Man, evidently, was tired of merely having plants and animals and slaves to serve him, and robbing nature’s treasures of metal and stone, wood and yarn, of managing her water in canals and wells, of breaking her resistances with ships and roads, bridges and tunnels and dams. Now he meant not merely to plunder her of her materials, but to enslave and harness her very forces so as to multiply his own strength. This monstrous and unparalleled idea is as old as old as the Fuastian Culture itself. Already in the tenth century we meet with technical constructions of wholly new sort. Already the steam engine, the steamship, and the air machine are in the thoughts of Roger Bacon and Albertus Magnus. And many a monk busied himself in this cell with the idea of Perpetual Motion. This last idea never thereafter let go its hold on us, for success would mean the final victory over “God or Nature” (Deus sive Natura), a small World of one’s own creation moving like the great World, by virtue of its own forces and obeying the hand of man alone. To build a World oneself to be oneself God—that is the Faustian inventor’s dream, and from it has sprung all our designing and re-designing of machines to approximate as nearly as possible the unattainable limit of perpetual motion. The booty-idea of the beast of prey is thought out to its logical end. Not this or complete with its secret of force, is dragged away as spoil to be built into our Culture. However, one who was not himself possessed by this will to power over all nature would necessarily feel that this was devilish, and in fact men have always regarded machines as the invention of the devil—with Roger begins the long line of scientists who suffer as magicians and heretics. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

After the great moment in German thought—of Kant, Goethe, Schiller and Hegel, in which the rediscovery of Greece played so important a role—Greek scholarship retired to the universities, where it was again a dead piece of learning, unable itself to inspire or produce a compelling vision that could transform men. It became studied by bourgeois professors who educated bourgeois men for whom, as with Aschenbach, the Greeks were just “culture.” The Greek splendor, which had formed such heroic figures just a half-century earlier, became a mystery. Nietzsche, acutely aware of this splendor and its disappearance from the scene, blamed the scholars, or rather blamed something that informed scholarship. A classical scholar who certainly would have been among the greatest who ever lived if he had not been called to philosophy, Nietzsche attempted the last great return to the Greeks. Like his German predecessors, he returned to Greek poetry in particular. However, he coupled his taste for the tragedies with something very new—a radical attack on Socrates, the founder of the tradition of rationalism, which is the essence of the university. This is probably the first attack made by a philosopher on Socrates, and it is a violent one, continuing throughout Nietzsche’s whole career. What is fascinating for us in this is that Nietzsche, and Heidegger following him, are the first modern thinkers since the days of Hobbes, Spinoza and Descartes to take Socrates—or any classical philosopher’s teaching—really serious as an opponent, as a living opponent rather than as a cultural artifact. Socrates is alive and must be overcome. It is essential to recognize that this is the issue in Nietzsche. It is not a historical or cultural question. It is simply a classic philosophic disputation: Was Socrates right or wrong? #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Nietzsche’s indictment of Socrates is that his rationalism, his utilitarianism, subverted and explained away that great stupidity which is noble instinct. He destroyed the tragic sense of life, which intuited man’s true situation amidst things and allowed for creative forming of life against the terror of existence, unendowed with and unguided by any pre-existing forms or patterns. Instinct or fatality prior to reason and vulnerable to reason, establishes the table of laws or valuation within which healthy reason works. A darkness on top of a void is the condition of life and creation, and it is dispelled in the light of rational analysis. The poet, in his act of creation, knows this. The scientist and the scholar never do. The act of creation is what forms cultures and folk-minds. There cannot be, as Socrates believed, the pure mind, which is trans-historical. This belief is the fundamental premise and error of science, an error that becomes manifestly fatal in dealing with human things. The method of the sciences is designed to see only what is everywhere always, whereas what is particular and emergent is all that counts historically and culturally. Homer is not merely one example of an epic, or the Bible of a revealed text, but that is what science sees them as, and the only reason it is interested in them. The scholar turns away from them to comparative religion or comparative literature, id est, either to indifference or to a flabby ecumenism compounded out of the lowest common denominator of a variety of old and incompatible creations. The scholars cannot understand the texts that he purports to interpret and explain. Schiller might be able to grasp the essence of the Iliad because as a creator he is akin to Homer. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

He could not understand Homer as Homer understood himself, because his mind was of a different historical epoch. However, he could understand what it means to be a poet. A scholar can do neither. From the point of view of life, and from the point of view of truth, modern scholarship is a failure. Hegel ridicules the typical German gymnasium teacher who explains that Alexander the Great had a pathological love of power. The teacher proves the assertion by the fact that Alexander conquered the World. The teacher’s freedom from this illness is attested to by the fact that he has not conquered the World. This story encapsulates Nietzsche’s criticism of the German university and its classical scholarship. The scholar cannot understand the will to power, not a cause recognized by science, which made Alexander different from others, because the scholar neither has it nor does his method permit him to have it or see it. The scholar could never conquer the mind of man. Nietzsche’s return to the example of the ancients, and his rigorous drawing of the consequences of what German humane scholarship really believed, had a stunning effect on German university life and on the German respect for reason altogether. Artists received a new license, and even philosophy began to reinterpret itself as a form of art. The poet won the old war between philosophy and poetry, in which Socrates had been philosophy’s champion. Nietzsche’s war on the university led in two directions—either to an abandonment of the university by serious men, or to its reform to make it play a role in the creation of culture. The university ruled by Hegel, the modern Aristotle, had to be reconstituted, as the discredited medieval university had been made over by the now discredited Enlightenment university. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Psychologist Erich Fromm divided religions into two principal categories: humanitarian and authoritarian. Humanitarian religions, according to Dr. Fromm, concern themselves with the goals of self-realization, while authoritarian religions emphasize the importance of their own power. “The essential element in authoritarian religion,” he wrote, “is the surrender to a power transcending man. The main virtue of this type of religion is obedience, the cardinal sin, disobedience.” Most Satanic cults are authoritarian in nature. The members join the group to remedy feelings of powerlessness and inadequacy by submitting to cult leaders in order to be taught the “occult secrets of magic.” Thus, they feel themselves as part of an elite group, in possession of exclusive powers, superior to the rest of humanity. Paul Valentine unabashedly states that one of the reasons he started a Satanic religion was the feeling of power it gives him. While teaching that the ultimate goal of the Setian is self-realization, Michael Aquino states that the governing principle of magic is the ability to “control people without their realizing how or why they are being control.” Gini Graham Scott’s experience with the Temple of Set echoes my own observations of other Satanic and occult groups: “The power of the High Priest increases the power group members feel. He derives much of his power from the members’ belief that he is better able to communicate and manifest (Set) through his being. Also, when members honor him with salutes and hails, he appears that much more powerful. His power, in turn, reflects back on the group.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

However, although the orientation of both the leadership and the laity of most of neo-Satanic churches such as the Temple of Set and the Church of Satan is authoritarian, and stressed control, there is no evidence that any socalled “brainwashing” techniques are employed within these groups to program the thoughts of their members—as has been alleged in contemporary cults such as the Moonies or the Hare Krishans. James T. Richardson, Mary Harder, and Robert Simmonds, in their paper, “Thought Reform and the Jesus Movement,” equate the conversion processes used in some cults in modern “Jesus Movement” with those employed by the Chinese on Western prisoners of war in Korea in the early 1950s. Such comparisons have also been made by psychiatrist Robert J. Lifton, who related such “thought-reform” to religion with his concept of “religious totalism,” which he broke down into eight separate elements: (1) milieu control, or the control of human communication, (2) mystical manipulation, or the installation of a sense of higher purpose by which members are taught they have been ”chose” by forces outside themselves to carry on some mystical imperative, (3) the demand for purity, or the adoption by believers of black or white picture of the World, (4) the cult of confession for past sins, (5) the “sacred science,” which teaches that the group’s dogma is completely true, (6) the loading of language, or the language of “non-thought,” (7) the subordination of human experience to the claims of doctrine, and (8) the severance of ties with those not doctrinally pure (family, friends etcetera.)  #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Lifton suggests that the more those eight components combine in a group situation, the more likely is the possibility of altering a member’s behavior and thoughts. That would be true in religious cults or radical political movements, and the dynamics have been clearly observed to be in operation in such cults as the Jim Jones cult in Guyana, the Moonies, and the Yahwehs, as well as the Manson Family. The more communication from outside is cut, and the more dependence upon the group is fostered, the more likely group behavior will be infected by the beliefs of the leader are violent, the group can turn violent. With the possible exception of The Process in the early 1970s, no organized Satanic church has attempted to attain that kind of control of its membership. The Church of Satan, the Temple of Set, and the Church of Satanic Liberation, although displaying some of Lifton’s eight components—assuming at times a fascistic, authoritarian tone—have not attempted to break down the thoughts of their members. In fact, their stress on egotism, individualistic thought, and nonconformity—although within their groups, their members have simply arrived at another kind of conformity—has been a barrier to the implantation of any cohesive system of thought. This, perhaps, has been a source of failure of such groups as LaVey’s and Aquino’s to consolidate and add to the gains in membership they made in the early 1970s. Back in 1971, before he became certain that Set was a real entity, Michael Aquino seemed to anticipate this built-in program for failure in his own temple when he wrote that “a large percentage of letters to The Cloven Hoof portray Satan as a de facto God to be served, worshipped and adored—not as an anti-god. For such persons, the distinction between Christianity and Satanism is principally semantic. The long-term influence of such a trend could be disastrous and I suspect the question may be called shortly. Some people, I suppose, cannot exist without a master to serve. Erich From is alive and lurking in the ritual chamber.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

A new concept of business is taking shape in response to the info-wars now raging across the World economy. As knowledge becomes more central to the creation of wealth, we begin to think of the corporation as an enhancer of knowledge. We speak of adding vale by upgrading information. We talk about improving the firm’s human resources. And we begin poking our noses into information that does not belong to us. All, it would seem, is fair in love and info-war. On April 25, 1985, the telephone rand at the offices of Texas Instruments in Dallas, Texas. A voice with an international accent asked for a meeting with a company security executive. A Syrian electrical engineer who sought political asylum in the United States of America, Sam Kuzbary had once worked at TI before being fired as a security risk. Rumor had it that the CIA had helped him get out of Syria, where he had once worked for the Syrian military. Kuzbary carried a gun in his car. Now, he said, he wanted to ingratiate himself with TI and get his job back. He had information, he said, about important secrets that had been stolen from TI. That call led to an early morning raid by Dallas police on the offices of a small high-tech firm called Voice Control Systems, Inc., founded originally by a real estate developer who wound up in jail for drug smuggling. Now owned by a different investment group and headed by a former president of U.S Telephone, VCS, it turned out, employed numerous former TI researchers, including Kuzbary. What the police found were 7,985 filed copied from the computers at TI’s advanced research project on speech recognition. A scorching race was (and still is) under way among major computer firms, including IBM Texas Instruments, to find a way for computers to understand human speech. (They can already and are only getting better, but the technology is costly.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Everyone knows that whoever wins this technological race will have the potential for fabulous profits. In fact, at the time, Michael Dertouzos, head of computer science at the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology, considered that “whoever breaks the logjam to make machines understand spoken words will gain control over the information revolution.” Were the engineers who jumped ship at TI and joined VCS really guilty of stealing research worth $20 million, as TI charged? In the trial that followed, Dallas prosecutors Ted Steinke and Jane Jackson insisted a crime had been committed. Lawyers for defendants Tom Schalk and Gary Leonard, however, pointed out that none of the materials taken was marked with the words TI—STRICKTLY PRIVATE which were supposed to be on all secret material. What is more, the lab in which the work was done was headed by Dr. George Doddington, a brilliant maverick who often described his lab as “free and open” and argued that major breakthroughs would come only if researcher from different companies and universities shared their knowledge. Even more to the point, VCS did not seem to be using any of the TI material. Schalk insisted to the jury that at no time during his work at TI had he regarded any of this material as secret. Leonard said he merely wanted to keep a historical record of research he had done, and that he had copied a TI computer directory because it contained a list of the people in his Sunday-school class. To all of which Steinke, the prosecutor, replied: “One thing they can’t change. They sunk these programs out without telling anyone.” The Dallas jury, some of its members crying as the verdict was read, found the men guilty. They were sentenced and fined, then placed on probation. Both appealed the ruling and immediately went back to work, trying to make computers understand speech. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

It is hard to know if industrial espionage is actually on the rise, because, in the words of Brian Hollstein of the American Society for Industrial Security’s committee on the protection of information, “Being a victim of industrial espionage is a lot like getting venereal disease. Many may have it, but nobody wants to talk about it.” On the other hand, more lawsuits are being filed against information thieves and pirates. Hollstein has thought about the value of information more than most. “Many corporations,” he said a few years ago, “really do not understand….They still think in terms mainly of moving around men and materials,” as though still locked into the smokestack economy. “What it amounts to,” he has said, “is a failure to recognize that information has value.” That attitude is changing swiftly. As wars for the control of information heat up, many companies have decided they need more information about the plans, products, and profits of their adversaries. Thus the dramatic rise of what is known as “competitive intelligence.” Smart companies, of course, have always kept an eye cocked at their competitors, but today adversarial knowledge is prime ammunition in the info-wars. Several factors account for the changed attitude. The speed with which any market can now be invaded from outside, the long lead times needed for research (in contrast with shorter product life-cycles), and stiffer competition all have contributed to the much-publicized systematization and professionalization of business spying. He pressure for continual innovation means more resources are flowing into new products, some requiring extremely heavy research. “Designing a chip can take hundreds of labor-years and millions of dollars. Simply copying the competition is both faster and cheaper,” writes John D. Halamka in Espionage in Silicon Valley, explaining why companies now engage in reverse engineering—taking apart a rival product to learn its secret. Xerox reverse-engineers competitive copiers. Companies reverse-engineer services to find out what makes them profitable. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Yet another factor promoting the rise of competitive intelligence has been the widespread reorganization of strategic planning. Once a highly centralized activity carried out by staff personnel reporting to top management, planning has been pushed down into the operating units, where it is often carried out by practical line managers geared to rough-and-tumble competition. Knowing what competitors are up to has immediate tactical advantage as well as possible strategic use. All this helps explain why 80 percent of the thousand largest U.S. firms now have their own full-time sleuths and why the Society of Competitor Intelligence Professionals alone claims member from at least three hundred companies in six nations. Their companies keep them busy. Before the Marriott Corporation committed itself to launching the Fairfield Inn chain of low-cost hotels, reports Fortune, it sent a team of snoops into nearly four hundred rival hotels to check on what soaps and towels they supplied, how good the front desk was in dealing with special problems, and whether the sounds of pleasures of the flesh could be heard in adjoining rooms. (The sounds were simulated by one of Marriott’s CI agents while another in the next room listened for them.) Marriott also hired executive headhunters to interview (and pump) the regional managers of rival chains, to find out how much its competitors were paying, what training they offered, and whether their managers were happy. When the Sheller-Globe Corporation, maker of heavy truck cabs, wanted to design a new cab, it systematically called on potential customers, asking them to rank the opposition on seven scales covering gasoline milage, comfort, windshield visibility, ease of steering, seating, accessibility of controls, and durability. The information set targets for the Sheller-Globe design team to beat. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

 Like real spies, business intelligence agents begin their hunt with a careful scan of “open” sources. They pore over trade journals, newsletters, and the general press for clues to a competing firm’s plans. They read speeches, studying recruiting ads, attend meetings and seminars. They interview former employees, many of whom are eager to talk about their old companies. However, CI snoops—among them, paid outside consultants—have also been known to fly a helicopter over a plant for clues to a competitor’s capacity, to scour trash baskets for discarded memos, and to employ more aggressive measures as well. A look at a rival’s internal phone directory can help one construct a detailed map of its organization, from which it is possible to estimate its budget. One Japanese company sent experts to look at the rail tracks leaving the plant of an American competitor. The thickness of the rust layer—presumably indicating how often or how recently the tracks were used—was a clue to the factory’s production. On occasion, zealous practitioners bug hotel rooms or offices where rivals are negotiating a deal. Even less savory are the U.S.A defense contractors who paid “consultants” to learn in advance how much their competitors were bidding on a Pentagon project, thus permitting them to underbid. In turn, some of the consultants reportedly bribed military personnel to get the facts. Of course, competitive intelligence professionals define CI as the legal pursuit of information. However, a recent Conference Board survey of senior managers suggest that 60 percent of them think anything goes when it comes to corporate spying. The hotting-up of today’s info-wars is part of a growing recognition that knowledge, while central to the new economy, violates all the rules that apply to other resource. It is, for example, inexhaustible. We know how to add vale to a good idea is much more problematic. We lack the new accounting and management theories needed to grapple with super-symbolic realities. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We do not yet know how to manage a resource that is salable, but much of which is supplied (often at no charge) by customers themselves. Of, for that matter, either willingly or unwittingly, by competitors. Nor have we yet come to understand how the corporation as a whole engages in knowledge enhancement. Focusing again on the subject of the technology of statistics, I must call attention to the fact that statistics creates an enormous amount of completely useless information, which compounds the always difficult task of locating that which is useful to a culture. This is more than a case of “information-overload.” It is a matter of “information-trivia,” which has the effect of placing all information on an equal level. No one has expressed this misuse of a technology better than the New Yorker magazine cartoonist Mankoff. Showing an attentive man watching television news, Mankoff has the newscaster saying, “A preliminary census report indicates that for the first time in our nation’s history female anthropologists outnumber male professional golfers.” When statistics and computers are joined, volumes of garbage are generated in public discourse. Those who have watched television sports programs will know that Mankoff’s cartoon is, in fact, less of a parody than a documentary. Useless, meaningless statistics flood the attention of the viewer. Sportscasters call them “graphics” in an effort to suggest that the information, graphically presented, is a vital supplement to action of the game. For example: “Since 1984, the Buffalo Bills have won only two games in which they were four points ahead with less than six minutes to play.” Or this: “In only 17 percent of the times he has pitched at Shea Stadium has Dwight Gooden struck out the third and fourth hitters less than three times when they came to bat with more than one runner on base.” What is one to do with this or to make of it?  #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

And yet there seems to be a market for useless information. Those who read USA Today, for example, are offered on the front page of each issue an idiotic statistic of the day that looks something like this: “The four leading states in banana consumption from 1980 through 1989 are Kansas, North Dakota, Wyoming, and Louisiana. Oddly, Nevada, which was ninth in 1989, fell to twenty-sixth last year, which is exactly where it ranks in kiwi consumption.” It is surprising how frequently such blather will serve as the backbone of conversations which are essentially meaningless. I have heard New Yorkers, with a triumphant flourish, offer out-of-towners the statistic that New York City is only eighth in nation in per-capita violent crimes and then decline to go outside because it was past 6.00pm. I do not say, of course, that all such statistical statements are useless. If we learn that one out of every four males between the ages of twenty and thirty has gone to summer camp as a child, and that the nation’s expenditure for the education of male children is 23 percent less than it is for girls, we may have some statistical facts that will help us to see a cause-and-effect relationship, and thereby suggest a course of action. However, statistics, like any other technology, has a tendency to run out of control, to occupy more of our mental space than it warrants, to invade realms of discourse where it can only wreak havoc. When it is out of control, statistics buries in a heap of trivian what is necessary to know. We have talked about Desert Rose Industries. They use assemblers in the simulated molecular World of the Silicon Valley Faire. They are big, slow, computer-controlled things moving molecular tools. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

With the right instructions and machinery to keep them supplied with molecular tools, these general-purpose assemblers can build almost anything. They are slow, though, and take a lot of energy to run. Some of the building uses special-purpose assembly systems in the molecule-processing style, like the systems in the basement of a simulated molecular factory. The special-purpose systems are all moving belts and rollers, but no arms. This is faster and more efficient, but for quantity orders, cooling requirements limit the speed. It is faster to use larger, prefabricated building blocks. Desert Rose uses these for most of their work, and especially for rush orders like the one Carl set up. Their underground warehouse has room-sized bins containing upward of a thousand tons of the most popular building blocks, things like structural fibers. They are made at plants on the West Coast and shipped here by subway for ready use. Other kinds are made on site using the special-purpose assemblers. Carl’s main room has several cabinet-sized boxes hooked up to the plumbing, each taking in raw materials, running them through this sort of specialized molecular machinery, and pumping out a milky syrup of product. One syrup contains motors, another one contains computers, and another is full of microscopic plug-in light sources. All go into tanks for later use. Now they are being used. The mix for the Red Cross tent job is mostly structural fiber stronger than the old bulletproof-vest materials. Other building blocks also go in, including motors, computers, and dozens of little struts, angle brackets, and doohickies. The mix would look like someone had stirred together the parts from a dozen toy sets, if the parts were big enough to see. In fact, though the largest parts would be no more than blurry dots, if you saw one under a normal optical microscope. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The mix also contains block-assemblers, floating free like everything else. These machines are big, about like an office building in our simulation view with the standard setting. Each has several jointed arms, a computer, and several plugs and sockets. These do the actual construction work. To begin the building, pumps pour the mixture into a manufacturing pond. The constant tumbling motions of microscopic things in liquids would be too disorganized for building anything so large as a tent, so the block-assemblers start grabbing their neighbors. Within moments, they have linked up to form a framework spread through the liquid. Now that they are plugged together, they divide up job, and get to work. Instructions pour in from Carl’s desktop computer. The block-assemblers use sticky grippers to pull specific kinds of building blacks out of the liquid. They use their arms to plug them together. For a permanent job, they would be using blocks that bond together chemically and permanently. For these temporary tents, though, the Red Cross design uses a set of standard blocks that are put together with amazingly ordinary fasteners: these blocks have snaps, plugs, and screws, though of course the parts are atomically perfect and the threads on the screws are single helical rows of atoms. The resulting joints weaken the tent’s structure somewhat, but who cares? The basic materials are almost a hundred times stronger than steel, so there is strength to waste if it makes manufacturing more convenient. Fiber segments snap together to make fabrics. Some segments contain motors and computers, linked by fibers that contain power and data cables. Struts snap together with more motors and computers to make the tent’s main structures. Special surfaces are made of special building blocks. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

From the human perspective, each tent is a lightweight structure that contains most of the conveniences and comforts of an apartment: cooking facilities, a bathroom, beds, windows, air-condition, specially modified to meet the environmental demands of the quake-stricken country. From a builder’s perspective, especially from a nanomachine’s point of view, the tent is just another structure slapped together from a few hundred kinds of prefab parts. In a matter of seconds, each block-assembler has put together a few thousand parts, and its section of the tent is done. In fact, the whole thing is done: many trillions of hands make light work. A crane swings out over the pond and starts plucking out tent packages as fresh mix flows in. Maria’s concern has drawn her back to the plant to see how the building is going. “It’s coming along,” Carl reassures her. “Look, the first batch of tents is out.” It the warehouse, the first pallet is already stacked with five layers of dove-gray “suitcases”: tents dried and packed for transport. Carl grabs a tent by then handle and lugs it out the door. He pushes a tab on the corner labeled “Open,” and it takes over a minute to unfold to a structure a half-dozen paces on a side. The tent is big, and light enough to blow away if it did not cling to the ground so tightly. Maris and Carl tour the tent, testing the appliances, checking the construction of furniture: everything is extremely lightweight compared to the bulk-manufactured goods of the 1990s, tough but almost hollow. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Like the other structures, the walls and floors are full of tiny motors and struts controlled by simple computers like the ones used in twentieth-century cars, televisions, and pinball machines. They can unfold and refold. They can also flex to produce sound like a high-quality speaker, or to absorb sound to silence outdoors racket. The whole three-room setup is small and efficient, looking like a cross between a boat cabin and a Japanese business hotel room. Outside, though, it is a little more than a box. Maria shakes her head, knowing full well what architects can do these days when they try to make a building really fit its site. Oh well, she thinks, These won’t be used for long. “Well, that looks pretty good to me,” says Carl with satisfaction. “And I think we’ll be finished in another hour.” Maria is relieved. “I’m glad you had those pools freed up so fast.” By three o’clock, they have shipped three thousand emergency shelters, sending them by subway. Within half an hour, tents are being set up at the disaster site. When we think about global space, of course China comes to mind. While its neighbors try to figure out where they may fit in new Asia they assume will be dominated by China, China no longer sees itself as merely an Asian power. It talks about creating an Asian free-trade sone, but its ambitions—economic and otherwise—are global. It is changing its relations not only to time but to the deep fundamental of space as well. Starting with the reforms in the 1980s and ‘90s, its opening to foreign investment, its entry into the World Trade Organization and its immense expansion of imports and exports, China has, with every passing day, been deepening and diffusing its links to the outside World. And here, too, the twin track strategy is evident. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

At one level, floods of affordable Chinese good blanket the World, undercutting the makers of Mexican electronic components, Indonesian garments or Colombian copper wire. These are not turned out in China’s industrial-age sweatshops. However, China is also encouraging its high-tech companies to move out and conquer the World. Thus Lenovo, its top PC maker, buys IBM’s PC manufacturing division. Huawei, its big I.T. company, boasts of having ten thousand R&D workers and of maintaining labs in India, Britain, Sweden and he United States of America. It partners with Intel, Microsoft, Siemens and Qualcom to produce communications equipment. China’s expanding spatial reach will soon be more evident in finance as well. The Chinese government has launched “Made in China 2025,” a state-led industrial policy that seeks to make China dominant in global high-tech manufacturing. The program aims to use government subsidies, mobilize state-owned enterprises, and pursue intellectual property acquisition to catch up with—and then surpass—Western technological prowess in advanced industries. For the United States of America and other major industrialized democracies, however, these tactics not only undermine Beijing’s stated adherence to international trade rules but also pose a security risk. Washington argues that the policy relies on discriminatory treatment of foreign investment, forced technology transfers, intellectual property theft, and cyber espionage, practices that have encouraged President Donald J. Trump to levy tariffs on Chinese goods and black several Chinese-back acquisitions of technology firms. Meanwhile, many other countries have tightened their oversight of foreign investment, intensifying debate over how best to respond to China’s behavior. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

What is China 2025? China plans to thrust itself, big-time, as it will no longer be a region long regarded as America’s backyard—counterbalancing America’s strong presence in China’s backyard, Taiwan. Made in China 2025 is the government’s ten-year plan to update China’s manufacturing base by rapidly developing ten high-tech industries. Chief among these are electric cars and other new energy vehicles, next-generation information technology (IT) and telecommunications, and advanced robotics and artificial intelligence. Other major sectors include agricultural technology; aerospace engineering; new synthetic materials; advanced electrical equipment; emerging bio-medicine; high-end rail infrastructure; and high-tech maritime engineering. However, China’s highly focused drive toward economic expansion should, in theory, keep it too busy for foreign military adventures. Nevertheless, the sectors to the so-called fourth industrial revolution, which refers to the integration of big data, could computing, and other emerging technologies into global manufacturing supply chains. In this regard, Chinese policy makers drew inspiration from the German government’s Industry 4.0 development plan. China is acquiring long-range unmanned aircraft and air-refueling equipment that extended the range of its hair force. It not has nuclear missiles that can reach target all across the United States of America. And it seeks to transform its navy—once designed to protect coastal waters—into a “blue water” nuclear armed fleet capable of ever-more distant operations. China 2025 sets specific targets: by 2025, China aims to achieve 70 percent self-sufficiency in high-tech industries, and by 2049—the hundredth anniversary of the People’s Republic of China—it seeks to dominate position in global markets. China compresses time, it also expands its influence spatially, profoundly altering its traditional economic—and military—relations to these deep fundamentals. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Also, keep in mind the highly sought-after Northren California climate provides year-round recreational opportunities for hiking, biking, golfing, and high-end shopping.
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The bravest fear that Americans have is that the conscience has gone down before the dollar. If we do not save this Great Republic, she will become rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest will have long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad will teach her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who will applaud the crushing of other people’s liberties, will live to suffer for their mistake in their own persons.  Much of the government is irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich, China, and other nations and their hangers on, the suffrage is becoming a mere machine, when they use as they chose. There is no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket. From showily and sumptuously entertaining neighboring titled aristocracies, and from trading their daughters to them, the plutocrats came in the course of time to hunger for titles and heredities themselves. The drift toward monarchy, in some form or other, began; it was spoken of in whispers at first, later in a bolder voice. The sleeping republic must awake at last, but not too late. We must drive the money changers from the temple, and put the government into clean hands. Otherwise, before long, the money changers will buy up half the country with soldier-pensions and turn a measure which has originally been a righteous one into a machine for the manufacture of bond-slaves—a machine which is at the same time an irremovable instrument of tyranny–for every pensioner has a vote, and every man and woman who has ever been acquainted with a soldier is a pensioner; pensions are dated back to the Fall of Man, and hordes of men who have never handled a weapon in their lives came forward and drew four hundred and twenty years’ back-pay. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The country’s conquests, so far being profitable to the Treasury, has been an intolerable burden from the beginning. The pensions, the conquests, and corruption together, have brought bankruptcy in spite of the maddest taxation, the government’s credit is gone, the arsenals are empty, the country is unprepared for war. The military and naval schools, and all commissioned offices in the army and navy, are the preserve of the money changers; and the standing army—the creation of the conquest-days—is their property. The army and navy refuse to serve the new congress and the new Administration, and said ironically, “What are you going to do about it?” A difficult question to answer. Landsmen man such ships which are not abroad watching the conquests—and sunk them all, in honest attempts to do their duty. A civilian army, officered by civilians, has risen brimming with the patriotism of an old forgotten day and is rushing multitudinously to the front, armed with sporting-guns and pitchforks—and the standing army sweeps into space. For the money-changers have privately sold out the shoemaker. He conferred titles of nobility upon the money-changers, and mounted the republic’s throne without firing a shot. It is thus that money has become our master. Intent on catching up with the West, China’s leaders knew this would be impossible if China focused exclusively on low-tech development while the United States of America shed Second Wave industries and raced to build a high-tech Third Wave economy. China, they therefore decided, needed more than sweatshops. It also needed its own World-beating, high-value-adding, knowledge-intensive sector. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

To make this twin-track policy work, Chin had to compress time—to accomplish in decades what took others one or more centuries. It would also have to extend its spatial reach. And, most important, it would need advanced I.T. telecom, digitalization and access to the latest economically relevant knowledge. This explains why China’s strategy since then has focused—whether deliberately or inadvertently—on precisely the three deep fundamentals emphasized in these pages: Time, space, and knowledge. Thus China had become remarkably skillful in the use of speed as a competitive weapon in international trade. According to Robert B. Cassidy, a U.S. government trade official cited in BusinessWeek, Japanese, South Korean and European exports often took “four or five years to develop their place in the market…China overwhelms a market so quickly you do not see it coming.” So fast, in fact, “that it’s nearly impossible [for companies] to adjust through the usual strategies, such as automating or squeezing suppliers,” the magazine adds. By the time they do, it is too late. And when China sets a strategic priority, it can break domestic speed records as well. “What happened in the 1990s in China was nothing short of a social miracle,” writers Robert C. Fonow, former president of Sprint Japan and general manager of Scientific-Atlanta in Shanghai. “In the space of 10 years, China has developed one of the most advanced telecommunications infrastructures in the World. Within a few years, it is likely to have the single most advanced telecommunications infrastructure in the World.” To reach this point, Fonow explains, China would first “bring in new technology as quickly as possible, study it, imitate it, and improve it.” Next, it would “develop indigenous technology capabilities equal to the West’s and use them as a base to develop a greater capacity for technological innovation.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Nor is acceleration in China limited to business tactics and technology. It is part of the country’s new culture. When author Alexander Stille went to Xian to write about historic artifacts like its third-century BC army of terracotta warriors, he wondered if ordinary people were troubled by the rush forward. “Most Chinese,” he writes, “many of whom have known famine and extraordinary hardships in their own lifetimes, are surprisingly unsentimental about these changes…For most younger Chinese [change] cannot come fast enough.” That was not the case during thousands of years of China’s past. The executive thought police, as such, earn their paychecks. Their jobs are filled with stress and difficulty. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate the staggering complexity of the rules needed in engineering and integrating a large-scale corporate information system that delivers information to those who need it…that prevents fraud, sabotage, or invasion of  personal privacy…that regulates access to various networks and data banks by employees, customers, and suppliers…that sets priorities among them…that produces numberless specialized reports…that allows users to customize their software…that meets dozens of other requirements, does it all within budgetary constraints—and then does it over and again as new technologies, competitors, and products appear. Devising rules to guide such a system requires such high-level technical expertise that CIOs and their staffs often lose sight of the human implications of their decisions. Who gets access is, in fact, a political issue. Privacy is a political issues. Designing a system so that it serves one department better than another is a political act. If one unit gets lower communications priority than another, so that it must wait for service, even timing is political. The allocation of costs is always a power issue. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Thus, as soon as we begin to speak of policing information, all sorts of disquieting “para-political” questions pop up. Two employees are caught up in bitter personal feud. One of them learns the appropriate computer passwords, enters the personnel files, and puts damaging material into an adversary’s records. None of this comes to light until the victim has already left and gone to work for another firm, where discovery of the damaging information leads to dismissal. What happens? Who is responsible? The first company? If he or she loses access to an important data base, are a worker’s chances for promotion unfairly reduced? With only a trace of imagination, it is possible to multiply scores of such questions. In the absence of comprehensive public policies, it is left to private firms to think through the personal and political implications of all the rules governing their information systems. However, should such questions, with their human rights implications, be left entirely to private companies? And if so, who in any particular firm should write the rules? The chief information officer? We are, here, on thing and alien ice. Few have much experience with the ethical, legal, and ultimately political questions arising from the need to impose constraints on the flow of business information. Top management, as a rule, delegates the task. However, to whom? Should companies establish internal “information councils” or even “legislatures,” to write the laws governing information rights, responsibilities, and access? Should unions share in this decision-making? Do we need “corporate courts” to settle disputes over security and access? Do we need “information ethicists” to define a new informational morality? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Will the rules regulating information in industry condition public attitudes toward freedom of information in the larger society? Might they accustom us to censorship and secrecy? Will we eventually need an explicit Bill of Electronic Information Rights? Every one f these is a power issue, and the decision about them will shift power within the firm and, ultimately, in society at large. The more turbulent, unstable, and non-equilibrial tomorrow’s business environment becomes, the more unpredictable the needs of users. Rapid change means chance. It means uncertainty. It means competition from the least-expected quarter. It means big projects that collapse and small ones that stun one with their success. It means new technologies, new kinds of skills and workers, and wholly unprecedented economic conditions. All this is amplified when the competition is blistering hot and comes, very often, from countries or cultures that are drastically different from the one the business was designed to serve. How, in this kind of World, can even the cleverest CIO accurately pre-specify what information will be needed by whom? Or for how long? In today’s high-turbulence environment, business survival requires a stream of innovative products or services. Creativity requires a kind of corporate glasnost—an openness to imagination, a tolerance for deviance, for individuality, and the serendipity that has historically accounted for many creative discoveries, from nylon and latex paint to products like the NutraSweet fat substitute. There is, therefore, a profound contradiction between the need for careful channeling and close control of information, on the one hand, and the need for innovation on the other. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The safer and surer a business information system, and the better it is protected, pre-defined, pre-structured, and policed, the more it will constrain creativity and constipate the organization. What we learn, therefore, is that the information wars now ranging in the outside World—over everything from supermarket scanners and standards to television sets and technonationalism—are mirrored inside the corporation as well. Power, in the business of tomorrow, will flow to those who have the best information about the limits of information. However, before it does, the info-wars now intensifying will alter the very shape of business. To know how, we need to take a closer look at this crucial resource—knowledge—whose pursuit will shake the powers-that-be from New York to Tokyo, from Moscow to Monte-video. Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near-monopoly of the World’s seed stock define a total environment that integrates food production from planting to consumption. Although Levi-Strauss is right that “Civilization manufactures monoculture like sugar beet,” only since World War II has a completely synthetic orientation begun to dominate. Agriculture itself takes more organic matter out of the soil that it puts back, and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals. Regarding the latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the land; along with cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present domesticated state is totally dependent on agriculture for its existence, is especially bad. J. Russell Smith called it “the killer of continents…and one of the worst enemies of the human future.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The erosions cost of one bushel of Iowa corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the more general large-scale industrial destruction of farmland. The continuous tillage of huge monoculture, with massive use of chemicals and no application of manure or humus, obviously raised soil deterioration and solid loss to much higher levels. The dominant agricultural mode has it that soil needs massive infusions of chemicals, supervised by technicians whose overriding goal is to maximize production. Artificial fertilizers and all the rest from this outlook eliminate the need for the complex life of the soil and indeed convert it into a mere instrument of production. The promise of technology is total control, a completely contrived environment that simply supersedes the natural balance of the biosphere. However, more and more energy is expended to purchase great monocultural yields that are beginning to decline, never mind the toxic contamination of the soil, groundwater and food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that cropland erosion is occurring in this country at a rate of two billion tones of soil a year. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that over one third of topsoil is already gone forever. The ecological imbalances caused by monocropping, not cultivating and watering the lands and forests, and synthetic fertilizers causes enormous increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop loss due to insects has actually doubled. Technology responds, of course, with spiraling application of more synthetic fertilizers, and weed and pest killers, accelerating the crime against nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Another post-war phenomenon was the Green Revolution, billed as the salvation of the impoverished Third World by American capital and technology. However, rather than feeding the hungry, the Green Revolution drove millions of less affluent people from farmlands in Asia, Latin America and Africa as victims of the program that fosters large corporate farms. It amounted to an enormous technological colonization creating dependency on capital-intensive agribusiness, destroying older agrarian communalism, requiring massive fossil fuel consumption and assaulting nature on an unprecedented scale. Desertification, or loss of soil due to agriculture, has been steadily increasing. Each year, a total area equivalent to more than two Belgiums is being converted to desert Worldwide. The fate of the World’s tropical rainforests is a factor in the acceleration of this dessication: half of them have been erased in the past 30 years. In Botswana, the last wilderness region of African has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle and almost half of the rainforests of Central America, primarily to raise cattle for the hamburger markets in the USA and Europe. The few areas safe from deforestation are where agriculture does not want to go; the destruction of the land is proceeding in the USA over a greater land area than was encompassed by the original 13 colonies, just as it is the heart of the severe Africa famine of the mid of the mid-‘80s and the extinction of one species of wild animal and plant after another. Returning to animals, one is reminded of the words of Genesis in which God said to Noah, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

When newly discovered territory was first visited by the advance guard of production, as a wide descriptive literature shows, the wild mammals and birds showed no fear whatsoever of the explorers. The agriculturalized mentality, however, so aptly foretold in the biblical passage, projects an exaggerated belief in the fierceness of wild creatures, which follows from progressive estrangement and loss of contact with the animal World plus the need to maintain dominance over it. The fate of domestic animals is defined by the fact that agricultural technologists continually look to factories as models of how to refine their own production systems. Nature is banished from these systems as, increasingly, farm animals are kept largely immobile throughout their deformed lives, maintained in high-density, wholly artificial environments. Billions of chickens, pigs and veal calves, for example, no longer even see the light of day much less roam the fields—fields growing silent as more and more pastures are plowed up to grow feed for these hideously confined beings. The high-tech chickens, whose beak-ends have been clipped oof to reduce death due to stress-caused fighting, often exists four or even five to a 13-inch by 18-inch cage and are periodically deprived of food and water for up to tend days to regulate their egg-laying cycles. Pigs live on concrete floors with no bedding; foot-rot, tail-biting and cannibalism are endemic because of physical conditions and stress. Sows nurse their piglets separated by mental grates, mother and offspring barred from natural contact. Veal calves are often raised in total darkness, chained to stalls so narrow as to disallow turning around or other normal postural adjustment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

These animals are generally under regimens of constant medication due to the tortures involved and their heightened susceptibility to diseases: automated animal production relies upon hormones and antibiotics. Such systematic cruelty, not to mention the kind of food that results, brings to mind the fact that captivity itself and every form of enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor or model. Food has been one of our most direct contacts with the natural environment, but we are rendered increasingly dependent on a technological production system in which finally even our senses have become redundant; taste, once vital for judging a food’s value or safety, is no longer experienced, but rather certified by a label. Overall, the healthfulness of what we consume declines and land once cultivated for food now produces coffee, tobacco, grains for alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs creating the context for famine. Even non-processed foods like fruits and vegetables are now grown to be tasteless and uniform because the demands of handling, transportation and storage, not nutrition or pleasures, are the highest considerations. Total war borrowed from agriculture to defoliate millions of acres in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, but the plundering of the biosphere proceeds even more lethally in its daily, global forms. Food as a function of production has also failed miserably on the most obvious level: half of the World, as everyone knows, suffers from malnourishment ranging to starvation itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Meanwhile, the diseases of civilization, contrasted with the healthful pre-farming diets, underline the joyless, sickly World of chronic maladjustment we inhabit as prey of the manufacturers of medicine, cosmetics, and fabricated food. Domestication reaches new heights of the pathological in genetic food engineering, with new types of animals in the offing as well as contrived microorganisms and plants. Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the World of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system. The project of subduing nature, begun and carried through by agriculture, has assumed gigantic proportions. The “success” of civilization’s progress, a success earlier humanity never wanted, tastes more and more like ashes. Thus, we appear to have reached the end of the line. We cannot expand; we seem unable to intensify production without wreaking further havoc, and the planet is fast becoming a wasteland. This has come to pass very fast, and it leaves interplanetary archaeologists of the future a lot to discover. The probable fate of civilization will look to archaeologists of the future as a very long and stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology…leading rapidly to extinction. Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous. Physiologist Hared Diamond termed the initiation of agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible without its dissolution. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We last talked about how Technopoly, science is used to make democracy “rational.” Polling is still another way. Just as statistics has spawned huge testing industry, it has done the same for the polling of “public opinion.” One may concede, at the start, that there are some uses of polling that may be said to be reliable, especially if the case involves a greatly restricted question such as, Do you plan to vote for X or Y? However, to say a procedure is reliable is not to say it is useful. The question is as yet undecided whether knowledge of voter trends during political campaign enriches or demeans the electoral process. However, when polls are used to guide public policy, we have a different sort of issues altogether. I have been in the presence of a group of United States of America’s congressmen who were gathered to discuss, over a period of two days, what might be done to make the future of American more survivable and, if possible, more humane. Ten consultants were called upon to offer perspectives and advice. Eight of them were pollsters. They spoke of the “trends” their polling uncovered; for example, that people were no longer interested in the woman’s movement, did not regard environmental issues as of paramount importance, did not think the “drug problem” was getting worse, and so on. It was apparent, at once that these polling results would become the basis of how the congressmen thought the future should be managed. The ideas the congressmen had (all men, by the way) receded to the background. Their own perceptions, instincts, insights, and experience paled into irrelevance. Confronted by “social scientists,” they were inclined to do what the “trends” suggested would satisfy the populace. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

It is not unreasonable to argue that the polling of public opinion puts democracy on a sound and scientific footing. If our political leaders are supposed to represent us, they must have some information about what we “believe.” In principle, there are at least four of them. The first has to do with the forms of the questions that are put to the public. Like, is it proper to smoke and pray at the same time. Or, to take a more realistic example: If we ask people whether they think it acceptable for the environment to continue to be polluted, we are likely to come up with answers quite different from those generated by the question, Do you think the protection of the environment is of paramount importance? Or, Do you think safety in the streets is more important than environmental protection? The public’s “opinion” on almost any issue will be a function of the question asked. (I might point out that in the seminar held by the congressmen, not one asked a question about the questions. They were interested in results, not in how these were obtained, and it did not seem to occur to them that the results and how they are obtained are inseparable.) Typically, pollsters ask questions that will elicit yes or no answers. Is it necessary to point out that such answers do not give a robust meaning to the phrase “the public opinion”? Were you, for example, to answer “No” to the question “Do you think the drug problem can be reduced by government programs?” one would hardly know much of interest or value about your opinion. However, allowing you to speak or write at length on the matter would, of course, rule out using statistics. The point is that the use of statistics in polling changes the meaning of “public opinion” as dramatically as television changes the meaning of “political debate.” In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Second, the technique of polling promotes the assumption that an opinion is a thing inside people that can be exactly located and extracted by the pollster’s questions. However, there is an alternative point of view, of which we might say, it is what Jefferson had in mind. An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate. A question may “invite” an opinion, but it also may modify and recast it; we might better say that people do not exactly “have” opinions but are, rather, involved in “opinioning.” That an opinion is conceived of as a measurable thing falsifies the process by which people, in fact, do their opinioning; and how people do their opinioning goes to the heart of the meaning of a democratic society. Polling tells us nothing about this, and tends to hide the process from our view. Which leads to the third point. Generally, polling ignores what people know about the subjects they are queried on. In a culture that is not obsessed with measuring and ranking things, this omission would probably be regarded as bizarre. However, let us imagine what we would think of opinion polls if the questions came in pairs, indicating what people “believe” and what they “know” about the subject. If I may make up some figures, let us suppose we read the following: “The latest poll indicates that 72 percent of the American public believes we should withdraw economic aid from Nicaragua. Of those who expressed this opinion, 28 percent thought Nicaragua was in central Asia, 18 percent thought it was an island near New Zealand, and 27.4 percent believed that ‘Africans should help themselves,’ obviously confusing Nicaragua with Nigeria. Moreover, of those polled, 61.8 percent did not know what ‘economic aid’ means.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Were pollsters inclined to provide such information, the prestige and power of polling would be considerably reduced. Perhaps even congressmen, confronted by massive ignorance, would invest their own understandings with greater trust. The fourth problem with polling is that it shifts the locus of responsibility between political leaders and their constituents. It is true enough that congressmen are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. However, it is also true that congressmen are expected to use their own judgment about what is in the public’s best interest. For this, they must consult their own experience and knowledge. Before the ascendance of polling, political leaders, though never indifferent to the opinions of their constituents, were largely judged on their capacity to make decisions based on such wisdom as they possessed; that is, political leaders were responsible for the decisions they made. With the refinement and extension of the polling process, they are under increasing pressure to forgo deciding anything for themselves and to defer to the opinions of the voters, no matter how ill-informed and shortsighted those opinions might be. We can see this process of responsibility-shift even more clearly in the cause of the statistically based ratings of television shows. The definition of a “good” television show has become purely and simply a matter of its having high ratings. A “bad” show has low ratings. The responsibility of a television writer, in a word, is entirely responsible to the audience. There is no need for the writer, in a word, is entirely responsible to the audience. There is no need for the writer to consult tradition, aesthetic standards, thematic plausibility, refinements of tastes, or even plain comprehensibility. The iron rule of public opinion is all that matter.  #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Television executives are fond of claiming that their medium is the most democratic institution in America: a plebiscite is held every week to determine which programs will survive. This claim is given added weight by a second claim: creative artists have never indifferent to the preferences and opinions of their audiences. Writers, for example, write for people, for their approbation and understanding. However, writers also write for themselves and because they have something they want to say, not always because readers have something they want to hear. By giving constant deference to public preferences, polling changes the motivation of writers; their entire effort is to increase “the numbers.” Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artists. However, values rather than reasons sustain communities. Thus from the outset of this second Renaissance, scholar treated Greek philosophers more as natural scientists treat atoms than as they treat other natural scientists. They were not invited to join the serious discussion of the scholars. All things Greek were subjected to our analysis based on the views of modern philosophy. This procedure alters radically what one expects to learn from them. Men of the Enlightenment looked down on Greek thinkers because they thought them wrong. Romantics respected them because their truth or falsity became a matter of indifference. Schiller’s distinction between naïve and sentimental poetry is an example of the kind of categorization that became common. Homer’s charm is a result of his not having seen what we see, his unawareness of the abyss. He still walked on enchanted ground, and his poetry lacked that reflectiveness imposed on us who know that the gods can depart. He was unaware of the death of gods and cultures as children are unaware of the death of men. He lived in the youth of the World.  #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

If we are to be whole and happy, we must recover that direct relation to things men once had. However, we must do it in the company of our awareness of the vulnerability of things. The artist has a greater responsibility than Homer knew because he does not merely imitate nature but creates it. A successful modern artist would be deeper, more fully self-conscious than was Homer. The naïve Homer belonged to a culture different from that of the sentimental Schiller, and has to be understood in his own cultural context. Naivete consists in large measure in the lack of “historical consciousness,” the belief that the greats are individuals to be understood individually and in the same way at all times. Plutarch believed he was showing forth images of greatness itself, while in fact his heroes are just Greeks and Romans, high expressions of their culture, from which they are inseparable. The awareness of this is the peculiarly modern superiority or insight. Schiller was, of course, an unusually profound and sensitive reader. It is doubtful whether his reading of Homer teaches us very much about Homer, because it is too encumbered by what we now believe to be Romantic prejudices. However, Homer, interpreted and misinterpreted by Schiller, contributed to his own artistic creation, which was founding a German literature and a German culture. It is an example of what some would call “creative misinterpretation.” The faith in one’s own vision, perhaps fed by the inspiration of others’ visions, is what is important. An act uninformed by learning is the important thing. Implicit in what I am saying is that while Schiller’s views are not true but are productive, there are true views, known presumably to scholars, which are not productive. This is what Goethe implies. The scholar is an objective reasoner, the poet a subjective creator. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Here is where Nietzsche enters, arguing with unparalleled clarity and vigor that if we take “historical consciousness” seriously, there cannot be objectivity, that scholarship as we know it is simply a delusion, and a dangerous one, for objectivity undermines subjectivity. All of classical scholarship in Germany, with its exquisite sense of the historical determination of the mind, proceeded as though the mind of the German scholars were not so determined. The discovery of culture and the folk-mind means that there cannot be universal principles of understanding. Reason is a myth that makes mythmaking impossible to comprehend. Creativity and a science of human things cannot coexist, and since the science of human things admits that man is creative, the creative man wins the day. However, scholars cannot behave creatively. The discovery of culture as the element in which man becomes himself produces an imperative: Build and sustain culture. This scholar cannot do. Culture is not only the condition of life, it is the condition of knowing. Without a German culture, the scholar in Germany cannot confront other cultures. While aiding the individual in feeling more powerful, Satanism can make relating to others outside the group even more difficult. A Satanist who formerly felt out of sync with society suddenly realized why: he was the one who was really in sync all the time; it is the rest of the World who are the “chumps.” Socializing with others of like mind only reinforces the process; and inferiority complex is transformed into a superiority complex. Weird becomes weirder. Once that happens, the need to believe becomes even stronger. Dr. Freud likened the belief in magic to a stage found in primitives and obsessional neurotics in which the thought process themselves become overvalued compared to reality. He called this the “omnipotence of thought” and noted that patients who exemplified this would go to extreme length of self-deception in order to protect their belief system. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Any accidental connection can reinforce the neurotic’s belief in his own powers: think of someone, and if that person appears, the thought made him appear. The several thousand other times that the person did not appear are conveniently forgotten. One can often see this phenomenon at work among Satanists, from the claim that the sudden appearance of a parking space was “proof” that it has been magically conjured up, to the attribution of survival of an automobile accident to “protection” by infernal powers. Seldom will a Satanist bale the Powers of Darkness for letting him get into the accident in the first place; if he did, he would be an ex-Satanist, perhaps a born-again Christian. Once advantage of magical thinking is that the results do not have to be definite and are subject to misinterpretation. Flexibility is built into the system and a ritual does not have to achieve its total purpose in order to be deemed successful. If a magician puts a death curse on an enemy, for example, and three days later the would-be victim burns his finger, the magician is able to interpret that as proof that his ritual just was not strong enough. The danger in such groups is that as the members come to rely more on this mode of thought, they can become totally emotionally dependent on the group as their alienation from society increases. A Christian man’s great-grandparents had practised magic. As a result of this his grandparents had developed mediumistic abilities. His grandmother has suffered from depression and had an irritable and selfish nature. Her psychic disturbances had finally led to her being committed to a mental hospital. The trouble reappeared in the next generation, in the generation of the man’s parents. When however, the man’s father actually turned to Christ all the symptoms of compulsion and other psychic complications disappeared. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Ok, ok, it is REALLY early, but that doesn’t stop us from dreaming up our menu ideas for the coming holidays! No need to make fun – you’ll thank us when you’re enjoying the delicious eats! 🤤

We’re thinking something really lavish this year – that pantry is large enough to hold all the spices we need, and the island at Residence 1 gives all the room necessary for little hands to help us prep the dinner.

What’s your favorite dish for special occasions?

Cresleigh Plumas Ranch at Riverside is an entertainer’s dream home. This spacious, open floorplan invites natural light and maximizes space and seemlessly blends indoor living with the charm of out door hosting and toasting and recrreation.

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#CresleighRiverside

We, free citizens of the Great Republic, feel an honest pride in her greatness, her strength, her just and gentle government, her wide liberties, her honored name, her stainless history, her unsmirched flag, her hands clean from oppression of the weak and from malicious conquest, her hospital door that stands open to the hunted and the persecuted and the rich of all nations; we are proud of the judicious respect in which she is held by the monarchies which hem her in on every side, and proudest of all of that lofty patriotism which we inherited from our fathers, which we have kept pure, and which won our liberties in the beginning and has preserved them unto this day. While that patriotism endures the Republic is safe, her greatness is secure, and against them the powers of the Earth cannot prevail. I pray you to pause and consider. Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object—robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. To-day they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician’s trick—a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every school-house in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor—none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, “Our Country, right or wrong,” and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

For in a republic, who is “the country?” Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant—merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who is not. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is “the country?” Is it the newspaper? is it the pulpit? is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who is not. Who are the thousand—that is to say, who are “the country?” In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which is not. You cannot shrink this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country—hold up your head! you have nothing to be ashamed of. Only when a republic’s life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

This republic’s life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands. The stupid phrase needed help, and it got another one: “Even if the war be wrong, we are in it and must fight it out: we can not retire from it without dishonor. You have planted a seed and it will grow. Perhaps the most abusive example of technology is found in the work of Francis Galton, who was born in 1822, died in 1911, and therefore lived during the richest period of technological invention. He may be thought of as one of the Founding Fathers of Technopoly. Galton is also known as the founder of “eugenics,” a term he coined, which means the “science” of arranging marriage and family so as to produce the best possible offspring based on the hereditary characteristics of the parents. He believed that anything could be measured and that statistical procedures, in particular, were the technology that could open the pathway to real knowledge about every form of human behavior. The next time you watch a televised beauty contest in which women are ranked numerically, you should remember Francis Galton, whose pathological romance with numbers originated this form of idiocy. Being unsatisfied with vagueness about where the most “beauty” was to be found, he constructed a “beauty map” of the British Isles. As he told us, he classified “the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent.” He then proved statistically tht London had the most beautiful girls, Aberdeen the must unattractive; this is no doubt made it awkward for Galton to spend his vacation in Scotland. If this were not enough, he also invented a method for quantifying boredom (by counting the number of fidgets) and even proposed a statistical inquiry for determining the efficacy of prayer. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

However, Galton’s main interest was in demonstrating, statistically, the inheritance of intelligence. To that end, he established a laboratory at the International Exposition of 1884, where for threepence people could have their skulls measured and receive Galton’s assessment of their intelligence. Apparently, a visitor received no extra credit for demanding his or her money back, which would surely have been a sign of intelligence. We can be sure that not many did, since Galton was considered a major intellect of his day. In fact, Lewis Terman, the man most responsible for promoting IQ tests in America, calculated that Galton’s IQ was more than 200. Terman, who fancied making such estimates of the dead, ranked Charles Darwin (Galton’s cousin, incidentally) at a mere 135, and poor Copernicus somewhere between 100 and 110. For a definitive history and analysis of the malignant role played by statistics in the “measurement” of intelligence, I refer to the reader to Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant book The Mismeasure of Man. Here, I will only cite three points made by Gould, which I believe are sufficient to convince anyone with a higher IQ than Copernicus of the dangers of abusing statistics. The first problem is called reification, which means converting an abstract idea (mostly, a word) into a thing. In this context, reification works in the following way: We use the word “intelligence” to refer to a variety of human capabilities of which we approve. There is no such thing as “intelligence.” It is a word, not a thing, and a word of a very high order of subtraction. However, if we believe it to be a thing like the pancreas or liver, then we will believe scientific procedure can locate it and measure it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The second problem is ranking. Ranking requires a criterion for assigning individuals to their place in a single series As Gould remarks, what better criterion can be used than an objective number? In the ranking of intelligence, we therefor assume that intelligence is not only a thing, but a single thing, located in the brain, and accessible to the assignment of a number. It is as if “beauty” were determined to inhere in the size of a woman’s chest. Then all we would have to do is measure the chest and rank each woman accordingly, and we would have an “objective” measure of “beauty.” The third point is that in doing this, we would have formulated our question “Who is the fairest of all?” in a restricted and biased way. And yet this would go unnoticed, because, as Gould writes, “The mystique of science proclaims that numbers are the ultimate test of objectivity.” This means that the way we have defined the concept will recede from our consciousness—that is, its fundamental subjectivity will become invisible, and the objective number itself will become reified. One would think that such a process would appear ridiculous on the breast of it, especially since, by believing it, we must conclude that Dolly Parton is objectively proved to be more beautiful than Audrey Hepburn. Or, in the case of intelligence, that Galton had twice as much of it as Copernicus. Nonetheless, in Technopoly all this is take very seriously, albeit not without a few protests. After a lifetime of working in the field of intelligence measurement, E.L. Thorndike observed that intelligence tests suffer from three small defects: “Just what they measure is not known; how far it is proper to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and compute ratios with the measures obtained is not known; just what the measures signify concerning intellect is not known. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In other words, those who administer intelligence tests quite literally do not know what they are doing. That is why David McClelland remarked, “Psychologists should be ashamed of themselves for promoting a view of general intelligence that has engendered such a testing program.” Joseph Weizenbaum summed it up by saying, “Few ‘scientific’ concepts have so thoroughly muddled the thinking of both scientists and the general public as that of the ‘intelligence quotient’ of ‘IQ.’ The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.” Gould has documented some of this harm, and Howard Gardner has tried to alleviate it (in his book Frames of Mind). However, Technopoly resists such reproaches, because it needs to believe that science is an entirely objective enterprise. Lacking a lucid set of ethics and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity. This quest is especially evident not only in our efforts to determine precisely how smart people are but also in our attempts to find out precisely how smart groups of people are. Aside from the fact that the procedures used do not and cannot give such an answer, one must ask, Of what Earthly use is it to declare that one group of people is smarter than another? We must keep in mind the story of statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet. That is to say, in a culture that reveres statistics, we can never be sure what short of nonsense will lodge in people’s heads. The only plausible answer to the question why we use statistics for such measurements is that it is done for sociopolitical reasons whose essential malignancy is disguised by the cover of “scientific inquiry.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

One has to understand, certain things are only one’s opinions but can be confirmed by objective measure, then one can believe one has an irreproachable authority for making decisions about the allocation of resources. This is how, in Technopoly, science is used t make democracy “rational.” Now, the title of Chief Information Officer did not yet exist in American firms but there was a small “Data Priesthood”—the data-processing professionals. Because no one else could make the “giant brain” do anything, these few professionals essentially “owned” the firm’s mainframes, and anyone who wanted information processed had to come to them. The priests enjoyed the blessing of an info-monopoly. Then came the micros. Desktop computers arrived with the force of a whirlwind in the late 1970s. Immediately sensing that these inexpensive new machines would erode their power, many data professionals threw everything they had into a campaign to keep them out of their companies. The DP priests sneered at the microcomputers’ limited capacity and small size. They fought against the budgeting funds for them. However, just as an entrenched monopoly, Western Union, could not keep the telephones out of the hands of Americans in the 19^th century, the business community’s voracious hunger for information swept aside all opposition from the data professionals. Soon thousands of executives were end-running the data priests, buying their own machines and programs, beginning to network with one another.  It became clear that companies would need dispersed computer power, not just a few centrally controlled mainframes. The “giant brain” fantasy was dead, and with it the concentrated power of the DP staff. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Today, in many big firms more than half of all computer processing power is outside the Information Systems department, and, as a senior manager of Deloitte & Touche puts it, the computer professional still have “Worlds more to lose.” Executives no longer came, tugging their forelocks and shuffling their feet, to beg for a few minutes of computer time. Many, no longer under the control of the DP priesthood, had their own sizable departmental budgets for computers. The priests now faced a situation not unlike that of the medical doctors, who lost their godlike status as more and more medical knowledge seeped into the lay press and the media. Instead of dealing with computer illiterates, the DP professionals now confronted a large number of “end-users” who knew something of the basics of simple computing, read computer magazines, bought machines for their kids at home, and were no longer awestruck by anyone who rattled on about RAM and ROM. The “micro revolution” demonopolized computer information and shifted power out of the hands of the priesthood. Like most revolutions, the micro revolution was a messy affair. With individuals and their departments rushing out to buy whatever kind of machines, software, and services they wanted, the result was an electronic Tower of Babel. So long as these were mainly stand-alone systems, it did not matter much. However, once it became necessary for these machines to talk to the mainframes or to one another and the outside World, the drawbacks of unrestrained liberty became starkly apparent. Computer professionals carried a grave warning to their bosses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Computer democracy could end by shrinking the power of top management itself. How could anyone responsibly run a company when its entire computerized information system was out of control? Different machines, different programs, different data bases, everyone “doing his own thing” raised the specter of anarchy in the office. It was time to clamp down. In every revolution there is a period of upheaval and extremism, followed by a period of consolidation. Thus the DP staff, backed by senior management, now set about institutionalizing the revolution and, in the process, recouping some of the priesthood’s erstwhile influence. To impose order on computers and communications, the new CIOs were handed far greater resources and responsibilities than ever before. They were told to integrate systems, connect them up, and formulate what might be called “rules of the electronic road.” Having originally been hoarders of centralized information, and having lost control of the system for a time, the new information systems people and the CIOs who lead them have now reemerged as data police, enforcing new rules that, together, define the firm’s information system. These rules, which cover technical standards and types of equipment, also usually govern access to central data banks, priorities, and many other matters. Ironically, the latest surprising twist of the screw finds many CIOs singing the virtues of the very microcomputers they once despised. The reasons are clear. Micros are no longer the 98-pound weaklings they once were. Together with minis and workstations, they are now so powerful they can actually take over many of the old functions of the mainframe. Hence, many CIOs are calling for “downsizing” and further decentralization. “Downsizing is a phenomenal trend,” reports Theodore Klein of the Boston Systems Group, Inc. “I was recently at a conference of sixty MIS directors and just about every one was doing this in some form.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

In the words of CIO magazine, the journal of the CIOs, “Downsizing puts control in the hands of business-unit managers.” However, that control is now firmly governed by rules set by computer professionals. Many CIOs, in fact, with support from above, are attempting to recentralize control under the flag of “network management.” Says Bill Gassman, a marketing specialists for DEC: “Network management is more than a technical issue; it’s political.” His view is shared by others who believe, in the words of Datamation magazine, that “the arguments for centralized network management…frequently masks a desire by some within MIS organizations to regain personal operational control lost during the past few years.” In short, while info-wars rage in the corporation’s external environment—pitting, as we saw, retailers versus manufacturers, or industries and even nations against one another—info-wars on a smaller scale are raging internally as well. CIOs and their staffs become, whether they mean to or not, info-warriors. For though they may not conceive of their function in these terms, their largely unrecognized task is to redistribute power (while trying, not surprisingly, to expand their own). Functioning as both highway engineers and state troopers on our fast-growing electronic highways—they build as well as attempt to manage the systems—they are put in the distasteful position of being, in a sense, the corporation’s “executive thought police.” While the first, primitive assemblers were controlled by changing what molecules are in the solution around the device, getting the speed and accuracy wanted for large-scale manufacturing takes real computation. Carl’s setup uses a combination of special-purpose molecule processors and general-purpose assemblers, all controlled and orchestrated by nanocomputers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Computers back in the 1990s used microelectronics. They worked by moving electrical charge back and forth through conducting paths—wires, in effect—using it to block and unblock the flow of charge in other paths. With nanotechnology, computers are built from molecular electronics. Like the computers of the 1990s, they used electronic signals to wave the pattens of digital logic. Being made of molecular components, though, they are built on a much smaller scale than 1990s computers, and work much faster and more efficiently. On the scale of our simulated molecular World, 1990s computer chips are like landscapes, while nanocomputers are like individual buildings. Carl’s desktop PC contains over a trillion nanocomputers, enough to out-compute all the microelectronic computers of the twentieth century put together. Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, an exploratory engineer proposed that nanocomputers could be mechanical, using sliding rods instead of moving electrons. These molecular mechanical computers were much easier to design than molecular electronic computers would have been. They were a big help in getting some idea of what nanotechnology could do. Even back then, it was pretty obvious that mechanical computers would be slower than electronic computers. Carl’s molecular electronic PC would have been no great surprise, though nobody knew just how to design one. When nanotechnology actually arrived and people started competing to build the best possible computers, molecular electronics won the technology race. Still, mechanical nanocomputers could have done all the nanocomputing jobs at Desert Rose: ordinary, everyday molecular manufacturing just does not demand the last word in computer performance. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

For Carl, the millions of nanocomputers in the milky waters of his building ponds are just extensions of machines on his desk, machines there to help him run his business and deliver products to his customers—or, in the case of the Red Cross emergency, to help provide time-critical emergency supplies. By reserving those three separate ponds, Carl can either build three different kinds of equipment for the Red Cross or use all the ponds to mass-produce the first thing on the Red Cross list: emergency shelters for ten thousand people. The software is ready, the plumbing is fine, the drums of building materials are all topped up, the Special Mix for this job is loaded: the build is ready to start. “Okay,” Carl tells the computer, “build Red Cross tents.” Computer talks to nanocomputers. In all three pools, nanocomputers talk to assemblers. The build begins. Three tragic conflicts in the twentieth century—World War I, World War II and the Cold War—represented the terminal climax of the industrial era and gave rise to the unique collision of wealth waves that we see on the planet today. The Second Wave wealth system is in retreat. By contrast, the Third Wave wealth system, starting in the United States of America, has already—in a few short decades—crossed the Pacific and transformed Asia. In the years ahead, we will see the wave overrun the shores of Latin America and Africa as well. The signs are already apparent. Behind this World transformation, we have shown, are unprecedented changes at the level of the deep fundamentals of wealth. Nowhere is this clearer or more revealing than in Asia’s historic rise and China’s great awakening. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

While much mentioned in financial news, Asia remains insufficiently understood on both Wall Street and in Washington—which, because of history and geography, face more toward the Atlantic than the Pacific. Between 2001 and 2005, when the United States of American opened free-trade negotiations with twenty nations, just one was in Asia. Citing this critically, one U.S. senator remained Washington that Asia “is hoe to six of the past decade’s ten fastest growing economies, five of the top ten U.S. trading partners and more than half the World’s population.” He might have added that it is also home to the overriding majority of the World’s Muslims and is the region most surrounded by nuclear weaponry. Above all, Asian is home to China. And unless the United States of America, Europe and the rest of the World understand what is really happening in China—the China that lies hidden behind the flood of unreliable economic and financial statistics—it will be difficult to make sense of what lies ahead. For what happens there—one way or the other—will radically reallocate wealth and shake the planet. By 2004, China had pushed past Japan to become the World’s third biggest trading nation after the United States and Germany. That same year saw China sitting on more than $500 billion of the World’s $3.5 trillion in foreign-currency reserves. It owned nearly $175 billion worth of U.S. Treasuries—an amount exceeded only by Japan—putting it in a position to jolt the entire global economy if it chose to replace dollars with euros or a basket of other currencies. In little more than two decades, China had become a giant force looming over the World economy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

However, can China’s spectacular growth continue? Will China actually become the global superpower of the year 2020, as so many forecasters predicted? No, but they have made significant progress and they have moved the date of expectation of becoming the global superpower to 2025. Conventional wisdom attributes China’s startling progress to its break with communism and its transition toward a market economy. However, that is hardly a sufficient explanation. Other nations have tried shifting in the same direction, and none has experienced anything like China’s success. Moreover, China even now cannot yet be described as a fully developed market economy. That market cliché also overlooks the trickle-down effect set in motion when, as we have seen, Silicon Valley transferred progressively higher-level computer-manufacturing operations to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan—each of which then set up plants and mainlined capital into China—all this before Beijing’s shift toward market economies had gone very far. Another equally important reason for China’s spectacular performance can be found in the way it has applied its novel twin-track development strategy. Now, humans have been long lived on this planet. An immediate aspect of agriculture, brought to light increasingly in recent years, involved the physical well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researchers show that “the diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that their health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.” Conversely, Farb summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited number of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much more costly in terms of human labor expended.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and nutrition” caused by the changeover from food gathering to food production. Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised. Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the 16^th century tell of Florida Indigenous fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was long believed that primitive people died in their 30’s and 40’s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury and severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries. During the industrial age fairly recently did life span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in Paleolithic times humans were long-lived, once certain risks were passed. Devries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture. Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental carries, and mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture; previously women gave birth with no difficulty and little or no pain. People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R.H. Post, have heard a single-engined plane while it was still 70 miles away, and many of them can see for moons of Jupiter with the unassisted eye. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall decline in the quality—and probably in the length—of human life among farmers as compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated. One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance, referred to the “life-sustaining soil, which yielded its copious fruits unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of hunter-gatherers and the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease. A history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food choices. According to Rooney, prehistoric people found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas, “All civilizations,” Wenke remind us, “have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.” It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The World’s population now depends for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied. The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed Worldwide so that Inuit Eskimo and an African native may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or frozen fish stick from a single factory in Sweden. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

A few big multinationals such as Unilever, the World’s biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the World. When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use is the whole duty of man, our separation from nature was virtually complete and the stage was set for the Industrial Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingers in the person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History, who pronounces that our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer recross a certain threshold of civilization once again become part of a natural habitat. He further states, expressing perfectly the original and preserving imperialism of agriculture, “As the Earth in its primitive state is not adopted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human destiny.” The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at the base all mass production is farming. The natural World is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks of the mid-America prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to a plow in order to cut through the soil for the first time. Or from a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once. Did you know that in 1948, the Lady of Endor Coven was started by a Toledo, Ohio barber tuned fortune-teller, Herbert A. Sloane, and ceased with this death in the 1980s? Well, Sloane’s creed, based heavily on Gnosticism, taught that Satan was not evil, but the bringer of wisdom and the messenger of God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The Christian God was identified with the Demiurge, whose spirit was trapped in the material World, with Satan sent to Earth to give man occult knowledge, or gnosis, so that the divine aspect within humanity could be returned to God. The Orthodox Satanic Church, in existence from 1971 to 1974 in Chicago, which at its height claimed more than five hundred members, taught a similar system of beliefs. The group’s anti-LaVey philosophy taught that Got the Creator created Satan, who, in turn, became the teacher of all knowledge. Through ritual, prayer, and songs, held every Saturday night at Chicago’s Occult Book Shop, members were exhorted to absorb as much of Satan’s wisdom as they could. For all their differences, all of the neo-Satanic churches share several structural and psychological traits, not only with themselves but with other occult sects. With hero worship often a large factor in the success of these groups their existence has been dependent on the charisma and continued life of the leader. As he or she goes, so goes the cult—which has resulted in a short life span for a majority of occult and virtually all Satanic organizations. As seen, many Satanists are frustrated people reacting against the banality and powerlessness of their lives. Feeling like insignificant cogs in a machine, bewildered by the complexities of various bureaucracies, these people seek out a group that will accept them, in which they can vent their feelings of hostile alienation without being censured. Through the practice of “magic” and the achievement of “adept” levels they can feel that they are unique and powerful. However, becoming part of an elect elite can have side effects. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Rousseau initiated a second Renaissance when he expressed his dissatisfaction with modernity, made possible by his knowledge of the Greek and Roman examples. “Ancient statesmen spoke endlessly of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.” Rousseau’s use of his knowledge of antiquity—which was, although not scholarly, very profound—is a perfect model of the reason for having ancient thought available to those great individuals who, as Nietzsche put it, are untimely and need a vantage point from which to get their bearings and become the most timely of all. It is the old Greeks who make men both untimely and timely in crises. Nothing fancy, no infinite searching outside; the book in itself always intelligible, as long as human nature remains the same. This is the role played by the Greek authors throughout the wildly varying ages since they wrote, always Phoenix-like when they appear to have been consumed and are only ashes conserved by the scholars. Rousseau’s fervent appeal for modern man to look back to the ancient city, because it was whole and a true community, was the source of the romantic longing to breathe the fresh air of Greece again. Its moral and esthetic health was what Rousseau conveyed so convincingly. He gave the impulse to all kinds of attempts at a new communitarian beginnings, from Robespierre to Owen to Tolstoy and the kibbutz, an impulse still alive in contemporary thought. However, most of all, as I have discussed earlier, his observations on the tension between Enlightenment and decent politics gave birth to the idea of culture. It was to the study of Greece or Sparta or Athens as models of cultures that Rousseau’s reflection led. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The motive for this study—which flourished particularly in Germany, where Rousseau’s influence was most strongly felt, precisely because of Kant’s and Goethe’s predominance there—was to understand culture, with a view to the founding of a German culture. It was primarily Greek and Roman poetry and secondarily history to which the German thinkers turned for inspiration, and the scholars followed. It was distinctly not Greek philosophy. This was evident in Rousseau himself. The philosophers whose theoretical reflection was necessary to him were Bacon, Descartes and Newton, not Plato and Aristotle. The latter two just did not know the truth about nature. Whatever interest later scholarship had in them was as parts of Greek culture, as typical expressions of it and less interesting than poets, who are culture founders. The Greek philosophers were not valid interlocutors. Rousseau admired Plato and thought he had deep insight into human things, but rather more as a poet than a philosopher or a scientist. Plato was indeed the philosopher for lovers, but Rousseau, without consulting Plato, taught that eros is the child of pleasures of the flesh and imagination. Its activity is poetry, the source of what Rousseau understand to be the life-creating and -enhancing illusions and thereby the source of the ultimate grounds of the folk-minds that make peoples possible. In Plato, eros led to philosophy, which in turn led to the rational quest for the best regime, the one good political order vs. the plurality of cultures. So the discovery of Greek “culture” was contrary to Greek philosophy. And this particular difference, concerning the best regime as opposed to culture, proved fatal to reason. We can recognize this in a preliminary way in Weber’s assumption that it is values rather than reasons that found and sustain communities. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

So you’ve moved into your new #CresleighHome and you’re ready to tackle the backyard. Head on over to our blog and search “landscaping” for all the tips and tricks you’ll need.

Here are a few of our favorite blog posts on the subject:
🌼 14 Low-Maintenance Plants for Easy Landscaping
🌼 5 Landscaping Mistakes to Avoid
🌼 5 Best Places to Order Seeds Online

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#MillsStation

It was in the Hall of Sovereigns in the same palace which the Acting Head of the Human Race, and the Family had occupied, for many centuries. It is still the most gorgeous—and I think the most beautiful, too—in the Empire. Its gilded masses cover miles of space, and blaze like the fallen sun. Its interior parks and gardens and forests stretch away into the mellow distances, an apparently limitless paradise. A hundred thousand persons, not counting the brigades and divisions of Household Troops, server the Parents and certain Eden-born families of their immediate descendants in this place. Yet the palace takes up no inordinate room in this grand capital, whose population almost defies figures, and which contains many streets that are upward of two hundred miles long without a break. Agriculture, the indispensable basis of civilization, was originally encountered as time, language, number and art emerged. As the materialization of alienation, agriculture is the triumph of estrangement and the definite divide between culture and nature and humans from each other. Agriculture is the birth of production, complete and with its essential features and deformation of life and consciousness. The land itself becomes an instrument of production and the planet’s species its objects. Wild or tame, weeds or crops speak of that duality that cripples the soul of our being, ushering in, relatively quickly, the despotism, war and impoverishment of high civilization over the great length of that earlier oneness with nature. The forced march of civilization, which Adorno recognized in the “assumptions of an irrational catastrophe at the beginning of history,” which Freud felt as “something imposed on a resisting majority,” of which Stanley Diamond found only “conscripts not volunteers,” was dictated by agriculture And Mircea Eliade was correct to assess its coming as having “provoked upheavals and spiritual breakdowns” whose magnitude the modern times cannot imagine. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

“To level off, to standardize the human landscape, to efface its irregularities and banish its surprises,” these words of E.M. Cioran apply perfectly to the logic of agriculture, is not inherent in social reality but an imposition on it. The dimension of time or history is a function of repression, whose foundation is production or agriculture. Hunter-gatherer life was anti-time in its simultaneous and spontaneous openness; farming life generates a sense of time by its successive-task narrowness, its directed routine. As the variety of Paleolithic living gave way to the literal enclosure of agriculture, time assumed power and came to take on the character of an enclosed space. Formalized temporal reference points—ceremonies with fixed dates, the naming of day, etcetera—are crucial to the ordering of the World of production; as a schedule of production; the calendar is integral in civilization. Farming has been around for possibly millions of years. Maybe even since the time of Adam and Even in the Garden of Eden, and it has done more to shape history and society than almost any other activity. Nonetheless, within the lifetimes of most people now alive and possibly within the next two decades, agriculture as we know it will cease to be. This is a transformation that is creeping up on people and will take many by surprise, and we should not welcome it. Not only would industrial society be impossible without time schedules, the end of agriculture (basis of all production) would be the end of historical time. Representation begins with language, a means of reining in desire. By displacing autonomous images with verbal symbols, life is reduced and brought under strict control; all direct, unmediated experience is subsumed by that supreme mode of symbolic expression, language. Language cuts up and organizes reality, and this segmentation of nature, an aspect of grammar, set the stage for agriculture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The new linguistic mentality led very directly to agriculture. Unquestionably, the crystallization of language into writing, called forth mainly by the need for record-keeping of agricultural transactions, is the signal that civilization has begun. In the non-commodified, egalitarian hunter-gatherer ethos, the basis of which (as has so often been remarked) was sharing, number was not wanted. There was no round for the urge to quantify, no reason to divine what was whole. Not until the domestication of animals and plants did this cultural concept fully emerge. Two of number’s seminal figures testify clearly to its alliance with separateness and property: Pythagoras, center of a highly influential religious cult of number, and Euclid, father of mathematics and science, whose geometry originated to measure fields for reasons of ownership, taxation and slave labor. One of civilization’s early forms, chiefdomship, entails a linear rank order in which each member is assigned an exact numerical place. Soon, following the antinatural linearity of plow culture, the inflexible 90-degree gridiron plan of even earliest cities appeared. Their insistent regularity constitutes in itself a repressive ideology. Culture, now numberized, becomes more firmly bounded and lifeless. Art, too, in its relationship to agriculture, highlights both institutions. It begins as a means to interpret and subdue reality, to rationalize nature, and conforms to the great turning point which is agriculture in its basic features. The pre-Neolithic cave paintings, for example, are vivid and bold, a dynamic exaltation of animal grace and freedom. The Neolithic art of farmers and pastoralists, however, stiffens into stylized forms; this pottery is typified as a narrow, timid botching of material forms. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

With agriculture, art lost its variety and became standardized into geometrical designs that tended to degenerate into dull, repetitive patterns, a perfect reflection of standardizes, confined, rule-patterned life. And where there had been n representation in Paleolithic art of men killing men, an obsession with depicting confrontation between people advanced with the Neolithic period, scenes of battles becoming common. Time, language, number, art and all the rest of culture, which predates and leads to agriculture, rests on symbolization. Just as autonomy preceded domestication and self-domestication, the rational and the social precede the symbolic. Food production, it is eternally and gratefully acknowledged, permitted the culture potentiality of the human species to develop. However, what is this tendency toward the symbolic, toward the elaboration and imposition of arbitrary forms? It is a growing capacity for objectification, by which what is living becomes reified, thing-like. Symbols are more than basic units of culture; they are screening devices to distance us from our experiences. They classify and reduce to do away with the otherwise almost intolerable burden of relating one experience to another. Thus culture is governed by the imperative of reforming and subordinating nature. The artificial environment which is agriculture accomplished this pivotal mediation, with the symbolism of objects manipulated in the construction of relations of dominance. For it is not only external nature that is subjugated: the face-to-face quality of pre-agricultural life itself severely limited domination, while culture extends and legitimates it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

It is like that already during the Paleolithic era certain forms or names were attached to objects or ideas, in a symbolizing manner but in a shifting, impermanent, perhaps playful sense. The will to sameness and security found in agriculture means that symbols became as static and constant as farming life. Regularization, rule patterning, and technological differentiation, under the sign of division of labor, interact to ground and advance symbolization. Agriculture completes the symbolic shift and the virus of alienation has overcome authentic, free life. It is the victory of cultural control; the amount of work per capita increases with the evolution of culture and the amount of leisure per capita decreases. Today, the few surviving hunter-gatherers occupy the least economically interesting areas of the World, where agriculture has not penetrated, such as the shows of the Inuit or desert of the Australian aborigines. And yet the refusal of farming drudgery, even in adverse settings, bear its own rewards The Hazda of Tanzania, Filipino Tasaday, !Kung of Botswana, or the Kahlahari Desert !Kung San—are seen as easily surviving a serious, several years’ drought while neighboring famers starved—also testify to the fact that no group on earth has more leisure time than hunters and gatherers, who send it primarily of games, conversation and relaxing. Service rightly attributed this condition to the very simplicity of technology and lack of control over the environment of such groups. And yet simple Paleolithic methods were, in their own way, “advanced.” Consider a basic cooking technique like steaming foods by heating stones in a covered pit; this is immemorially older than any pottery, kettles or baskets (in fact, is anti-container in its non-surplus, no-exchange orientation) and is the most nutritionally sound way to cook, far healthier than boiling food in water, for example. Or consider the fashioning of such stone tools as the long and exceptionally thin “laurel leaf” knives, delicately chipped but strong, which modern industrial techniques cannot duplicate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The hunting and gathering lifestyle represents the most successful and enduring adaptation ever achieved by humankind. In occasional pre-agriculture phenomena like the intensive collection of food or the systematic hunting of a single species can be seen signs of impending breakdown of a pleasurable mode that remained so static for so long precisely because it was pleasurable. The “penury and day-long grind” of agriculture, is the vehicle of culture, “rational” only in its perpetual disequilibrium and its logical progression toward ever-greater destruction. Although the term hunter-gatherer should be reversed (and had been by not a few current anthropologists) because it is recognized that gathering constitutes by far the larger survival component, the nature of hunting provides salient contrast to domestication. The relationship of the hunter to the hunted animal, which is sovereign, free and even considered equal, is obviously qualitatively different from that of the farmer or herdsman to the enslaved chattels over which he rules absolutely. A machine, on the other hand, is outside of us, clearly created by us, modifiable by us, even discardable by us; it is easier to see how a machine re-creates the World in its own image. However, in many respects, a sentence functions very much like a machine, and this is nowhere more obvious than in the sentences we call questions. As an example of what I mean, let us take a “fill-in” question, which I shall require you to answer exactly if you wish full credit: Thomas Jefferson died in the year___. Supposed we now rephrase the question in multiple-choice form: Thomas Jefferson died in the year (a) 1788, (b) 1826, (c) 1926, (d) 1809. Which of these two questions is easier to answer? I assume you will agree with me that the second question is easier unless you happen to know precisely the year of Jefferson’s death, in which case neither question is difficult. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

However, for most of us who know only roughly when Jefferson lived, Question Two has arranged matters so that our chances of “knowing” the answer are greatly increased. Students will always be “smarter” when answering a multiple-choice test than when answering a “fill-in” test, even when the subject matter is the same. A question, even of the simplest kind, is not and can never be unbiased. I am not, in this context, referring to the common accusation that a particular test is “culturally biased.” Of course questions can be culturally biased. (Why, for example, should anyone be asked about Thomas Jefferson at all, let alone when he died?) My purpose is to say that the structure of any question is as devoid of neutrality as its content. The form of a question may ease our way or pose obstacles. Or, when even slightly altered, it may generate antithetical answers, as in the case of the two priests who, being unsure if it was permissible to smoke and pray at the same time, wrote to the Pope for a definitive answer. One priest phrased the question “Is it permissible to smoke while praying?” and was told it is not, since prayer should be the focus of one’s whole attention; the other priest asked if it is permissible to pray while smoking and was told that it is, since it is always appropriate to pray. The form of a question may even block us from seeing solutions to problems that become visible through a different question. Consider the following story, whose authenticity is questionable but not, I think, its point: Once upon a time, in a village in what is now Lithuania, there arose an unusual problem. A curious disease afflicted many of the townspeople. It was mostly fatal (though not always), and its onset was signaled by the victim’s lapsing into a deathlike coma. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

If the victim was actually dead when burial appeared seemly, medical science not being quite so advanced as it is now, there was no definite way of knowing. As a result, the townspeople feared that several of their relatives had already been buried alive and that a similar fate might await them. How to overcome this uncertainty was their dilemma. One group of people suggested that the coffins be well stocked with water and food and that a small air vent be drilled into them, just in case one of the “dead” happened to be alive. This was expensive to do but seemed more than worth the trouble. A second group, however, came up with a less expensive and more efficient idea. Each coffin would have a twelve-inch stake affixed to the inside of the coffin lid, exactly at the level of the heart. Then, when the coffin was closed, all uncertainty would cease. The story does not indicate which solution was chosen, but for my purpose the choice is irrelevant. What is important to note is that different solutions were generated by different questions. The first solution was an answer to the question, How can we make sure that we do not bury people who are still alive? The second was an answer to the question, How can we make sure that everyone we bury is dead? Questions, then, are like computers or television or stethoscopes or lie detectors, in that they re mechanisms that give direction to our thoughts, generate new ideas, venerate old ones, expose facts, or hide them. Aside from language itself, I do not suppose there is a clearer example of a technology that does not look like one than the mathematical sign known as zero. A brief word about it may help to illuminate later examples. The zero made its way from India to Europe in the tenth century. By the thirteenth century, it had taken hold of Western consciousness. (It was unknown to the Romans and the classical Greeks, although analogous concepts were known to Babylonian mathematicians of the Hellenistic period.) #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Without the zero, you will find it difficult to perform any of the calculations that are quite simple to do with it. If you should try multiplying MMMMMM by MMDCXXVI, you will have this point confirmed. I have been told, by the way, that such a calculation can be done, but the process is so laborious that the task is unlikely to be completed, a truth that did not escape the notice of medieval mathematicians. There is, in fact, no evidence that Roman numerals were ever used, or intended to be used, for calculation. For that purpose, mathematicians used an abacus, and between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, a struggle of sorts took place between abacists, who wrote Roman numerals but calculated with the abacists, and algorists, who used Hindu numerals employing the zeros sign. The objection raised by the abacists was that the zero registered the absence of a power of ten, which no Roman numeral did, and which struck them as philosophically and perhaps aesthetically offensive. After all, the zero is a sign that affects values of numerals wherever it occurs but has no values in itself. It is a sign about signs, whose very etymology, via “cipher” from the Hindu word for “void,” suggests the idea of “nothingness.” To the abacists, it was a bizarre idea to have a sign marking “nothing,” and I fear that I would have sided with the abacists. I speak of the zero for two reasons: First, to underscore that it is a kind of technology that makes both possible and easy certain kinds of thoughts which, without it, would remain inaccessible to the average person. If it does not exactly have an ideology, it contains, at least an idea. I have previously alluded to the technology of using letters or numbers to grade students’ papers, and to the Greek discovery of the technology of alphabetization: like the use of zero, these are examples of how symbols may function like machines in creating new mind-sets and therefore new conceptions of reality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Second, the use of the zero and, of course, the Hindu numbering system of which it was a part made possible a sophisticated mathematics which, in turn, led to one of the most powerful technologies now in use: Statistics. We will talk more about statistics later. The word manufacturing comes from the Latin manufactus, meaning “handmade.” Today, the term brings to mind huge, noisy machines stamping out products and spewing waste. Giving up manufactured products is not popular or practical—almost everything we used today is manufactured. If all machine-made products were to suddenly vanish, most people in the United States of America would find themselves naked and outdoors, with very little around them. Expanding manufacturing is an object of nearly every nation on Earth. We cannot give up manufacturing, but we can replace today’s technologies with something radically different. Molecular manufacturing can help us get what we seem to want: high-quality products made at low costs with little environmental impact. Making the needed technology happen is the easy part. Far more complicated and difficult is overcome the list of non-technological obstacles. The first is heavy-handed tradition—and the powerful feedback loop that maintains it. In traditional less affluent communities, for decades or even centuries, each generation has lived much as its distant ancestors did. The governing assumption is that the future will replicate the past. This implies that what worked best in the past will continue to work best in the future. And, since life is lived close to the margin of survival, the less affluent around the World have plenty of cause to be rationally risk-averse. Their very resistance to the new, however, slows the rate of change, further reinforcing the anachronistic conviction that the future will resemble the past. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

A second obstacle is education—and its absence. Everyone, of course, is in favor of education. Except. Except the unwise parents who, to keep the family from starving, need their children to slave in the field, to care for younger kids or to bed at the roadside. Except all those who think women should be kept ignorant and obedient. Except governments with other priorities. In villages across the World, the family is often the de facto school, passing down yesterday’s suspicion of the new, further reinforced in some places by religious instruction. Where state schools do exist, teachers are underpaid and undereducated themselves. Schools frequently lack even pencils and paper. Critics attack this global disgrace. However, the alternatively typically offered resembles the factory-style education systems found in industrial societies. Classrooms. Desks. Age-segregated classes. Rote work. Standardized test. Enforced punctuality. Uniformity in the name of democracy. A system, in short, that promotes what employers used to call “industrial discipline.” Can this ever be successfully replicated in every village? Should it? Mass education designed for the industrial age meets the needs of neither the pre-industrial village nor the post-industrial future. Rural education—indeed, all education—has to be totally reconceptualized. Today technology offers educators a tool for customizing education to the diverse cultures and needs of small groups and even individuals. We are approaching a time when we will be able—inexpensively—to put in every village some kind of computer connected in some way to the outside World. A time when children, given the chance, can, as we saw in India, teach themselves to access the Internet. A time when multiplayer games can educate. A time when local teachers can advance their own learning through distant online mentors. A time of “reverse home schooling,” when children tech their parents—and help reduce the parents’ suspicion of the new. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Here, too, technology alone offers no remedy for unwiseness. Political, economic and social forces must be mobilized to educate the coming generation. Yet another critical obstacle is the paucity of energy in rural areas. Unless the less affluent of the World gain access to sources of energy more powerful than their own muscles and those of their farm animals, they will remain forever trapped in destitution. In a World where 1.8 billion people still lack electricity, it is impractical, in the face of massive poverty and today’s realities, to dogmatically oppose any and every extension of coal, gas, and even nuclear power, despite their well-know dangers and environmental costs. China’s twin-track development strategy, calling for the simultaneous development of its Second and Third Wave sectors, includes the planned construction of two new rectors a year for the next sixteen years. Its controversial Three Gorges Dam is the biggest in the World. Similarly, other governments around the globe, in Africa, Asia and Latin America, are also spending huge sums to bring electricity to their rural less affluent. However, as in education, these plans usually reflect the solutions of the industrial era—mass energy systems designed mainly to serve urban centers where factories and population are densely concentrated. The cost of applying the same solution to highly dispersed rural populations is enormous. According to a 2002 report by India’s planning commission, “Traditional grid connection would be uneconomical in villages…[At] the cost and pace at which rural electrification is taking place, it would be technically and financially impractical to expect the non-electrified villages to be covered even in two decades.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

By contrast, the report continues, “decentralizing power generation will be possible with renewable energy sources such as solar energy, biomass, small hydro power and wind energy.” Few planners take seriously into account the likelihood that, over the next generation or two, in energy as in so many other fields, convergences of old and new technologies will produce powerful hybrid results and completely new breakthroughs that will surprise us all. Bank of America (BofA) decided on a strategic expansion of its trust business. In 1982, BofA had assets of $122 billion, employed 82,000 people in more than 1,200 branches and offices from Sacramento to Singapore. Its trust department alone managed $38 billion in funds for some 800 large institutional investors and pension funds. Among its trust customers were the Walk Disney Company, AT&T, Kaiser Aluminum, and other industrial heavyweights. However, the bank had fallen behind technologically. At that point it decided to expand its beachhead in the trust business, in competition with Bankers Trust, State Street of Boston, and the other East Coast financial giants. BofA’s head of trust operations, Clyde R. Claus, realized he would need a state-of-the-art computer system. The old system, though recently given a botched $6 million face-lift, would be hopelessly inadequate. The day of proverbial “widows and orphans,” who went to the bank’s trust department, timidly asked the bank to invest their funds, and were satisfied with terse semiannual or annul reports—that day was long past. Trust customers now were far more sophisticated. Some had huge accounts. They wanted detailed information broken down every which way. The big ones had their own powerful computers, telecommunications nets, ad sophisticated financial analysis software, and they demanded complex up-to-the-instant data. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

So Claus and BofA’s information systems group hired consultants and contractors to build the most advanced information system in the trust field. Some 3.5 million lines of programming code were written; and 13,000 hours of training were devoted to preparing employees to use the new information system. Despite this crash effort, the new system lagged behind its deadlines. Endless bugs plagued the project. Worse yet, the existing system was falling further and further behind, too. Customers were muttering. The pressures rose. In 1986 the trust department’s in-house newsletter, Turtle Talk, received an anonymous letter warning Claus not to implement the new system. It was, the letter writer claimed, not ready. If Claus thought so, it was because someone had “pulled the wool” over his eyes. However, Claus could not wait. Customers were already three months behind on their statements. Things had got so bad that BofA officials were paying out huge sums to customers on the “honor” system, because they could not locate the records needed to verify the amounts. Crisis followed crisis. Battle followed battle. Upheavals in the bank’s top management, sudden changes in policy, layoffs, staff relocations, all took a disastrous toll on the trust division. By 1988, having poured an estimated $80 million down the sump, the entire project collapsed. Bank of America backed ignominiously out of the trust business. The rout was complete. Heads rolled down the carpeted corridors in the months that followed Out went Claus. Out went several senior VPs. (Out, too, went 320 of the 400 employees of the main software and system design contractor.) Out went customers—taking with them about $4 billion worth of assets. Out went parts of the trust operation, one piece having previously been sold off to Wells Fargo, another turned over to State Street of Boston, one of the industry leaders that BofA had intended to challenge. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

It was Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow all over again. Systems experts, whether called CIOs or directors of systems, are point men in the info-wars, vulnerable to bullets from any direction. A brief look at their rise, fall, and resurrection provides a keen insight into how power shifts as the control of information changes hands. Many Setians claim to have had an interest in the occult before finding their way to the temple, and quite a few are former “white lighter,” or wicca, devotees. Most come from a Christian background, and while some may have joined as a reaction against their upbringing, the sentiments and philosophy of the temple, while being un-Christian, do not appear to be virulently anti-Christian. For example, one former Jesuit found the Temple of Set after searching for a “civilized avenue for exploring the forbidden side of life.” He and his wife teach at a Catholic school, say they have no problem with their religious past, playing down their conversion to the Temple of Set as “just something bound to happen.” There are members of all ages, although the average racial and economic profile is firmly Caucasian, white-collar, and middle-class. Considering Aquino’s intellectual emphasis and his extensive required reading lists, it is not surprising that the educational level of the cult is fairly high. Typical occupations include college student, teacher, accountant, computer programmer, secretary. However, outside occupational status did not count for much within the group. This is because the members consider their mundane jobs a hindrance to their magical development, and because they often feel that the jobs they have are boring, unsatisfying, and economically unrewarding. The group’s emphasis is on magical over Worldly power found, enabled members to feel they were powerful beings, despite experiences outside the group which belied that. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Over and over again at meeting, one would hear [Setians] describe their everyday frustrations, which led them to want power—such as problems with jobs and relationships. Then, once they joined the group, they often used the practices they learned to counter these problems or vent their frustrations and anger. These practices in turn provided them with a socially channeled form to express these feelings. These truths were borne out, at least in part, by the evolution of the temple since its birth in 1975. At its zenith at the end of the 1970s, the cult had a membership of about one hundred, with pylons in Detroit, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., New York, and San Jose. However, by 1981 Aquin and his flock had begun to be plagued by the same problems that disrupted the Church of Satan. The same elitism that had attracted initiates in the first place led to frequent ego clashes as members competed for godlike status, resulting in increased dropouts and purges by the leadership. Aquino himself seems to have become disenchanted, retiring to the position of “GM Emeritus” and turning over the administrative duties of Dr. Steven Flowers, a Texas English professor. By 1987, Temple functions were strictly curtailed as the group experienced more defections and factionalizing, and in official missives, Aquino went so far as to express the view that perhaps the World was not ready for “Xepering.” Eventually, Aquino fell out with the San Francisco Police Department and sued the city of San Francisco for defamation of character, terming the entire affair a “modern witchhunt in the most classical sense.” Effort tends to live in the three Critiques, the last great statement of liberal Enlightenment, the other strand of rationalism that coexists in the universities with Baconian-Cartesian-Lockean rationalism. The primary effort is to set limits to pure reason, to say to “proud reason, ‘this far and no further,’” in such a way that reason will submit rationally. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Kant’s critical philosophy does not dictate to science what it must discover; it establishes the limits within which pure reason operates. It does the same for practical reason, thus turning David Hume’s distinction between the is and the ought from a humiliation for moral reasoning into the basis for its triumph and its dignity. It further establishes the faculty of judgment, which can again allow man to speak about ends of the beautiful. In this system not only does natural science have a secure place in the order of the university, but so also do moral and esthetics. However, the unity of the university is now Kant. These three kinds of knowledge (the true, the good, the beautiful in new guises) are given their domains by three Critiques, but are not unified by being knowledge of aspects of a single reality. Aristotle’s human sciences are part of the science of nature, and his knowledge of man is connected to and in harmony with this knowledge of the stars, bodies in motion and animals other than man. This is not the case with the human sciences after Rousseau, which depend on the existence of a realm entirely different from nature. Their study is not part of the study of nature, and the two kinds of study have little to do with one another. This new condition of the learned disciplines, which found its earliest expression in the German universities at the beginning of the nineteenth century and gradually spread throughout the Western universities, at fist proved very fertile. The progress of the natural sciences, now unimpeded by theological or political supervision and emancipated from philosophy, continued and became even more rapid. And the human sciences, given a fresh vocation, came to a new flowering, especially in historical and philological studies. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Man understood as a free, moral individual—as creative, as producer of cultures, as maker and product of history—provided a field for humane research taking man seriously as man, not reduced to the moved bodies that now constituted the realm of natural science. The serious goal that is necessary to make scholarship vital was provided by the sense that man could be understood by his historical origins; that moral and political standards could be derived from the historical traditions of the various nations, to replace the failed standards of natural right and law; that the study of high culture, particularly that of Greece, would provide the models for modern achievement; that a proper understanding of religion might provide a faith proof against critical reason. Scholars, for that moment, more than at any time since the Renaissance, seemed to be in the service of life, to be as useful as soldiers, doctors, and workers. The great movements of careful historical research and textual criticism initiated this heyday of the nineteenth century gave us nourishment which we have yet entirely to digest. The humanities took over the whole burden of instructing us about man, especially in morals and esthetics (the new science of the beautiful and the sublime). However, the very condition of this exhilaration in the human sciences—the dualism nature-freedom—created problems form the outset and in the long run undermined the confidences of their practitioners or turned them back into mere erudites again. There was a haunting doubt as to the reality of the realm of freedom, which seemed to restore the richness of the phenomenon man. What are the relations between the two realms? At what point doe the natural in man stop and the free being? It is really possible to limit the claims of natural science? #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Within Kant’s system, if scientists can, as they claim, in the long run predict the behavior of all phenomena, can one plausibly postulate a noumenal freedom, the expression of which are predictable in the phenomenal field? Does not natura science presupposed mechanical causation, determinism and the reduction of all higher phenomena to lower ones, the complex to the simple, and do not the success of that science in astronomy, physics, chemistry and biology attest to the truth of its presuppositions? New discoveries or speculation such as evolution called into question that independent or nonderivative character of mind. The very faculty that made it possible to set the limits of science and reason in the Critique of Pure Reason proved to be just another accidental effect of evolving matter. The ground of morals and esthetics disappeared. Natural science continued to seem substantial, while romanticism and idealism inhabited imaginary cities, sublime hopes but little more. Pessimism as a philosophical school came onto the scene. Joined to the health and expansiveness of natural science was the recognition that humane learning had itself failed to generate moral and political standards. All the study of the facts of national history and the invention of “folk-minds” could not provide guidance for the future, or the imperatives for conduct. The learning was impressive, but it looked more and more to be the product of idle curiosity rather than the quest for knowledge of what is most needful. Philosophy, no longer a part of, or required by, natural science, was nudged over toward the humanities and even became just another historical subject. Its claim to be the ruler in the university no longer earned respect. There was a condominium with no higher unity. The humane learning could argue for equal rights and was to some extent formally accorded them, but that began to be “academic” and have little to do with the way things looked in the real World. The natural scientist was both the image of knower and the public benefactor; the humanist, a professor. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The problem of the knower in the perspective for the modern understanding was formulated over and over again from the beginning of the modern university dispensation by the man, not a member of the German university dispensation by the man, not a member of the German university, who, along with Kant, most influenced it—Goethe. A classic summation of his views is to be found in Faust, the only modern book that can be said to have made a national heroic model to rival those of Homer, Virgil, Dante and Shakespeare. The scholar Faust, meditating in his cell, translates the first line of the Gospel According to John, “In the beginning was the word (logos)”; then, dissatisfied with the description he says “the feeling,” which also does not quite do; finally and definitely he chooses to reinterpret it as “the deed.” Action has primacy over contemplation, deed over speech. He who understands must imitate the beginnings. The act of the creator, not preceded and controlled by thought, is the first thing. The scholar with his reason misunderstands the origin because he lacks the vital force that lies behind the order of things. He trifles, piling up facts from which the informing principle has been extracted. Faust’s relation to the perpetual studier Wagner, who says he already knows much but wants to know everything, is paradigmatic. Only knowledge that serves life is good, and life is in the first place constituted by dark action, by fatal impulse. Knowledge comes afterward and lightens the World made by the deed. As painted by Goethe, Wagner loos slight and feeble. His idle love of knowledge is superficial compared to Faust’s inchoate impulses. Although the opposition between the vita active and the vita contemplative is as old as philosophy, if not older, Goethe’s moment is the first where the side of action is taken by the theory itself, thus announcing the end of the ancient opposition. The theoretical life is groundless because the first thing is not the intelligible order but the chaos open to creativity. There can be no contemplation where there is nothing to see. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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