mission oils, apply the right amounts of natural moisturizing compounds, and even achieve the elusive goal of “deep pre cleaning” by actually reaching down into pores and cleaning them out. The cream could be a smart material with smooth-on, peel-off conveniences. The mouth, teeth, and gums are amazingly troublesome. Today, daily dental care is an endless cycle of brushing and flossing, of losing ground to tooth decay and gum disease as slowly as possible. A mouthwash full of smart nanomachines could do all that brushing and flossing do and more, and with far less effort—making it more likely to be used. This mouthwash would identify and destroy pathogenic bacteria while allowing the harmless flora of the mouth to flourish in a healthy ecosystem. Further, the devices would identify particles of food, plaque, or tartar, and life them for teeth to be rinsed away. Being suspended in liquid and able to swim about, devices would be able to reach surfaces beyond reach of toothbrush bristles or the fibers of floss. As short-lifetime medical nanodevices, they could be built to last only a few minutes in the body before falling apart into materials of the sort found in foods (such as fiber). With this sort of daily dental care from an early age, tooth decay and gum disease would likely never arise. If underway, they would be greatly lessened. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

One could list any number of additional advances in health care and many other fields as further evidence that things are actually getting better for more people. However, when future generations look back at today they may most value the extraordinary discoveries about the World that we, the first generation since the dawn of the knowledge economy, are making. Thus, the last half century has seen a profound reconceptualization of humanity’s place in the Universe. Since the first satellite was shot into the Heavens in 1957, astrophysicists have had access to massive amounts of new data with which to confirm or disconfirm earlier theories of the cosmos. And most of the new data have supported the finding that the Universe began with a big bang 14 billion years ago—an estimate experts believe is subject to an error rate of only 0.2 billion years. Like all scientific findings, this one may be revised in light of new evidence. However, so far, many different experiments have corroborated one another—and the big bang concept. The Universe did not, as many still believe, come into being roughly six thousand years ago, and it is not static. Like everything in it, including us humans, it, too, is subject to change. Not only is there no life without change; there is no Universe. Even while come scientists have been expanding our conception of the cosmos, others have been probing smaller and smaller bits and pieces of it and putting that knowledge to practical use. Thus we have the current breakthroughs at the nano level. Nanotechnology promises to do a wide range of things previously far beyond our reach—from the creation of new construction materials to precision drug delivery and diagnosis and the replacement of silicon-based chips. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Thus, the coming leap to nanoproduction and nanoproducts—the source of so much stock-market excitement today—needs to be seen as only one step toward the manipulation of even tinier phenomena in the future. Still a long way off, these next steps may eventually make possible the creation of wealth at smaller and smaller levels, from those measured not just in nanos but in picos, femtos, attos, and zeptos to, who knows, eventually yoctos—a yocto being the term for 0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,001 of a meter. What is so exciting about going to the nano level—grossly large by comparison with these—is that as we move down in scale, things are not only smaller but stranger and stranger. They behave differently. And if nanotechnology promises new cures for disease, imagine what the move to even smaller scales can do—negatively as well as positively. At the scale of both the most minute phenomena and of the cosmos itself, we, in this generation, have learned more about nature and our species than all our ancestors combined. We have taken up the ringing challenge of Francis Bacon set out for humanity in 1603—not to create some “particular invention, however useful,” but to succeed in “kindling a light in nature, a light which should in its very rising touch and illuminate all the border-regions that confine upon the circle of our present knowledge.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Having generated more new data, information and knowledge than all our ancestors combined, that we know of, we have organized it differently, distributed it differently and combined and recombined it in new and more transient patterns. We have also created entire new cyberworlds in which ideas, magnificent and terrifying alike, bounce off one another like trillions of intelligent Ping-Pong balls. We will, within the foreseeable future, through a combination of neuroscience, cybernetics and media manipulation, create far more realistic sensory, sensual and other virtual experiences. We will simulate future events personal or otherwise, in the digital World before participating in them “live.” And we will interact virtually or in the flesh with people from all over the planet. Criminals may have a field day. However, so will saints. Finally, we stand now at the time when even words like live and dead or human and inhuman may be redefined in the light of the new potentials open to our species, both on the Earth and in colonies in space. In short, nobody is promising utopia. The revolution now under way will not put an end to war, terrorism or disease. It cannot guarantee perfect ecological balance. However, it does promise that our children will live in an exciting World radically different from ours, with its own benefits and dangers and challenges. We cannot day whether this emerging World will be mostly “good” or mostly “evil,” because the very definitions of these terms will change, and it is not we but our children and their children who will do the judging, according to their own values. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Living at the dawn of this century, we are direct or indirect participants in the design of a new civilization with a revolutionary wealth system at its core. Will this process complete itself—or will the still incomplete wealth revolution come to a crashing halt? The history of the industrial revolution provides a clue. Between the mid-1600s, when it started, and the mid-1950s, when the knowledge economy first began to overlap and supersede it, the World went through countless upheavals. Wars on end. Civil Wars in England. The Swedish invasion of Poland. The Turkish-Venetian war. The Portuguese-Dutch war in Brazil. All these and more in the single decade starting in 1650. Later came Queen Anne’s wars against the Spaniards, the French and Indian wars, the Cambodian war of succession and on and on—all before we even get to the American and the French revolutions, Napoleon’s sweep across Europe, the American Civil War, World War I, the Russian Revolution, and worst of all, World War II. These conflicts were interspersed with flu epidemics; stock-market crashes; the decline of the large, multigenerational family; economic depressions; corruption scandals; regime changes; the introduction of the camera, electricity, the automobile, the airplane, movies and radio; and a succession of schools of art in the West, from Pre-Raphealitism and romanticism to impressionism, futurism, surrealism and cubism. Yet through all these changes and upheavals, one thing stands out. Nothing, not all of them together, stopped the forward advance of the industrial revolution and the spread of the new wealth system it brought. Nothing. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

The reason was that the Second Wave was not just a matter of technology or economics. It originated out of social and political and philosophical forces as well, and out of wave conflict in which the holdover elites of the agrarian age gradually yielded to the forces of the new. The Second Wave led to econocentrism: The idea that culture, religion and the arts, were all of secondary importance and—according to Marx—were determined by economics. However, Third Wave revolutionary wealth is increasingly based on knowledge—and puts economics back in its place as part of a larger system, bringing, for better and worse, issues like cultural identity, religion and morality back toward center stage. These issues should now be seen as part of a feedback process with the economy, rather than subordinate to it. The Third Wave revolution wears the face of technology because the technologies that come with it are so spectacular. However, like industrialization or “modernization” it is an all-encompassing change of civilization. And despite stock-market swings and other distractions, revolutionary wealth will continue its inexorable advance across much of the World. As tomorrow’s economy and society take for, all of us—individuals, companies, organizations, and governments alike—now face the wildest, fastest ride into the future of any generation. It is, when all is said, a fantastic moment to be alive. Welcome to the rest of the twenty-first century! #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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