Some men find God in nature, others place the Divinity in a different type of Grand Canyon. Many have had enough of pretty faces. They hardly even notice them. Beauty is not anything. They are too busy looking for something wore than what they saw last week. And perhaps that is what is what is wrong with society. No longer do most people look for things that are ascetically pleasing. They are looking for negative ways of release and projecting emotions and insecurities to make themselves feel better. Their only interest in other people is to see some disgrace that they have yet witnesses. A man down and out on his luck, a success woman who is beautiful that they can make feel insecure, a slave graveling for a pay check, someone from Asia waiting in line to become the next Ms. America when her citizenship is permitted. All these are good enough to make fun of for a momentary diversion, but then they must move on, searching for the next golden moment to exploit. It is best to keep looking, rather than pausing to consider what all this sinful behavior means. If the theologians are correct, and our bodies are only the ephemeral vessels of our eternal souls, then is not sullying other people a porous thing, allowing seepage of cruel rot from one’ mind to become the permanent life force inside? Their souls may be corroded to the point of damnation everlasting. Life for many is about humiliating others. Their mouths have become sphincters with a wriggling mouth lizard. After all, slander is all in fun! Unable to find sufficiently degraded specimens in the community, the sick thriller seeker moves on to other targets. Denigrating everyone individual with conduct disorder comes upon. One sees slavering prostration of offense on others as more than a national pastime; it is the new America godhead. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

I recently had one of my most memorable counselling experience. We were holding a mission when a young man came to me and unburdened himself. His case was so typical that I told him at once that either he or his family had been engaging in occult practices. He admitted this freely and what he went on to confess left a deep impression on my mind. This will in no way break any seal of confession, as the man himself asked me to use his experience wherever possible to warn people of the dangers of occultism. Let us begin the story, then. Even as a child the young man had suffered from depression and had had thoughts of suicide and other psychic disorders. From his early years he had heard noises during the night and had sometimes witnessed ghost-like appearances, which had caused rustling and whistling noises. A psychiatrist would perhaps diagnose these experiences as psychoneurosis, but this would not explain the cause of the disturbances. However, when one went into the family history the source became clear. The young man’s great-grandmother had been a magic charmer. She had healed both animals and people by means of her charms. In addition to this she had also belonged to a spiritistic circle which practised communication with departed spirits. It was her involvement with occult phenomena that brought about the tragic downfall of the family. The magic practices of the great-grandmother had been passed down to her son and daughter, who in turn had charmed both animals and people. Others were warned to stay away from the because they “might ask you out,” which means you may become enthralled by their presence and want a relationship because once you get their attention, they seem so charming and innocent and caring and attentive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

They had also carried on communication with the dead, and had practised the use if a pendulum and the laying of cards as a means of fortune-telling. They both died in a terrible way. The woman had at night seen ghost in her room, and she had the feeling that evil spirits were forever trying to keep her mouth and nose shut. This continued for many years and finally she had been committed to an asylum. Since she was not really mentally ill though, she was released after six months. Her brother later died in terrible agony in spite of the fact that he had asked that all his magic books be burned or thrown out of the house. He had even asked for a Bible to read, but he was not able to understand it. When he finally died in great pain an obnoxious, he was greatly missed. The grandchildren were no better off. One granddaughter used to have fits of frenzy in which she threw furniture around or sometimes lay down in the street screaming almost unbearably. She too was committed to an asylum. Another granddaughter heard the already mentioned sound of knocking during the night, and she was so emotionally disturbed that one day she suffered death by suicide, with two of her children, by jumping off a cliff with them. A grandson became a medium for a spiritistic séance, and he too suffered from a persecution mania and finally ended up in a mental home. Among the great-grandchildren, one girl continued the card-laying and charming tradition and later died when she was quite young. Her family asserts that she still haunts the house in which they live in the form of a poltergeist. It was one of the brothers of this girl who had come to me for counselling. He told me that he was utterly convinced that all the terrible psychic disorders in his family history could be traced back to their contact with occultism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

We see evidenced here the punishment for sin mentioned in the second commandment, “…visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.” And this is not an isolated cause. In my missionary work I have heard many similar family histories while counselling people. It is distressing to note how little is known of the powers of Satan among psychiatrists and Christian counsellors. The present atmosphere of rationalistic thought has caused these things to be regarded lightly as if they did not exist. However, if it is our desire to help people then we must take these satanic forces seriously. Man stands in the midst of a battle between Christ and Satan. When people think of Satan merely as a man with a tail and horns, and just mock at the ideas of a real devil, they make a terrible mistake and thus enable Satan to ensnare and attack his victims without hindrance. The most dangerous area of satanic seduction is magic, for it is here that people consciously participate in Satan’s work even though he hides behind a camouflage of pious ceremonies. Ronald Adam, a London electronics engineer and also a member of the Church of Satan for years, expressed a sentiment calling Satanists the “lunatic fringe of the occult.” Adam told me that he needs no group to practice his Satanism, which to him is more of a philosophy than a religion. “The essence of Satanism is material success,” he said. “Your own positive outlook gives you success, and that outlook comes from Satanic doctrine.” When told about the man’s feelings about his fellow members, LaVey, rather than expressing disapproval, said emphatically, “Those are the kind of members I want—people who can stand on their own without a bunch of slobbering idiots propping them up!” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

LaVey claims that this is what differentiates his cult from others. Unlike other cult leaders, he does not seek to impose his “truth” on his members. He does not even profess to know the truth. “The truth never set anyone free,” he wrote in 1969. “It is only DOUBT which will bring mental emancipation.” True Satanist, he says, now need no hierarchy to tell them how to think. And once that bulwark of Satanists is formed, the older order will fall. It is difficult to say how much of this LaVey actually believes, and how much of it is rationalization to compensate for his unwillingness to deal with the inevitable personality conflicts that would accompany the building up of another organization. However, the late High Priest seemed more interested in compiling his essays for publication, transferring obscure pieces of celluloid to videotape and DVD, and playing his keyboards than he was to committing himself to administering the day-to-day needs of his flock. Although he is purposely vague when discussing membership figures, saying that the position of the players carried greater importance than the numbers, LaVey asserted that subscribers to The Cloven Hoof the church newsletter, stand at about two thousand. More significant, perhaps, is the increase report by LaVey in the membership applications since 1982. LaVey attributed the rise to the new public visibility of the church in response to the recent wave of allegation of Satanic child abuse, and theorized that the hysteria had perhaps generated a perverse result. However, will the new recruits understand that LaVey’s  brand of Satanism was the ultimate conscious alternative to hard mentality and institutionalized thought? The High Priest proclaimed: “It is a studied, contrived set of principles and exercises, designed to prevent and liberate from the contagion of mindlessness which destroys innovation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

“Here are some reasons why it is called ‘Satanism’: It is most stimulating under that name, and self-discipline and motivation are easier under stimulating conditions. It means ‘the opposition,’ and epitomizes all symbols of non-conformity. It represents the strongest ability to turn a liability into an advantage—to turn alienation into exclusivity. In other words, the reason it’s called ‘Satanism’ is because it’s fun, it’s accurate, and it is productive.” Some of the “few good men” attracted to LaVey’s free thinking, egotistic philosophy might be able to utilize it and turn it into a source of strength. However, for the weaker-minded, turning “alienation into exclusivity” might only promote further alienation and exacerbate already existing psychological and emotional problems. Yet LaVey was optimistic that those people he sought—his underground men—would seek him out, and that when they do, society would be transformed. All that went before the grottos, the striptease acts, the carnie jive—was part of the Master Plan, LaVey insisted, like the trial-and-error procedure of programming one of his musical sequencers. “Eventually, you get the entire tune by pressing one note,” he says with a diabolical glint in his eyes. “It’s like painting by the numbers. People can’t see the picture until it’s finished.” With LaVey, it was difficult to gauge just how serious he was in making such proclamations, but Walt Harrington summed up the man when he wrote: “Anton LaVey is not a cartoon Satan. He’s far less frightening than you might imagine, because he is admittedly a carnival hustler. Yet he is still terrifying, because he touches, if not the mystical darkness, then the psychological darkness—the hate and fear—in us all. Ans because he, sadly, knows a haunting truth: Everybody wants to feel better than somebody.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

It is generally imagined that eugenics was a quack science that began with Mein Kampf and ended with the experiments of Dr. Mengele. This is not the case. “Family planning” and “genetic engineering” are the current euphemistic equivalents, as we will see, euphemism is very often a means of killing you softly, with a new song. Eugenics is the practical application of genetic theory to strengthen the genetic material of the human species (positive eugenics) or eliminate genetic dross (negative eugenics). At the turn of the century, eugenics was sold as a moral imperative. To housewives and mothers at that time, eugenics meant health-consciousness applied in a positivist science-directed manner. To social scientists, eugenics was a way to increase the quality of humanity similar to that of breeding more resilient strains of cattle. The presumed results would be auspicious: a steady increase in man’s intelligence and a decrease in crime and birth defects. Many America states took up the eugenic cudgel, passing sterilization laws for the physically unfit. By the end of the 1920s many thousands of mental defectives and violent criminals had undergone compulsory sterilization—a scientifically and legislatively sanctioned foray into the realm of preventive sociology. By the mid-1930s, however, eugenics more and more became a synonym for racism and pseudo-science, as some think that ending a pregnancy on purpose is a form of terminating a human life and age discrimination. Hostilities with Germany were increasing, and Nazi racial policy was vulnerable to Allied propaganda since Americas and British alike were threatened by intimations of Teutonic racial superiority. Great quantities of anti-Nazi tracts and books appeared, pillorying the myth of the Aryan superman. “What planet are you from? Whatcha doing to my body? Seems like science fiction. I felt it in my backbone. Your heart transmitting vibes. My system crashes one by one, two, one, two, three, four. Lovers in slow motion. Let us be unspoken (Super Human). Just keep your body close to me (Super Human). And we’re super human. Some cosmic confusion. I’m scared I will lose you (Super Human). We’re super human. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

“You’ll find someone new. Someone to love you, too. You were never really mine. We’re super human. But then you let me go. That’s okay cause I’m super human. Your power went through me once (Super Human). We were super human. We were super human babe (Super Human). Yeah, we were (Super Human). We were super human,” lyrics by Andrew Bayer featuring Asbjorn, name of song: Super Human. Many Ayrans are not racist, but they like to remind their brothers that they are a super race and understand that some of them are from different origins and that some will fall in love with some of the new people on Earth, but they are stronger together. Great quantities of anti-Nazi tracts and books appeared in the 1930s, pillorying the legend of Aryan Superman. It is ironic to note, however, that the German Population Courts were merely emulating American eugenic policy. As early as 1930, Hitler reveals to economic advisor Wagener, “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” [Otto Wagner, Hilter: Memoris of a Confidant, 1985, Yale University Press.] Eugenics=race hatred became an equation hard to shake in a country of Hun-haters. Yet in the 1920s, mainstream eugenicists were quick to distance themselves from those who, like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, promoted de Gobineau-derived theories of Nordic racial superiority. An ounce of eugenics is worth a pound of race prejudice,” wrote Professor Frank Hankins in Evolution in Modern Thought, attempting to salvage eugenic science by merging it with American melting-pot sloganeering. Hankins and fellow scientists failed to keep the flame alive. By 1940, funding for research and legal sterilizations slowed to a halt, and the eugenic ideal of a nation full of geniuses and free of imbeciles became just a fading memory. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

In the repudiation of applied genetics, however, a tyranny of a very different nature arose. Grigori Lysenko’s announcement in the late 1930s that there is no such thing as an inherited trait, that all traits are environmentally determined, paved the way for the reordering of the Russian spirit in the likeness of Joseph Stalin. Rejecting theories of inheritance made it easier for Soviet rulers to expect unswerving allegiance to heavy inoculations of communist dogma. Aldous Huxley and other science fiction writers painted pictures of eugenic/technological nightmares, of gleaming post-partum assembly lines complete with stainless steel nipples. (Later in his life, Huxley found an “unregulated” breeding process a far greater nightmare.) In the U.S.A., an environmentally-based theory of intelligence created the legal basis for lawsuits of race bias against institutions utilizing I.Q. test and the SAT in which Asian-Americans and Whites tend to be the highest scorers. Equalitarianism found its answer in Equal Opportunity programs, and not in a science which spoke about genetic advantages and disadvantages. There is no more frightening picture to the civil libertarian than the vision of a State drunk on the scripture of Social Darwinism. After WWII, in the wake of widespread anti-Nazi sentiment, UNESCO-underwritten scientists such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu flooded the bookstores, colleges, and academics with books such as Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, a debunking expose about “fascism of the gonads.” More recently, the anti-eugenicist torch has been passed to journalist-scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man), Allen Chase (The Legacy of Malthus) and Daniel Kevles (In the Name of Eugenics). Their tomes rebuke, in the tradition of American and British anti-Nazi propaganda, the moral premises—and scientific verities—of eugenics. Concludes Kevles in his book, “…the more masterful the genetic sciences have become, the more they have corroded the authority of moral custom in medical and reproductive behavior.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

UNESCO’s muddled role vis a vis eugenics—now for, now against—is worth contemplating since it describes throwing the birth process in one direction or the other for solely political purposes. G. Brock Chisholm, a former director of the World Health Organization, articulated UNESCO’s apparent aim: “What people everywhere must do is practice birth control and miscegenation in order to create one race in one World under one government. [U.S.A magazine, August 12, 1955]. A statement such as Chisholm’s demonstrates that a version of eugenics more in line with humanist ideals is exonerated under the rubric of sexual freedom and racial equality while the early eugenicists’ aims of intellectual and moral improvement of the species continue to be damned as diabolic. One of the earliest questioners was Jonathan Swift, who saw what was intended and spoke up against it in the name of the ancients and of poetry. Gulliver’s Travels is to early modern philosophy what Aristophanes’ The Clouds was to early ancient philosophy. Gulliver’s Travels is nothing but a comic statement of Swift’s preference for antiquity, casting his ancients as giants and noble horses, his modern as midgets and Yahoos. He addressed the aspect that most concern us, the establishment of the academies and universities—the Republic of Letters, to use Pierre Bayle’s expression—in the chapter entitled “A Voyage to Laputa.” Guliver, after observing modern politics in Lilliput, goes to Laputa to see modern science and its effect on life. Laputa is a flying island ruled by natural scientists. It is, of course, a parody of the British Royal Society, in Swift’s time a relatively recent association of the philosophers and scientists who had been tempted more into public and public life by modern thought. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

In this strange new land Gulliver finds a theoretical preoccupation abstracted from primary human concerns, one whose beginning point was not the human dimension, but which ends up altering it. On the Flying Island the men have one eye turned inward, the other toward the zenith. They are perfect Cartesians—one egotistical eye contemplating the self, one cosmological eye surveying the most distant things. The intermediate range, which previously was the center of concentration and defined both the ego and the pattern for the study of the stars, is not within the Laputain purview. They only studies are astronomy and music, and the World is reduced to these two sciences. The men have no contact with ordinary sense experiences. This is what permits them to remain content with their science. Communication with others outside their circle is unnecessary. Rather than making their mathematics follow the natural shapes of things, they change things so as to fit their mathematics. Their food is cut into all sorts of geometrical figures. Their admiration for woman, such as it is, is due to the resemblance of women’s various parts to specific figures. Jealousy is unknow to them. Their wives can commit adultery before their eyes without its being noticed. This absence of eroticism is connected with an absence of poetic sensibility. These scientists cannot understand poetry, and hence, in Gulliver’s view, their science cannot be a science of man. Another peculiarity of these men is described by Gulliver as follows. “What I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgments in matters of state and passionately disputing every in of a party opinion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

“I have indeed observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe, although I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences.” Gulliver recognizes the political concern of theoretical science and doubts that it can comprehend the actual practice of politics. He also thinks the scientists have a sense of special right to manipulate politics. The Laputians’ political power rests on the new science. The Flying Island is built on the principles of physics founded by Gilbert and Newton. Applied science can open new roads to political power. This island allows the king and the nobles to live free from conspiracies by the people—in fact, free from contact with them—while still making use of them and receiving the tribute that is necessary to the maintenance and leisure of the rulers. They can crush the terrestrial cities. Their power is almost unlimited and their responsibilities nil. Power is concentrated in the hands of the rulers; hence they are not forced even by fear to develop a truly political intelligence. They require no virtue. Everything runs itself, so there is no danger that their incompetence, indifference or vice will harm them. Their island allows their characteristic deformity to grow to the point of monstrosity. Science, in freeing men, destroys the natural conditions that make them human. Hence, for the first time in history, there is the possibility of tyranny grounded not on ignorance, but on science. The actual path to nanotechnology—the one that history books will record—could emerge from any one of the research directions in physics, biochemistry, and chemistry recounted in past reports. The availability of so many good options build the confidence that some particular path will be fastest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Several years ago, researchers at the University of Brobdingnag began work on developing a molecular manipulator. To reach this goal, a team of a dozen physicists, chemists, and protein researchers banded together (some working full time, some part time) and began the creative teamwork needed to solve the basic problems. First they needed to attach a gripper to an AFM tip. As grippers, they chose fragments of antibody molecules, the selectively sticky protein that the immune system uses to bind and identify germs. If they could get the “back” of the molecule stuck onto a tip, then the “front” could bind and hold molecular tools. (The advantage of antibody fragments was this: freedom of tool choice. Since the late 1980s, researchers had been able to generate antibodies able to bind almost any preselected molecule—or molecular tool.) They tried half a dozen methods before finding one that worked reliably. In parallel, the U. Brob AFM researchers worked on placing tips in a precise location and then holding them there with atomic accuracy for seconds at a time. This proved straightforward. They used techniques developed elsewhere during the early 1990s, adding only modest refinements. They now had their griper and a way putting it where they wanted it, but they needed a set of tools. The gripper was like the chuck of a drill, waiting to have different bits fitted into its tool-slot holder. So as the final step, the synthetic chemists on the team made a dozen different molecular tools, all identical at one end but different at the other. The similar parts all bound to the same anti-body tool-holder, slotting neatly into position. The different parts were all chemically reactive in different ways. Each of these tools could use a chemical reaction to transfer some atoms to a molecular object under construction. Developing the molecular tool kit was the toughest part of the project; it took about as much work as had gone into duplicating the palytoxin molecule back in the 1980s. None of the tasks in the project demanded the solution of a deep scientific puzzle, and none demanded the solution of a notoriously difficult engineering problem. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Each task had many possible solutions, the problem was to find a compatible set of solutions and apply them. After a few years, the solutions came together and the U. Brob research team began building new molecules by molecular manipulation. Now many teams are doing likewise. A university, a political party, a religious denomination, a judicial proceeding, even corporate board meetings are not improved by automating their operations. They are made more imposing, more technical, perhaps more authoritative, but defects in their assumptions, ideas, and theories will remain untouched. Computer technology, in other words, has not yet come close to the printing press in its power to generate radical and substantive social, political, and religious thought. If the press was, as David Riesman called it, “the gunpowder of the mind,” the computer in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind. I do not wish to go as far as Weizenbaum in saying that computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions and that the computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense. Perhaps that judgment will be in need of amendment in the future, for the computer is a technology of a thousand uses—the Proteus of machines, to use Seymour Papert’s phrase. One must note, for example, the use of computer-generated images in the phenomenon known as Virtual Reality. Putting on a set of miniature goggle-mounted screens, one may block out the real World and move through a simulated three-dimensional World which changes its components with every movement of one’s head. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

That Timothy Leary is an enthusiastic proponent of Virtual Reality does not suggest that there is a constructive future for this device. However, who knows? Perhaps, for those who can no longer cope with the real World, Virtual Reality will provide better therapy than Eliza. Wang Shiwu, a peddler in rural Anhui Province in China, used to haul his wares in a basket hoping to find customers in nearby villages and markets. It was a way of life not too different from that of peddlers or peasants a thousand years ago. Wang’s life changed in 1999. He realized then, he says, that “a wonderful opportunity had arrived.” And today Wang’s customers come to him. The wonderful opportunity was the Internet. Wang was not a geek. And, at fifty-two, he was not a kid. However, he was entrepreneurial, and before long he was surfing the Net in his home, collecting marketing information and offering it to fellow villagers free of charge. Every farmer knows the importance of timely prince information. Traditionally, sellers had to take their crop or herd to market on the bare chance that it would sell. Only then would they learn what prices were being offered—a system that severely limited their bargaining power. By supplying current price information, Wang changed all that. Wang then also offered to sell their products online. He sold the first 2 million kilograms of sweet potatoes at a higher price than that available in the local market. Before long, e-mail began pouring in, and Wang was in business. Wang’s story is told by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, which reported enthusiastically that, as of 2001, most farmers in Anhui had access to a computer and that 1,634 towns in the province—90 percent of the total—could obtain free market information online. The province also sponsored online “trade fairs” that saw more than 100 million kilograms of grain change hands in one year alone. As of October 2019, more than 98 percent of China’s administrative villages have been connected with fiber-optic networks and 4G networks, and 99 percent of the impoverished villages had been linked with broadband internet services. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The Internet is not just directly reducing rural poverty. It is also helping to create jobs for hundreds of thousands across China by enabling the growth of mega businesses like Alibaba and Tencent. In addition, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) estimates that 5G will create more than 8 million jobs by 2030. Thus, the whole economy is boosted, making it possible to devote extra resources to rural development. This trend will continue. What is clear is that, to date, computer technology has served to strengthen Technopoly’s hold, to make people believe that technological innovation is synonymous with human progress. And it has done so by advancing several interconnected ideas. It has, as already noted, amplified beyond all reason the metaphor of machines as humans and humans as machines. I do not claim, by the way, that computer technology originated this metaphor. One can detect it in medicine, too: doctors and patients have come to believe that, like a machine, a human being is made up of parts that function as the original did without impairing or even affecting any other part of the machine. Of course, to some degree that assumption works, but since a human being is in fact not a machine but a biological organism all of those organs are interrelated and profoundly affected by mental states, the human-as-machine metaphor has serious medical limitations and can have devastating effects. Something similar may be said of the mechanistic metaphor when applied to workers. Modern industrial techniques are made possible by the idea that a machine is made up of isolatable and interchangeable parts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, in organizing factories so that workers are also conceived of as isolatable and interchangeable parts, industry has engendered deep alienation and bitterness. This was the point of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which he tried to show the psychic damage of the metaphor carried too far. However, because the computer “thinks” rather than works, its power to energize mechanistic metaphors is unparalleled and of enormous value to Technopoly, which depends on our believing that we are at our best when acting like machines, and that in significant ways machines may be trusted to act as our surrogates. Among the implications of these beliefs is a loss of confidence in human judgment and subjectivity. We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation. Eavesdrop on a group of CIOs at a conference, and chances are that before long you will hear their standard complaints: That they are misunderstood by top management. Bosses view them as budget-busting cost centers, whereas they believe that effective high-tech Information Systems can actually cut costs and bring in profit. Bosses are too uninformed—ignorant is the mot juste—about computers and communications to make intelligent judgments. And they are not patient enough to learn. In fact, only one CIO in thirteen actually gets to report directly to his president or chief executive officer. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

However, while CIOs may grumble, they are far from powerless. As the super-symbolic economy expands, business expenditures for knowledge-processing soar. Only a fraction of these are for computers and related information systems. However, that fraction represents enormous amounts of money. By 1988 sales of the World’s top one hundred information technology firms, according to Datamation magazine, topped the $243 billion mark. That number was projected to rise to $500 billion by 1998. However, as of 2021, the top three technology companies: Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta combined have a total revenue of $1.4 trillion. The pandemic sped up growth in the technology industry. Anyone who helps direct these purchases and allocate these funds is hardly bereft of clout. What CIOs scarcely mention, however, is that they also allocate information—the source of power for other and, not incidentally, for themselves. As soon as a company budgets mega-dollars for information technology, struggles break out as different factions try to bite a chunk off the budget. However, in addition to traditional turf and money conflict, CIOs also find themselves smack in the middle of fights over information itself. Who gets what kinds of information? Who has access to the main data bases? Who can add to that data base? What assumptions are built into the accounting? Which department or division “owns” what data? And even more important, who dictates the assumptions or models built into the software? The conflicts over such questions, while seemingly technical, clearly affect the money, status, and power of individuals. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Moreover, these conflicts escalate. As the CIO and his staff redirect flows of information, they shake existing power relations. To use the expensive new computers and networks effectively, most companies are compelled to reorganize. Major restructurings are thus set in motion—and these trigger repercussive power struggles throughout the firm. Before long, smart management, prodded by the CIO, discovers that new information technology is not just a way to cut paperwork or speed service. It can sometimes be used strategically to capture new markets, create new products, and enter entirely new fields. We have already seen Citibank selling software to travel agents in the United States of America, or Seino Transport in Japan peddling software to truckers. Such forays into new businesses begin to change the shape and mission of the organization. This, however, triggers even more dangerous power struggles in the executive suite. To complicate matters, as computers and communications fuse and networks proliferate, a new power group begins to poke its head under the managerial tent: the telecommunications managers and their staff, who often jockey with the IS people for resources and control. Should communications be subordinate to Information Systems or independent? Chief information officers thus find themselves at the vortex of many disputes, some of which lead to, or become part of revolutions at the highest level. Because of what computers commonly do, they place an inordinate emphasis on the technical processes of communication and offer very little in the way of substance. With the exception of the electrical light, there never has been a technology that better exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “The medium is the message.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The most computer is almost all process. There are, for example, no “great computers,” as there are great writers, painters, or musicians. There are “great programs” and “great programmers,” but their greatness lies in their ingenuity either in simulating a human function or in creating new possibilities of calculation, speed, and volume. Of course, if J. David Bolter is right, it is possible that in the future computers will emerge as a new kind of book, expanding and enriching the tradition of writing technologies. Since printing created new forms of literature when it replaced the handwritten manuscript, it is possible that electronic writing will do the same. However, for the moment, computer technology functions more as a new mode of transportation than as a new means of substantive communication. It moves information—lots of it, fast, and mostly in a calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment of Descartes’ dream of the mathematization of the World. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the process reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed), it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs. So the computer’s emphasis on speed and especially its capacity to generate and store unprecedented quantities of information. In specialized contexts, the value of calculation, speed, and voluminous information may go uncontested. However, the “message” of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer argues, to put it badly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and public levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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We believe ourselves to be living in a democracy because from time to time we get to vote on candidates for public office. Yet our vote for congressperson or president means very little in the light of our lack of power over technological inventions that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done. Without our gaining control over technology, all notions of democracy are a farce. If we cannot even think of abandoning a technology, or thinking of it, affect the ban, then we are trapped in a state of passivity and impotence hardly to be distinguished from living under a dictatorship. What is confusing is that our dictator is not a person. Though a handful of people most certainly benefit from and harness to their purposes these pervasive technologies, the true dictators are the technologies themselves. Unlike human beings accused of crimes, all technologies should be assumed guilty of dangerous effects until proven innocent. No new technology should ever be introduced, until its ultimate effects are known and explained to the population. This is necessary because once it has been introduced, getting rid of any technology is practically impossible—so much of life gets reorganized around it and so much power and vested interest attaches to its continuance. Of course, this vision is itself practically impossible. Many technologies are too technically complex for the average person, like myself, not technically trained, to understand them. Also, in many instances it is impossible to identify all effects of a technology in advance of its introduction, especially those which do not lend themselves to scientific proofs and evidences. However, where does this leave us? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

Since it is impossible fully to grasp or explain many technologies, do we then go ahead with them? Do we trust our industrial leaders? Do we merely let them shoot craps with our existence? And if we do foresee undesirable effects from a technology, what means exist for then getting rid of that technology? Are there are? And what does all of this mean to the ultimate control of our lives? There is the possibility of an alternative way of thinking about a problem. If we believe in democratic processes, then we must also believe in resisting whatever subverts democracy. In the case of technology, we might wish to seek a line beyond which democratic control is not possible and then say that any technology which goes beyond this line is taboo. Although it might be difficult to define this line precisely, it might not be so difficult to know when some technologies are clearly over it. Any technology which by its nature encourages autocracy would surely be over such a line. Any technology that benefits only a small number of people to the physical, emotional, political, and psychological detriment of large numbers of other people would also certainly be over that line. In fact, one could make the argument that any technology whose operations and results are too complex for the majority of people to understand would also be beyond this line of democratic control. Can we really say any longer that a reason to go ahead with a technology is that it is too complex for people to grasp, or too clumsy or difficult to dismantle? Either we believe in democratic control or we do not. If we do, then anything which is beyond such control is certainly anathema to democracy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

At the moment our only choices are personal ones Though we may not be able to do anything whatever about genetic engineering or neutron bombs, individually we can say “no” to television. We can throw our sets in the garbage pail where they belong. However, while this is an act that may be very satisfying and beneficial, in making this act we must never forget that, like choosing not to drive a car, it is no expression of democratic freedom. In democratic terms, this individual act is meaningless, as it has no effect at all upon the wider society, which continues as before. In fact, this act disconnects us from the system and leaves us less able to participate in and affect it than before. Like Huxley’s “savage,” or like today’s young people who drop out to rural farms, we find ourselves even further removed from participation in the central processes that direct our society, our culture, our politics, and our economic organization. We are struggling in a classic double blind. Because eliminating television seems impossible, and personal withdrawal is in some ways not enough, at least at a systematic level, most of us naturally attempt to reform matters. In the case of television we have worked to improve and democratize its output. However, a central argument of these reports has been that television, for the most part, cannot possibly yield to reform. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself to the same extent that violence is inherent in guns. No new age of well-meaning television executives can change what the medium does to people who watch it. Its effects on body and mind are inseparable from the viewing experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

As for the political effects, if we switched from the commercial control of television to, say, governmental control, as in Sweden or Argentina or Russian, this would not change the essential political relationships: the unification of experience, the one speaking to the many, the inevitable training in autocracy that these conditions engender. Similarly, no  change is programming format from the present violent, antisocial tendencies to the more “prosocial” visions of education and psychologists will mean much compared with the training in passivity, the destruction of creativity, the dulling of communicative abilities that any extended exposure to television inevitably produces. This even assuming that the programming could be substantially changed which, as we have seen, is highly doubtful. No influx of talented directors or writers can offset the technical limits of the medium itself. No matter who is in control, the medium remains confined to its cold, narrow culverts of hyperactive information. Nothing and no one can change this, nor can anyone change how television’s technical limits confine awareness. As the person who gazed at streams becomes streamlike, so as we watch television we inexorably evolve into creatures whose bodies and minds become television-like. True, if we banned all advertising, that would allay many negative effects of the medium and diminish the power of the huge corporations that are re-creating life in their image. True, if we banned all broadcast television, leaving only cable system, that would reduce the effect of the centralization of control. More kinds of people might have access to the medium, but they would still have to submit to the dictates of the technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

As they used the machine, they would find their material and their own consciousness changing to suit the technological form. The people who use television become more like each other, the Indian who learns television is an Indian no longer. If we reduced the number of broadcast hours per day, or the number of days per week that television is permitted to broadcast, as many countries have, that would surely be an improvement. If we eliminated all crimes shows and other sensational entertainment, it would reveal what an inherently boring medium this is, producing awareness of artificial fixation despite boredom. If we banned all nature shows or news broadcasts from television, due to the unavoidable and very dangerous distortions and aberrations which are inherent in televising these subjects, then this would leave other, better-qualified media to report them to us. The result would be an increased awareness of far more complex, complete and subtle information. If we outlawed networks, there would be a new emphasis on local events, bringing us nearer to issues upon which we might have some direct personal effect. All of these changes in television would be to the good, in my opinion, and worthy of support, but do you believe that they would be any easier to achieve than the outright elimination of the whole technology? I do not think so. Considering how difficult it has been merely to reduce the volume of the kind of advertising that is directed at our children, and considering the overwhelming power of the interests who control communications in this country, we might just as well put our efforts toward trying for the whole in one. It will take no greater amount of organization and it does not suffer the inhibitions of ambiguity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Imagining a World free of television, I can envision only beneficial effects. What is lost because we can no longer flip a switch for instant “entertainment” will be more than offset by human contact, enlivened minds and resurgence of personal investigation and activation. What is lost because we can no longer flip a switch for instant “entertainment” will be more than offset by human contact, enlivened minds and resurgence of personal investigation and activation. What is lost because we can no longer see fuzzy and reduced versions of drama or forests will be more than offset by the actual experience of life and environment directly lived, and the resurgence of the human feeling tht will accompany this. What is lost by the unavailability of escape from what may be the painful conditions of many people’s lives, might be more than offset by the concrete realization that life had been made painful, more to some than to others, and the desire to do something about this, to attack whatever forces have conspired to make this so. The average child has watched more than 200,000 commercials by the time he or she graduates from high school. Advertisers spend over a half-billion dollars each year to tell children to buy expensive toys and unhealthy food. Each year the average viewer sees 18,000 commercials. In a typical American household, a television set is on for seven hours and two minutes a day. By the time a young person finishes high school, he or she will have spent more time watching television than sitting in a classroom. 99.5 percent of American homes have a television set. More than 250,000 Americans write to Doctor’s on TV asking for medical advice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

An American will have spent nine years of his or her life in front of a television by the age of sixty-five. A Detroit paper offered $500 to 120 families to turn off their sets for a month. Ninety-three of the families turned the offer down. Children show classic withdrawal symptoms normally associated with drugs when their families agree to kick the TV habit. By the age of fourteen, a devoted viewer will have witnessed 11,000 television murders. There is an average of eighteen violent acts per hour on children’s weekend programs, and pre-school children show “unwarranted aggressive behavior” after heavy television viewing. When asked to choose between their fathers and their television sets, more than half the young people in a survey chose television. Once rid of television, our information field would instantly widen to include aspects of life which have been discarded and forgotten. Human beings would residcover facets of experience that we have permitted to lie dormant. The nature of political process would surely change, making possible not only more subtle perspectives, but also the possibility of content over style. Political and economic power, now more concentrated than ever before in American history, would surely shift somewhat in the direction of more decentralized, noncapitalistic, community-based structures. Learning would doubtless reemerge to substitute for brainwashing. Individual knowledge and the collective knowledge of communities of friends and peers would again flower as monolithic, institutional, surrogate knowledge declined. Overall, changes are excellent that human beings, once outside the cloud of television images, would be happier than they have been of late, once again living in a reality which is less artificial, less imposed, and more responsive to personal action. How to achieve the elimination of television? I certainly cannot answer that question. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

It is obvious, however, that the first step is for all of us to purge from our minds the idea that just because television exists, we cannot get rid of it. The biggest conspiracy of all, which few even dare to acknowledge, is that we are victims of our birth. Thanks to the often accidental result of a cojoining of simpletons we are yanked unasked into this noxious land of pretense. We are doomed to fit into someone else’s plan until we become cunning enough to find a way out. By the time we figure out where we stand, it is too late to leave, and even suicide has become a felony. The second biggest conspiracy comes into play soon after birth—the weaning and shaping of new lives into the Consumerist Reality, which is what the behavioral science of marketing children’s cereals is all about. Leaving the supermarket without a box of Breakfast With Barbie is not a crime. However, if you do not purchase at least a couple of the latest holographic polychromatic “free prizes inside” Nintendo Cereal Systems, your kids will make you think it is a crime. It is not just the mood-elevating refined sugared product they are selling. (You could make a god case for food manufacturer’s collusion with the AMA, ADA, and FDA, supplying a ready quantity of sugar-addicted children with juvenile diabetes and dental carries.) With children’s breakfast cereal, the product is only nominally different from brand to brand, and then primarily in its food coloring. No, the food product is only a Trojan horse into the hearts and minds of the little Billys and Debbies. Food manufacturers are training children to gorge themselves on style, on popular culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

The corporate mascots and icons of the past can no longer serve contemporary corporate lebensraum. Children are to have a tv show, a top movie, a record album, a video game, and a toy doll to accompany their eating experience. Kids are to have breakfast with the same “friend” who appears on the back of their tee-shirts and as toys in their sandbox and as characters on endlessly re-run television shows. This “friendship” is purposefully imaginary rather than tactile. The images are seductive, but are not tangible, creating angst in the young children, who gorge themselves with Super Mario Brothers cereal in order to fill the absence inside of them. Advertising works on two premises: 1. Convincing us to buy what we already have. Advertising spreads its economic hegemony through the tried and true religious principles of fear and guilt. Advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges its victims to believe that satisfaction can only be obtained through the symbolic magic or grace of its commodity. Foodstuffs that are advertised are usually processed—meaning more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. Children’s cereals rate in all four of these iniquities. Cereal boxes are designed to hold young ones in thrall as they progress through the normal transitory stages of orality and anality. The symbol of consumption—the open mouth—is found on nearly every box. More subliminally, symbols of the act of excretion are found on such products as Cookie Crisps, Corn Pops, and the aptly named Cocoa Pebbles. Cookie Crisp gives us a lipsmacking bandit with a tongue sticking out of a stretching mouth. Cocoa Pebbles is even less subtle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

Barney and Fred are placed opposite sides of a large bowl containing the chocolate cocoa pebbles. The first perversion comes with the concept of Barney and Fred engaging in a menage-a-trois in oral consumption of Pebbles (the name of Fred’s daughter). The clincher is in the giant cereal blow before them with a hole bored out in the center with the aid of Barney’s “drill.” From that spincterish hole, large brown blobs are expelled. The cover of Corn Pops, formerly Sugar Pops, also boasts the prevalent hole with flying feces, with the O in Pops jettisoning large yellow brown blobs to all corners of the box. The predominate color of Cookie Crisp and Cocoas Pebbles is brown, while Corn Pops accompanies its brown with urine-yellow stains. Breakfast with Barbie appeals to the precocious libido of pre-teen girls and boys. The pink motif of the box is targeted for girls and, perhaps, gender neutral boys rebelling from their puddy dog tail stereotype. However, the image of a scantily-clad Barbie showing lots of plastic flesh or a Jeff Stryker 12-inch actions figure might be just the perfect breakfast companion for some boys. No longer does Barbie have superiority over the short He-men or tiny Gi-Joe action figures. However, the result of this may confuse a young boy’s gender role. This may be welcomed by food manufactures, for market surveys have found homosexual men to be more avid shoppers than their heterosexual counterparts. For the girls the pink design of Breakfast with Barbie cereal box suggests nothing more than pre-pubescent female private parts. To this end, an optical illusion that appears on the Breakfast with Barbie box panders to the primal fears of a young girl’s maturation and self-development. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

 In between Barbie’s legs an undefinable form emerges very pink and very erect. What is it? Further investigation reveals the form as Barbie’s pink sunglasses, which she rests upon her knee. Exclusivity which has played such a big part in status advertising for the last 70 years, has only just recently been applied to the children’s marketplace. Forested Flakes, Cheerios, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all offers a “limited edition” box with a hologram on the front. This may be the most dangerous form of advertising of all, since it foments such anti-social and competitive values as wealth and status. The collision of children’s games with consumerist doctrine carries the developing mind further afield from the childhood dreamstate, so necessary to the formation of a whole and healthy personality. Paramount in the invasion of economic hegemony into childhood imagination is the cynical revamping of fairy tales in the use of the “Magical Agent” to convince children of the merits of sugar cereals. Lucky Charms’ friendly Irish midget is a pied piper who keeps children in line with the promise of sweet confections, controverting parental dicta not to accept any candy from strangers. Ghostbusters and its spinoffs make good use of the unspoken secrets and mysteries that comprise the religious experience of childhood through its ridicule of adult oppressors. The prize inside Ghostbusters glows in the dark, glows secretly to children beyond the consciousness of adulthood. Corn Pops offers a prize “Ghost Detector” inside its box. The “Ghost Detector” is a psychic Geiger counter, a thin piece of heat-sensitive glow-in-the-dark plastic which curls up in one’s hand indicating the presence of a “ghost.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

Batman cereal (the bat itself has long been associated with darker practitioners of the occult) offers a glow-in-the-dark “bat disc flyer” in exchange for a coupon. The hologram, itself a form of Techno-magic, is an offer available from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal in the form of a Holographic tee-shirt from another dimension. And Nintendo Cereal System offers the child an opportunity to buy the secret “power” either on cassette or in a magazine. Presumably, this empowers the child to go beyond the limits of parental authority. PMRC would do well to look at these marketing ploys as the earliest link in the breakdown of the family unit. The masters of commerce have let children of America know that they are what they eat. A kid can be Batman or Barbie or Mario or even the voracious Pac-Man. Can Satan Crispies be far off? (We have heard of a plan afoot by one of the three big cereal manufacturers to begin test marketing Jesus Flakes in several predominantly Catholic South America countries and Mexico.) When it comes to the conquest of fortune, the strategy adopted for the assault on the old regime had two parts—one belonging to natural science and the other to political science. First, Descartes proposed that the humble doctor, one of Socrates’ ordinary examples of a reasonable artisan, lacking in the political or religious splendor that brings men to the center of the human stage, could, if science were to increase his power to heal a thousandfold, promise enough—if not eternity, at least an ever-increasing longevity—to gain men’s attachment and disenchant the priest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Then, Hobbes proposed that if another humble type, the policeman, who protects men against those who administer violent death, could be made effective in a new way, he could ward off the real dangers for men who had been made to look those dangers in the face and thereby away from fear of invisible powers and their ministers. Doctor and policemen, enhanced by the application of science to their endeavors, were to be the foundations of a wholly new political undertaking. If the pursuit of health and safety were to absorb men and they were led to recognize the connection between their preservation and science, the harmony between theory and practice would be established. The actual rulers, after a couple of centuries of astute propaganda directing popular passions against throne and altar, would in the long run be constrained by their subjects and would have to enact the scientists’ project. The scientists would, to use Harvey Mansfield’s formula, be the hidden rulers. The ends pursued by politicians and the means they use would be determined by philosophers. Scientists would be free and get support, and scientific progress would be identical to political progress so conceived. The scientists in this system belong to a World order of scientists, for national loyalties and customers are irrelevant to them as scientists. They are cosmopolitan. Gradually the political orders would have to be transformed, so that no particularity remains in the way of reason’s operations or produces conflict between the scientist’s loyalty to country and his loyalty to truth. There is only one science. It is the same everywhere and produces the same results everywhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Similarly, there can, in principle, be only one legitimate political order, founded by, on, and for science. There may well remain individual nations with old but decaying traditions stemming from special experiences in the past, and attachment to them may tug at the scientists’ cosmopolitanism. However, the nations must all gradually become similar. They must respect the rights of man. It is part of Manifest Destination, Globalization, and Americanizing. This doctrine of rights is the clear and certain rational teaching about justice that was intended to take the place of the ancient teachings, which were “like castles built on sand.” In fact, rights are nothing other than the fundamental passions, experienced by all men, to which the new science appeals and which it emancipates from the constraints imposed on them by specious reasoning and fear of divine punishment. These passions are what science can serve. If these passions, given by nature are what men have permission—a “right”—to seek satisfaction for, the partnership of science and society is formed. Civil society then sets as its sole goal that satisfaction—life, liberty and the pursuit of property—and men consent to obey the civil authority because it reflects their wants. Government becomes more solid and surer, now based on passions rather than virtues, rights rather than duties. These life-preserving passions act as the premises of moral and political reasoning, the form of which is as follows: “If I desire to preserve myself then I must seek peace, then…etcetera.” On the basis of such evident and deeply felt premises, men’s allegiance to government can be a matter of reason rather than passionate faith. Such imperatives are the very opposite extreme from those enunciated in the Ten Commandments, which provide no reasons for obeying their injunctions and do not affirm fundamental passions but inhibit them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Men now owe their clarity about their ends to reasoners. They obey on rational grounds the law that protects them. And they respect, and demand that the government respect, the scientists who most of all can, by the higher use of reason, understand and tame hostile nature, including human nature. Government becomes the intermediary between the scientists and the people. Part of human nature is autonomy and the freedom to travel, and Americans love their private vehicles that run of fossil fuels. However, oil-company executives are currently talking about the “last days of the Age of Oil.” Dr. Robert E. Armstrong, author of the NDU paper, takes this idea one step further, suggesting that we are moving toward a “biobased” economy in which “genes will replace petroleum” as a key source not only of many types of raw material and products but of energy. American farmers at the start of this century were gaining 280 million tons of waste leaves, stalks and other plant parts a year. Some of that biomass is already converted into chemicals, electricity, lubricants, plastics, adhesives and above all fuel. This, however, is only the beginning. Armstrong foresees the countryside dotted with small “biorefineries” that would turn biomass into foods, feeds, fibers, bioplastics and other goods. He cites a 1999 National Research Council report estimating that a domestic bio-based economy in the United States of America could ultimately fulfill “90 percent of the U.S. organic chemical consumption and 50 percent of our liquid fuel needs.” Nor is this just an American matter. In such an economy, Armstrong continues, “the basic raw material will be genes, and these, unlike oil, are found all over the World.” He thus forecasts a huge geopolitical shift of power from desert-bare oil countries toward tropical regions richly endowed with biodiversity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

“In a biobased World,” he writes, “our relations with Ecuador (to use a representative country…) will be more important than those with Saudi Arabia.” The reason: Ecuador has far greater biodiversity—hence gene diversity—of potential value to the World. And if that is true for Ecuador, what might it mean for Brazil? Or central Africa? At the Eden Project in Cornwall, England, Tim Smit directs what Fast Company calls “the World’s largest greenhouse.” “We are on the verge of a revolution that is greater than any in the 20^th century,” according to Smit. “There are now composite materials that you can make from plants that are stronger than steel and Kevlar. The implications are phenomenal. Every country in the World could have access to advanced materials created from their own plants.” Moreover, he continues, “biorefineries will have to be built close to the source of their raw materials. A regionalized agriculture will likely develop, with certain areas growing specific crops to supply regional biorefineries…The significance is the likely creation of nonfarming jobs in rural areas.” Armstrong concludes, “a biobased economy ultimately could help stem the flow of urbanization.” Are the Japanese bearing their share of the burden in nanotechnology research? For a variety of reasons, Japan’s contribution to nanotechnology research promises to be excellent. While the United States of America has generally pursued research in this area with little sense of long-term direction, it appears that Japan has begun to take a more focused approach. Researchers there already have clear ideas about molecular machines—about what might work and what probably will not. Japanese researchers are accustomed to a higher level of interdisciplinary contact and engineering emphasis than are Americans. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

In the United States of America, we prize “basic science,” often calling it “pure science,” as if to imply that practical applications are a form of impurity. In Japan instead of emphasizes “basic technology.” Nanotechnology is a basic technology, and the Japanese recognize it as such. Recent changes at the Tokyo Institute of Technology—Japan’s equivalent of MIT—reflect their views of promising directions for future research. For many decades, Tokyo Tech has had two major divisions: a Faculty of Science and a Faculty of Engineering. To these is now being added a Faculty of Bioscience and Biotechnology, to consist of four departments: a Department of Biomolecular Engineering, and what is termed a “Department of Biostructure.” The creation of a new faculty in a major Japanese university is a rare event. What U.S.A university has a department of Biostructure.” The creation of a new faculty in a major Japanese university is a rare event. What U.S.A. university has a department explicitly devoted to molecular engineering? Japan has both the departments at Tokyo Tech and Kyoto University’s recently established Department of Molecular Engineering. Japan’s Institute for Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) has broad-based interdisciplinary strength. Hiroyuki Sasabe, notes that the institute has expertise in organic synthesis, protein engineering, and STM technology. Sasabe says that his laboratory may need a molecular manipulator of the sort to accomplish its goals in molecular engineering. Research consortia in Japan are also moving toward nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

The Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology Organization (ERATO) sponsors many three-to-five-year projects in parallel, each with a specific goal. Consider the work in progress: Yoshida Nanomechanism Project, Hotani Molecular Dynamic Assembly Project, Kunitake Molecular Architecture Project, Nagayama Protein Array Project, Aono Atomcraft Project. These focuses on different aspects of gaining control over matter at the atomic level. The Nagayama Protein Array Project aims to use proteins as engineering materials to move toward making new molecular devices. The Aono Atomcraft does not involve nuclear power—as its translation might imply—but is instead an interdisciplinary effort to use an STM to arrange matter on the atomic scale. At some point, work on nanotechnology must move beyond spinoffs from other fields and undertake the design and construction of molecular machinery. This shift from opportunistic science to organized engineering requires a change in attitude. In this, Japan leads the United States of America, but America is gaining significant ground. Certainly, after the invention of the digital computer, it was abundantly clear that the computer was capable of performing functions that could in some sense be called “intelligent.” In 1936, the great English mathematician Alan Turing showed that it was possible to build a machine that would, for many practical purposes, behave like a problem-solving human being. Turing claimed that he would call a machine “intelligent” if, through typed messages, it could exchange thoughts with a human being—that is, hold up its end of a conversation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

In the early days of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called Eliza, which showed how easy it was to meet Turing’s test for intelligence. When asked a question with a proper noun in it, Eliza’s program could respond with “Why are you interested in,” followed by the proper noun and a question mark. That is, it could invert statements and seek more information about one of the nouns in the statement. Thus, Eliza acted much like a Rogerian psychologist, or at least a friendly and inexpensive therapist. Some people who used Eliza refused to believe that they were conversing with a mere machine. Having, in effect, created a Turning machine, Weizenbaum eventually pulled the program off the computer network and was stimulated to write Computer Power and Human Reason, in which, among other things, he raised questions about the research programs of those working in artificial intelligence; the assumption that whatever a computer can do, it should do; and the effects of computer technology on the way people construe the World—that is, the ideology of the computer, to which I now turn. From the sixteenth century until recently we were “Gutenberg’s Men.” The computer is the dominant metaphor of our age; it defines our age by suggesting a new relationship to information, to work, to power, and to nature itself. That relationship can best be described by saying that the computer redefines humans as “information processors” and nature itself as information to be processed. The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines—thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The computer subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it “think” better than we can. Indeed, the thinking power of silicon “brains” will be so formidable that if we are lucky, they will keep us as their best friend. Even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs. The thermostats has three beliefs—it is too hot in here, it is too cold in here, and it is just right in here. This statement redefines the word “belief.” The remark rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that “belief” means only what someone or something does. The remark also implies that simulating an idea is synonymous with duplicating the idea. And, most important, the remark rejects the idea that mind is a biological phenomenon. In other word, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad. From the proposition that humans are in some respects like machines, we move to the proposition that humans are little else but machines and, finally, that human beings are machines. We have also suggested to the propostion that machines are human beings. If follows that machines can be made that duplicate human intelligence, and thus research in the field known as artificial intelligence was inevitable. What is most significant about this line of thinking is the dangerous reductionism it represents. Human intelligence is not transferrable at this time. The plain fact is that humans have a unique, biologically rooted, intangible mental life which in some limited respects can be simulated by a machine but can not at this time be duplicated. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Machines cannot feel and, just as important, cannot understand. Eliza can ask, “Why are you worried about your mother?,” which might be exactly the question a therapist would ask. However, the machine does not know what the question means or even that the questions. (Of course, there may be some therapists who do not know what the question means either, who ask it routinely, ritualistically, inattentively. In that case we may say that are acting like a machine.) It is meaning, not utterance, that makes mind unique. I use “meaning” here to refer to something more than the result of putting together symbols the denotations of which are commonly shared by at least two people. As I understand it, meaning also includes those things we call feelings, experiences, and sensations that do not have to be, and sometimes cannot be, put into symbols. They “mean” nonetheless. Without concrete symbols, a computer is merely a pile of junk. Although the quest for a machine that duplicates mind has ancient roots, and although digital logic circuitry has given that quest a scientific structure, artificial intelligence does not and cannot lead to a meaning-making, understanding, and feeling creature, which is what a human being is. All of this may seem obvious enough, but the metaphor of the machine as human (or the human as machine) is sufficiently powerful to have made serious inroads in everyday language. People now commonly speak of “programming” or “deprogramming” themselves. They speak of their brains as a piece of “hard wiring,” capable of “retrieving data,” and it has become common to think about thinking as a mere matter of processing and decoding. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Standards have long been set by industries or government to assure the safety or quality of products and, more recently, to safeguard the environment. However, they are also designed by protectionists governments to keep competitive foreign products out or to advance an industrial policy. West Germany, for instance, conveniently enough for local industry, effectively barred foreign beer on grounds that it was “impure.” And what good is beer without sausage? So Italian canned luncheon meats were also excluded, as were many other imported foods that happened to contain an additive widely used to improve the consistency of the jelly in canned ham and beef. It took a minuet of negotiations and ultimately the threat of legal action by the European Community to make the Germans back down. By now it should come as no surprise that GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, has devised yet another standard—this one intended to reduce the use of standards for unfair trade purposes. However, even beyond their competitive purpose and their use as weapons in today’s blistering trade wars, there is another, deeper reason why la guerre de norms is heating up. A provocative article by the French writer Philippe Messine has suggested that fights over standards must multiply, because in advanced economies the ratio of systemic products to stand-alone products rises, putting standards “at the center of great industrial battles.” This important insight is underlined by the fact that computer-based manufacture leads to a tremendous increase in the variety of products, which means that systems must link more products into wholes or gestalts, and that, in turn, explains why demands for standards must skyrocket. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

It also helps us understand Messine’s remark that the new systemic products increasingly include “an important non-material component, gray matter.” For the manufacture of many goods in small runs aimed at segments or niches of the market increases the amount of information needed to coordinate the economy, making the entire cycle of production and distribution more knowledge-dependent. Then, too, as science and technology advance, technical standards themselves reflect our deeper knowledge. The tests and technologies employed to measure standards become more precise; tolerances, narrower. More information and even-deeper knowledge are embedded in the standards. Finally, as competitive innovations drive more new products into the marketplace, filling (and simultaneously creating) new consumer needs, the push for the definition of standards itself propels research forward. Thus, on every front—scientific, political, economic, and technological—the battle over standards can be expected to intensify as the new system for wealth creation replaced the fast-fading somestack World of the past. Victors in the widening wars over standards will wield immense, high-quality power in the fast-arriving World of tomorrow. Many people believe that the “Big Brother” syndrome—lies, disinformation, and deceptions which are setting the stage for a mass yoking to the false Messiah. There are plans to initiate a new colored currency which is being developed as the pretext of stopping organized crime. This U.S. government plot to destroy the “underground economy” will involve registering each citizen’s every purchase on a master computer. This emergent system is a multi-pronged plan of government monitoring the decisions and movements of its citizenry. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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Today’s blistering pace of innovation forces manufacturers to choose a strategy: either invent and impose a standard on your industry, or piggyback on someone else’s standard—or be driven into a commercial Siberia in which your products have limited uses and markets. IBM has been the dominant force in the computer industry since its inception. It was IBM’s blue-suited and buttoned-down salespeople who first put mainframes into government offices and corporations. And for nearly two decades IBM faced only weak and disorganized competition. Much of IBM’s monumental success could be traced to its early ability to set—and enforce—a standard for what goes on inside computers. At first it was the hardware that counted most. However, gradually it became clear that software is the most important element in any computer system. So-called “applications programs” were sets of instructions to the machine to perform tasks like accounting or word-processing, printing, displaying graphics, and communicating. However, every computer has built into it a kind of meta-program called an “operating system,” which determines what other kinds of programs it can or cannot run. The key to dominating the computer industry lies in software—without which the machines are inert and useless. However, the key to dominating software is the operating system. And the ultimate lever of control—the key to dominating operating systems—lies in the standards to which they, in turn, are held. It was IBM’s control of these that made it the superpower of the computing World. Despite IBM’s efforts, however, other operating systems have sprung up over the years, from Ada, which is promoted by the U.S. Department of Defense, to Unix, originally offered by AT&T, plus many variations of these. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

When Apple Computer started the microcomputer revolution in the mid-seventies, it specifically opted to create non-IBM-compatible machines, choosing a different operating system. Today an all-out battle is being fought internationally between IBM and its chief competitors to set the operating systems standard for the future. The struggle is highly technical, with experts arguing with other experts. However, the implication reach far beyond the computers industry itself, and governments see it as directly related to their economic development plans for tomorrow. Because IBM still dominates the field, and because its operating systems constrain users and competitors alike, a London-based organization called X/Open has been set up to create a standard for the operating systems of mini-computers, workstations, and PCs—the newer fields in which IBM is most vulnerable. Originally set up by AT&T, Digital Equipment, and the German Siemens, it now includes Fujitsu as well, all demanding a new standard that is “open,” rather than a barrier to non-IBM equipment. Since then the pressure on IBM has become so strong, it has been compelled to join the group and to pledge, cross its heart, that it will in the future commit itself to “open” policies. Even before this setback had fully sunk in, IBM faced another challenge, this time pitting it directly against Ma Bell, the American Telephone & Telegraph Company. As long as the 1960s, AT&T software engineers had developed an operating system called Unix for their own use. It had certain characteristics that made it attractive to universities and to some of the smaller computer makers. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

Not yet in the computer business itself, AT&T let them use Unix for pennies. They, in turn, produced their own customized variations of Unix. Since then Unix has become increasingly popular, with Sun Microsoftsystems selling Unix-based machines to the fast-growing workstation market. In a shrewd strategic stroke, AT&T promptly bought into Sun and formed an alliance with Xerox, Unisys, Motorola, and other companies to create a single Unix standard under AT&T’s leadership. Backed by AT&T and these allies, Unix’s growing popularity presented a direct threat to the dominance of IMB and other computer manufacturers with proprietary operating systems. Thus IBM, the new convert to operating-system glasnost, or openness, counterattacked. Faced with the danger that a unified version of Unix would be available on AT&T machines before anyone else’s, IBM now formed its own alliance to fight back. Called the Open Software Foundation, this group now includes DEC, Groupe Bull from France, Siemens and Nixdorf from West Germany, and many others. It is working to formulate its own alternate standard for Unix Charges and countercharges blare from full-page ads in The Wall Street Journal or the Financial Times as the battle over computer operating-system standards heats up. Once more the fate of giant corporations and whole industries hinges on a war over standards. Another war over standards we are seeing is with the public pressure to improve safety and prevent accidental cross-contamination of crops. This is a valid war and socially helpful. However, attempts to ban genetically modified (GM) foods altogether are irresponsible and potentially deadly. Even the cofounder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, has charged that the campaign against these foods is based on “fantasy and a complete lack of respect for science and logic.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Despite Luddite opposition, the World is going to move toward the production and use of environmentally safe genetically modified foods and other production of biotechnology. And that, combined with innovations brewing in a dozen other fields, can help crack once and for all the core of poverty on Earth. We know by now that genetic modification (GM) and other biotech methods can increase a crop’s nutritional content. They can reduce the need for fertilizers, irrigation and pesticides. They can help plants grow on arid land or in cold climates. They can radically boost per-acre yield. They can slash costs and increase the value of agricultural output. Until now, GM food crops have been widely grown in only six countries and have been largely limited to soybeans, canola, corn, and cotton because these crops are popular in the West and are commercially profitable. However, this is changing. The Indian Department of Biotechnology sees in the near future large-scale production of transgenically improved cabbage, tomato and potato crops. According to India’s former minister of agriculture, Rajnath Singh, the country also plans genetic research into twelve major poor-World crops, including maize, cassava and papaya. China has recently approved the importation of Monsanto’s genetically modified corn and soybeans, having, according to some, delay until now in order to give its own scientists more time to catch up with the technology. However, some farmers do not want to wait. Strict measures adopted in recent years to tighten control over imports of GM soybeans have failed to stop the growth rate of GM imports. In the first half of 2021, China bought some 22 million tonnes of U.S.A. soybeans. Approximately $7.7 billion USD. More than 70 percent of China’s imported soybeans are genetically modified. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

This underlines the difficulty of regulating or policing the new tools, especially in regions where governments have little control. However, it hardly invalidates the crying need for them. Recognizing this reality, according to Science, “China is developing the largest plant biotechnology capacity outside North America. Richard Manning, author of Against the Grain, a study of the historical rise and impact of agriculture, reminds us that farmers have been crossbreeding and raising hybrids for centuries—all based on trial, error, and luck. “Now,” he writers, “replace those fuzzy factors with precise information about the role each gene plays in a plant’s makeup. Today, scientists can tease out desire trains on the fly—something that used to take a decade or more to accomplish.” How can mixing chemicals (at least those specializing in synthesis) are doing construction work, and would be amazed that they can accomplish anything without being able to grab parts and put them in place. Chemists, in effect, work with their hands tied behind their backs. Molecular manufacturing can be termed “positional chemistry” or “positional synthesis,” and will give chemists the ability to put molecules where they want them in three-dimensional space. Rather than trying to design puzzle pieces that will stick together properly by themselves when shaken together in a box, chemists will then be able to treat molecules more like bricks to be stacked. The basic principles of chemistry will be the same, but strategies for construction will become far simpler. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

Without position control, chemists face a problem something like this: Picture a giant glass barrel full of tiny battery-powered drills, buzzing away in all directions, vibrating around in the barrel. Your goal is to take a piece of wood and put a hole in just one specific spot. If you simply throw it in the barrel, it will be drilled haphazardly in many places. To control the process, you must protect all the places you do not want drilled—perhaps by gluing protective pieces of metal over most of the wood surface. This problem—how to protect one part of a molecule while altering another part—has forced chemists to develop ever-cleverer ploys to build larger and larger molecules. If chemists can make molecules, why are they not building fancy molecular machines? Chemists can achieve great things, but have focused much of their effort on duplicating molecules found in nature and then making minor variants. As an example, take palytoxin, a molecule found in a Hawaiian coral. It was so difficult to make in the lab that it has been called “The Mount Everest of synthetic chemistry,” and its synthesis was hailed as a triumph. Other efforts are poured into making small molecules with unusual bonding, or molecules of remarkable symmetry, like “cubane” and “dodecahedrane” (shaped like the Platonic solids they are named after). Chemist, at least in the United States of America, regard themselves as natural scientists even when their life’s work is the construction of molecules by artificial means. Ordinarily, people who build things are called engineers. And indeed, at the University of Tokyo the Department of Synthetic Chemistry is part of the Faculty of Engineering; its chemists are designing molecular switches for storing computer data. Engineering achievements will require work directed at engineering goals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

How could chemist move toward building molecular machines? Molecular engineers working toward nanotechnology need a set of molecular building blocks for making large, complex structures. Systematic building-block construction was pioneered by Bruce Merrifield, winner of the 1984 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His approach, known as “solid phase synthesis,” or simply “the Merrifield method,” is used to synthesize the long chain of amino acids that form proteins. In the Merrifield method, cycles of chemical reaction each add one molecular building block to the end of a chain anchored to a solid support. This happens in a parallel to each of the trillions of identical chains, building up trillions of molecular objects with a particular sequence of building blocks. Chemists routinely use the Merrifield method to make molecules larger than playtoxin, and related techniques are used for making DNA in so-called gene machines: an ad from an Alabama company reads, “Custom DNA—Purified and Delivered in 48 hours.” While it is hard to predict how a natural protein chain will fold—they were not designed to fold predictably—chemists could make building blocks that are larger, more diverse, and more inclined to fold up in a single, obvious, stable pattern. With a set of building blocks like these, and the Merrifield method to string them together, molecular engineers could design and build molecular machines with greater ease. By the turn of the century, medicine was well on its way to almost total reliance on technology, especially after the development of diagnostic laboratories and the discovery and use of antibiotics in the 1940s. Medical practice had entered a new stage. The first had been characterized by direct communication with the patient’ experiences based on the patient’s reports, and the doctor’s questions and observations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The second was characterized by direct communication with patients’ bodies through physical examination, including the use of carefully selected technologies. The stage we are now in is characterized by indirect communication with the patient’s experience and body through technical machinery. In this stage, we see the emergence of specialists—for example, pathologists and radiologists—who interpret the meaning of technical information and have no connection whatsoever with the patient, only tissue and photographs. It is to be expected that, as medical practice moved from one stage to another, doctors tended to lose the skill and insight that predominated in the previous stage. So, without realizing what has happened, the physician in the last two centuries has gradually relinquished his unsatisfactory attachment to subjective evidence—what the patient says—only to substitute a devotion to technological evidence—what the machine says. He has thus exchanged one partial view of disease for another. As the physician makes greater use of the technology of diagnosis, he perceives his patient more and more indirectly through a screen of machines and specialists; he also relinquishes control over more and more of the diagnostic process. These circumstances tend to estrange him from his patient and from his own judgement There is still another reason why the modern physician is estranged from his or her own judgment. To put it in the words of a doctor who remains skilled in examining his or her patients and in evaluating their histories: “Everyone who has a headache wants and expects a CAT scan.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Roughly six out of every ten CAT scans the doctor order are unnecessary, with no basis in the clinical evidence and the patient’s reported experience and sensations. Why are they done? As a protection against malpractice suits. Which is to say, as medical practice has moved into the stage of total reliance on machine-generated information, so have the patients. Put simply, if a patient does not obtain relief from a doctor who has failed to use all the available technological resources, including drugs, the doctor is deemed vulnerable to the charge of incompetence. This situation is compounded by the fact that the personal relationship between doctor and patient now, in contrast to a century ago, has become so arid that the patient is not restrained by intimacy or empathy from appealing to the courts. Moreover, doctors are reimbursed by medical-insurance agencies on the basis of what they do, not on the amount of time they spend with patients. Nontechnological medicine is time-consuming. It is more profitable to do a CAT scan on a patient with a headache then to spend time getting information about his or her experiences and sensations. What all this means is that even restrained and selective technological medicine becomes very difficult to do, economically undesirable, and possibly professionally catastrophic. The culture itself—its courts, its bureaucracies, its insurance system, the training of doctors, patients’ expectations—is organized to support technological treatments. There are no longer methods of treating illness; there is only one method—the technological one. Medical competence is now defined by the quantity and variety of machinery brough to bear on disease. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Three interrelated reasons converged to create this situation. The American character was biased toward an aggressive approach and was well prepared to accommodate medical technology; the nineteenth-century technocracies, obsessed with invention and imbued with the idea of progress, initiated a series of remarkable and wondrous inventions; and the culture reoriented itself to ensure that technological aggressiveness became the basis of medical practice. The ideas promoted by this domination of technology can be summed up as follows: Nature is an implacable enemy that can be subdued only by technical means; the problems created by technological solutions (doctors call these “side effects”) can be solved only by the further application of technology (we all know the joke about an amazing new drug that cures nothing but has interesting side effects); medical practice must focus on disease, not on the patient (which is why it is possible to say that the operation or therapy was successful but the patient died); and information coming from a machine, from which it follows that a doctor’s judgment, based on insight and experience, is less worthwhile than the calculations of one’s machinery. Do these ideas lead to better medicine? In some respects, yes; in some respects, no. The answer tends to be “yes” when one considers how doctors now use lasers to remove cataracts quickly, painlessly, and safely; or how they can remove a gall-bladder by using a small television camera (a laparoscope) inserted through an equally small puncture in the abdomen to guide the surgeon’s instruments to the diseased organ through still another small puncture, thus making it unnecessary to cut open the abdomen. Of course, those who are inclined to answer “no” to the question will ask how many laparoscopic cholecystectomies are performed because of the existence of the technology. This is a crucial point. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

This hostile relationship between the prevailing passions of the philosopher and those of the demos was taken by the philosophers to be permanent, for human nature is unchanging. As long as there are men, they will be motivated by fear of death. This passion is primarily what constitutes the cave, a horizon within which hope seems unjustified. Serving the community that lives in the cave, risking one’s life for what preserves life, is honored. Vulgar morality is the code of this selfish collectivity, and whatever steps outside its circle is the object of moral indignation. And moral indignation, not ordinarily selfishness or sensuality, is the greatest danger to the thinker. The fear that the gods who protect the city will be angered and withdraw their protection indices ecstasies of terror in men and makes them wildly vindictive against those who transgress the divine law. There is a law that is the decree of God. When America was established, God told the founding Fathers that they were to expand its boarders, and grow more land to established Christianity and Capitalism. In the Apology, Socrates explains why he, such a good citizen, stayed out of Athens’ political life. When he presided in the Council he refused to put to the vote—and was overridden—a motion to put to death the commanders of Athens’ greatest naval victory because they had prudently refused to try to pick up the bodies of their dead from the water due to a storm that endangered the living. However, the divine law required the recovery of the bodies, and moral rage insisted on capital punishment for the commanders. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Mere prudence cannot override the sacred. Socrates’ philosophy has more in common with that prudence than it does with the popular moral fervor, which also caused his death, essentially for putting the prudent above the sacred. This fervor Socrates took to be the substrate of civil society. Thus there are two possibilities: the philosopher must rule absolutely, or he, “like a man in a storm when dust and rain are blown about by the wind, stands aside under a little wall.” There is no third way, or it belongs only to the intellectual, who attempts to influence and ends up in the power of the would-be influenced. He enhances their power and adapts his thought to their ends. The philosopher wants to know things as they are. He loves the truth. That is a moral virtue. Presumably he would prefer not to practice deception; but if it is a condition of his survival, he has no objection to it. The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one’s thought. Reformers may often be intransigent or extreme in deed, but they rarely intransigent in thought, for they have to be relevant. However, they are rarely intransigent in thought, for they have to be relevant. However, the man who fits most easily into the conventions and is least constrained by struggle with them has more freedom for thought. The real radicalism of ancient thought is covered over by its moderation in political deed, and this misleads many modern scholars. The ancients had no tenure to protect them and wanted to avoid the prostitution to which those who have to live off their wits are prone. There is no moral order protecting philosophers or ensuring that truth will win out in the long, or the short, run. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

So philosophers engaged in a gentle art of deception. There is no leaving civil society, no matter what Thoreau may have thought. However, they cannot avoid being noticed. They are different. Therefore philosophers allied themselves with the gentlemen, making themselves useful to them, never quite revealing themselves to them, strengthening their gentleness and openness by reforming their education. Why are the gentlemen more open than people? Because they have money and hence leisure and can appreciate the beautiful and useless. And because they despise necessity. Nietzsche said with some good reason that ancient gentlemen despised eating and pleasures of the flesh because these acts are forced on them by their animal nature, and they had the pride of the free. And although they tend to be reverent, they can be irreverent, and certainly are less prone to religious fanaticism than the many, because they are less in the grip of fear. Now, one day, a Processian whose name I do not remember began to tell me how much he enjoyed our music, and then in a sort of off-the-wall manner, began to speak on other matters: “You know, a lot of people say The Process is a Fascist organization It’s actually half-true. It was founded by the German Democratic Party, a neo-Nazi group in Germany as a front to raise money over here in the States. But since that time it’s grown more or less independent of the German group. I know a number of American Nazis and fascists who won’t have anything to do with The Process. They say they don’t want to be a part of a group that’s run by Europeans. When I was over in Europe, Interpol approached me and offered to pay me to spy on The Process. But I turned them down. They approached me a second time when I was at The Process headquarters in Toronto, but I told them I couldn’t do anything like that.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

The fellow went on to mention that he was of White Russian extraction, that his father escaped after the Revolution, and had lived for many years in Mexico. He mentioned that his brother had been busted for possession of drugs, and that he had to leave to bail him out of jail. I listened to all of this with little comment. Later that evening, Father Matthew sided-up to me and asked whether if I would do artwork for them. My illustration of a dragon showed up in the Death Issues of the Process Magazine. At closing time, after my folk group Changes was finishing up a set, Father Matthew told us, “You guys are welcome to stay, we have a little private party after closing we call an ‘Aesop,’ we sort of get loose and have a good time.” My partner, who had reservations about the group from the start, said he wanted to start heading home. I begged off as well. Father Matthew looked a bit crestfallen, but made no attempt to change our minds. Matthew asked us if we were interested in going out with the Processians to the main mental health facility in the area. Neither of my partners in Changes wanted to go. I gathered that the Processian provided entertainment to the inmates at Cook County Jail and Reed Mental Health Facility. I had no idea whether these visitations were intended as a charitable activity or for recruiting purposes. But over the years The Process seemed to attract some pretty strange characters. One woman member had been convicted of pouring blood on the draft tables at the Army Induction Center. This same woman subsequently became a leading personality in the emerging pagan movement in Chicago. She also operated a prostitution ring in the East Rogers Park area of Chicago’s North Side. In the Spring of 1980 a former Process member, Yvonne Kleinfelder, was found guilty of murdering her live-in mate, John Comer, and received a 25-year prison sentence. Comer was tied to a chair for six days after Kleinfelder emptied a foot-high lobster pot of boiling water on him. Prior to her murderous deed, Kleinfelder proclaimed herself a born again Christian. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

It is always good, then, to consider the background to the facts recorded in the Bible. Those who claim that a Christian should reject all medical help and who base their arguments on James chapter 5 may find that it is this very chapter that urges us not to neglect the use of medicine. Nevertheless it is true that the passage in the main dealing with the question of faith healing. Thus if a Christian feels constrained to refuse medical help and to rely solely on the Lord for healing, ne cannot be criticized. However, such an attitude of faith must never be made into a law which is binding on all Christians. I am sad to say that I know of many unfortunate examples where this has been the case. One of the most important points to bear in mind when considering the historical background is the fact that there is a distinction to be made between healing motivated by God and magical healing. In the ancient World it was common to imagine that sickness was caused by evil spirits. Hence the process of healing a person was often akin to the exorcising of demons, and would consist of the exorciser or the magic charmer calling on the name of the spirit in question or on the name of a more powerful spirit. We have a case of this recorded in Acts 19, where some travelling Jewish exorcists attempted to cast out a demon in the name of Jesus. They themselves were not Christian and the result was that they were overpowered and had to flee. We could easily say that the type of healing recorded in the New Testament is no longer valid for today, were it not for the fact that people claim that similar miracles still happen today. With this we come to the center of the problem. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

It is true to say that almost everyone who falls ill will at some time or other ask one’s self the question, “How can I get well?” The majority of people will first of all consult a doctor, but if this does not bring the relief they want, many will then turn aside to seek help in occult forms of healing. And these still exist in the 21^st century. Times have not changed. In conselling people I have met with a number of different types occult healing. After a nine-month sojourn in New Mexico, I returned to the Process headquarters to attend a Midnight Meditation, Father Barnabas had been transferred to New Orleans. Mother Mercedes was now in New York. Father Matthew was still in Chicago, but his wife and children had been moved someplace else. It was not long after when the Schism occurred. DeGrimston had been “purged,” and his estranged wife Mary Anne had reorganized the group into the “Foundation Church of the Millennium.” Gone were the old symbols. Gone too were the black outsides and cowled heads; gone where the old books and magazines. The new symbol was a six-pointed Star of the David with two F’s—one upside-down, the other upright. The new Wells Street coffee house was on the first floor at street level. Whatever mystique the Process had previously projected, the new group seemed only a bland shadow. I ran into Father Matthew one day across the street from J’s Place (the J stood for Jehovah, the only surviving God from the old pantheon which the Foundation Church still believe in). He borrowed a phone from phone from me and we stood at the curb talking…apparently he was being transferred to Miami. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

When I asked about what happened to the old group, he looked down, shook his head and said, “It’s really just too complex to go into.” Later I was to learn that Matthew changed his name to Father Nathan and was leading the Miami group. They gave the appearance of being involved in community and charitable work. By 1974 the Foundation Church place in Chicago folded. Robert DeGrimston, meanwhile, attempted to lead his remaining loyal retinue, but later faded out of sight American urban center, and can be found in the white pages of the phone book. An urbane, different, private man, DeGrimston decried the sensationalized histories of The Process as “unbearable,” and lambasted Bainbridge’s account, too, as a “pack of lies.” The fact that DeGrimston was so easily reached by phone immediately rendered as nonsense Maury Terry’s (and others) accusations of DeGrimston as a shadowy and unreachable ritual murder team captain. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger and novelist Steven Schneck, and with the LaVey formed the Magic Circle, whose weekly rituals were not open to the public. The thought soon struck LaVey that the energy the group was being squandered trying to move a teacup by psychic means and might be better put to use spreading the philosophy he had developed throughout his eclectic evolution. Thus, on Walpurgisnacht 1966, the Magic Circle became the Church of Satan, with LaVey as its High Priest, and his pretty blonde wife, Diane, as High Priestess. In 1967, the Church received national press coverage when LaVey performed a Satanic wedding of socialite Judith Case and radical journalist John Raymond. In may of that year, it made news again when LaVey performed a Satanic baptism of the Lavey’s three-year-old daughter, Zeena, and in December, he crated another media event when he performed Satanic last rites for a sailor member, complete with a full naval color guard. With the publicity came a flood of would-be initiates to the church. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Among the curious seeking entrance to the “Devil house” were celebrities like Sammy Davis, Jr., singer Barbara McNair, and veteran actor Keenan Wynn, upon whom Lavey later bestowed an honorary priesthood. Davis was such a fervent member that, for a time, he wore a Satanic Baphomet medallion on stage and actively proselytized the cause, setting up dinner meetings at his Los Angeles home between LaVey and various movie and entertainment personalities. While most of the more famous Hollywood figures requested their affiliation with the church be kept secret for fear of harming their careers, one who did not mind was buxom sex symbol Jayne Mansfield. Mansfield showed up at the church in 1966 with a request that the High Priest put a curse on her second husband, Matt Cimber, with whom she was engaged in a child custody battle. After she won a favorable court ruling, she became an ardent Devil’s disciple. When her young son, Zoltan, was later critically mauled by a lion at Jungleland Wild Animal Park, the actress called LaVey for help. The High Priest drove to the top of Mount Tamalpais, near San Francisco, and in the middle of a torrential rainstorm summoned all his magical powers while slowing out a soliloquy to Satan. Mansfield credited the boy’s miraculous recover to Satanic intervention and swore her undying loyalty to LaVey and the Prince of Darkness. There are many cases where people have been healed by black magic. There was a woman with mental and psychic disturbances who came for counselling. In the course of conversation an amulet was found in her possession. At first the woman refused to part with it because she was convinced that is she did so she would die in a few days. At least this is what the magic charmer said. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Finally however, she handed it over and she was shocked on opening it to find a piece of paper with the words, “Satan is your Lord and Master.” As she hocked her amulet, she became sick again. Now, this is common. Unfortunately the relationship with LaVey inspired the jealousy of Mansfield’s boyfriend, Sam Brody, who threatened to expose LaVey as a charlatan unless he stayed away from Jayne. LaVey responded by putting a curse on Brody, who shortly thereafter smashed up his Maserati and broke his leg. Undeterred, Brody continues his threats and LaVey retaliated with yet another cursing ritual, this one more serious. LaVey claims that he called Jayne and warned her to stay away from Brody, but she did not, and on June 29, 1967, the car in which she and Brody were traveling rear-ended a truck outside New Orleans. Brody and the driver were killed instantly and Mansfield was decapitated in the crash. LaVey blamed himself for Jayne’s death. It seems that while clipping some newspaper articles, he noticed that on the back of one was a photograph of Mansfield and that he had cut off her head. It was then he received the phone call saying she had been killed. To this say, LaVey claims to be shaken up by the “coincidence.” Mansfield’s tragic death and the subsequent revelations about the “curse” proved to be a media bonanza for the Church of Satan, and membership mushroomed. LaVey’s The Satanic Bible, expounding his philosophy, became an immediate occult best-seller upon its publication in 1969, its sales soon topping the million mark. There was even a poster copying the Army’s image of Uncle Sam: a horned, pointing LaVey announcing, “Satan Want You.” Both God and Lucifer are a well-crafted product re-evaluating the mythical conflict between Heaven and Hell, from a cultured and witty perspective. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

The rise of the demonic anti-hero in youth culture is also reflected in, of all places, the toy market. In April 1998, the Torture Garden—London’s leading fetish club—held a “Requiem for Anton LaVey.” “We the participants are serious Magickians [sic],” announced the organizers, “and we are performing this important ritual with real intent. At this time, near the end of the second millennium of Christian oppression, it is time…to throw off the shackles of religion and break its power. WE HAVE NO GODS BUT OUR OWN TRUE SELVES. The Black Mass is a great celebration of Flesh, Ecstasy and Freedom. Our intent:- it is our Will, to summon Satan—FOR FUN!!!” The vent was entertaining, with four floors of self-conscious exhibitionism, though, sadly Satan never put in an appearance. Perhaps this is because fetishism is almost conformist today, unlike the days when LaVey was an enthusiastic advocate. The Black Pope never advocated universal promiscuity but indulgence of whatever appetites an individual might possess. With the occult becoming so popular and mostly through the TV, it means television is not utterly useless. There are the old examples of the destruction of Joseph McCarthy, the exposure of the Vietnam War, voting fraud, the civil rights movement. We cannot deny that television has occasionally served what appears, even to me, as a progressive purpose. And yet what ties all of these together is the extent to which they were framed in the sort of objective terms that television can handle. Mail-in ballots, a broken immigration shortage, corruption in California were exposed because the issues were lies, deceits, corruption—objective matters. These are all “good television.” And everyone has to face the hard realities of racism, even in their own families. The wiring-in of everyone to television is nearly almost complete. A new national attitude is developing. The obvious rightness of the struggle to rebuild America and American pride cannot be avoided. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

 In turning the television telescope upon the American rights movement, the powers that be in television are not necessarily acting out of any deep moral or political enlightenment; they are following the inexorable dictates of the medium itself. The Rebirth of America, American produced and American made is the luckiest, most conscious, and deliberate, it is the smartest civil rights movement yet because it is controversial. There has been a good deal of violence. The issues are framed in objective terms: rights, opportunities, jobs, housing, homelessness, wages, taxes, health care, Americana, energy, cars, fuel, and schools. There are the good guys and the bad guys. It is simple to tell which is which because they even come in different political colors. There are inspired leaders who stand bravely against dazzling odds. There are mass demonstrations. All of this is the ingredients of “good television.” They have action, they highlight, they are highly visible, they are people-centered, they even deal with the subject of sensory, and they do require contextual understanding, they are “issues.” The American Unity and Civil Rights Movement is about power and restoring wealth to America. Everyone wants to be like America because they want laws, order, freedom, capitalism, the ability to get a job and become a billionaire. They want to buy their own house and the freedom to buy the car of their dreams and save for their retirement. And now we find every suburban community wanting prestigious and top-rated schools. There is something odd in the quality of success that America allows people. It is all free! All you have to do is work hard and everything you want is within the touch of your hands. No one can cap your career or salary; all you need is the skills or education and everything you want can be yours. Success is better than beauty, wealth, or being the prettiest person in the World. Capitalism is the way to go. Money and status can make the dullest people, the most desirable persons in the entire World! #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Before the industrial revolution, horrific poverty was not just concentrated in Africa, Asia or Latin America. According to historian Fernand Braudel, in the Beauvaisis region of France in the seventeenth century, over one third of all children died every year. Only about 60 percent reached the age of fifteen. Braudel describes a Europe swept by plague and recurrent famine. The poor crowded into cities, begging and stealing to stay alive. Children and wives were routinely abandoned, many doomed to perish in poorhouses alongside the elderly and infirm. Nobel Prize-winning economic historian Robert Fogel points out that “the energy value of the typical diet in France at the start of the 18^th Century was as low as that of Rwanda in 1965, the most malnourished nation for that year.” France was not alone. For ten thousand years, only the tiniest fraction of the World’s population ever lived above the barest subsistence level. And the World’s richest countries were only twice as rich as the poorest. If this was roughly true around the globe, with all the diversity of agrarian people, cultures, climates, religions and farming methods, it strongly suggests that peasant agriculture had at some point hit its upper limit of productivity. It was only after the industrial wealth system began to replace agriculture that the population soared and significant numbers of people crawled out of utter destitution. This history led economists and policy-makers to a common prescription for what is still called “development” or “modernization”—a strategy for moving a country’ workforce and economy from low-productivity, low-value-added farming to more productive, low-tech manufacturing and its support services. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

From the early 1950s on, this Second Wave strategy was propagated in endless variants by experts from the United States of America, Europe, Russia, the United Nations and NGO (Non-Government Organization) development agencies. Its message was, essentially, that each country had to replay the industrial revolution. And, indeed, there was no realistic alternative model. After the 1960s, some critics attacked this strategy and proposed focusing not on factories and the urbanization that came with them but on small-scale “appropriate” or “alternative” technologies that are sustainable and use local resources. Since them, this movement has broadened, encouraging microfinance and the creation of small business in poor-World countries, reaching out to science, and becoming more sophisticated. Many imaginative innovations have flowed from this movement. However, it is essentially designed to stop or slow further industrialization and to keep peasant populations on the land. Moreover, in their assumption that “small is beautiful,” many of the movement’s militant adherents still romanticize machines and make little distinctions between industrial and knowledge-intensive technologies. Claiming that both these technologies serve only the rich, critics ignore the benefits they have, in fact, brought to millions of the World’s destitute. More important, they do not understand that Third Wave technologies have already indirectly raised huge members out of misery and offer for the first time in more than three centuries fresh, powerful ways to attack the poverty of the poorest. Worldwide, as more and more of the economy came to depend on phones, the companies or government agencies that provided or regulated them became enormously powerful too. In the United States of America, AT&T, otherwise known as the Bell System or Ma Bell, became the dominant supplier of telecommunications services. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

It is hard for those accustomed to decent telephone service to imagine operating an economy or a business without it, or to function in a country where the telephone company (usually the government) can deny even basic phone service or delay its installation for years. This bureaucratic power gives rise to political favoritism, payoffs, and corruption, slows down national economic development, and frequently determines which enterprises have a chance to grow and which must fail. Yet such is the situation still prevailing in many of the formerly socialist and nonindustrial nations. Even in the technologically advances nations, phone service suppliers and regulators can control the fate of entire industrial sectors, by providing or refusing specialized services, setting differential prices, and through other means. Sometimes angry or frustrated user strike back. In fact, the biggest corporate restructuring in history, the court-ordered breakup of AT&T in 1984, can illustrate the point. The U.S. government had been trying without success to dismantle AT&T since the 1940s on grounds that it was charging customers too much. Government attorneys hauled the company into court, cases dragged on interminably, but nothing fundamental changed. Warning shots were fired across the corporation’s bow, but even during Democratic administrations pledged to strong antitrust action, nothing cracked the AT&T grip on the U.S. communications system. What ultimately shifted the power balance was a combination of new technology and the irrepressible demand of business phone users for more and better service. Starting in the 1960s, a large number of American businesses had begun installing computers. Simultaneously, satellites and many other new technologies erupted from the laboratories—some of them out of AT&T’s own Bell Labs. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Soon corporate computer users began demanding a great variety of new data network services. They wanted computers to be able to talk to one another. They knew the necessary technology was feasible. However, the diverse data services they desperately needed represented, at the time, to small a market to whet Ma Bell’s appetite. As a protected monopoly the phone company had no competition, and was therefore slow to respond to these new needs. As computers and satellites spread, however, and more companies needed to link them up, business disgruntlement with AT&T intensified. IMB, the prime supplier of mainframes, presumably lost business because AT&T was dragging its feet, and had other reasons for wishing to see AT&T’s monopoly cracked. All these unhappy corporations were politically savvy. Gradually anti-AT&T sentiment in Washington mounted. Ultimately, it was the combination of new technologies and rising hostility to Ma Bell that provided the political climate for the climactic bust-up that occurred. Breaking AT&T into pieces, the court, for the first time since the early decades of the century, opened telecommunications in the United States of America to competition. There were, in other words, structural forces, not merely legal reasons, behind the massive breakup. Just as an overwhelming business demand for better communications had defeated Western Union a century earlier, so again, new technologies and an overwhelming unmet demand for new services ultimately defeated AT&T. By now the rate of technological change has become white-hot and companies are far more dependent on telecommunications than ever in history. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The result is that airlines, car makers, and oil companies are all engaged in a many-sided war for control of the emerging communications system. Indeed, as we will shortly see, truckers, warehousers, stores, factories—the entire chain of production and distribution—are being shaken. Moreover, as money becomes more like information, and information more like money, both are increasingly reduced to (and moved around by) electronic impulses. As this historic fusion of telecommunications and finance deepens, the power inherent in the control of networks increases exponentially.  All this explains the fierce urgency with which companies and governments alike are hurling themselves into the war to control the electronic highways of tomorrow. Amazingly, however, few top business leaders actually understand the stakes, let alone the fantastic changes restructuring the very nature of communications in our time.  In the territorial system, people tend to not want to apologize and wins a great many converts from its neighbours. When one of these apologizers is next to someone who does not like to admit fault, and the other three neighbours are nice, the one who does not like to apologize is likely to do better than any of its four neighbours as well. Thus, in a social system based on diffusion by imitation, there is a great advantage to being able to attain outstanding success, even if it means that the average rate of success is not outstanding. This is because the occasions of outstanding success win many converts. The fact the stubborn neighbour starts off being nice means that it avoids unnecessary conflict, and continues to hold its own when the rules which are not nice are eliminated. The advantage of being stubborn is based on the fact that while five rules are abjectly apologetic to it, no other nice rule elicits such apologies from more than two other rules. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The territorial system demonstrates quite vividly that the way the players interact with each other can affect the course of the evolutionary process. A variety of structures have now been analyzed in evolutionary terms, although many other interesting possibilities await analysis. Each of the five structures reveal different facets of the evolution of cooperation: Random mixing was used as the fundamental type of structure. Cooperation based upon reciprocity can thrive even in a setting with such a minimal social structure. Clusters of individuals were examined to see how the evolution of cooperation could have gotten started in the first place. Clusters allow a newcomer to have at least a small chance of meeting another newcomer, even though the newcomers themselves are a negligible part of the whole environment of the natives. Even if most of a newcomer’s interactions are with uncooperative natives, a small cluster of newcomers who use reciprocity can invade a population of meanies. Differentiation of the population was shown to occur when the individuals have more information about each other than is contained in the history of their own interaction. If the people have labels indicating their group membership or personal attributes, stereotyping and status hierarchies can develop. If the individuals can observe each other interacting with others, they can develop reputations; and the existence of reputations can lead to a World characterized by efforts to deter bullies. Governments were found to have their own strategic problems in terms of achieving compliance from most of their citizens. Not only is this a problem of choosing an effective strategy to use in a particular case, but it is also a question of how to set the standards so that compliance will be both attractive to the citizen and beneficial to the society. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Territorial systems were examined to see what would happen if the individuals interacted only with their neighbours and imitated a neighbour who was more successful than they were. Interactions with neighbours were found to give rise to intricate patterns in the spread of particular strategies, and to promote the growth of these strategies that scored unusually well in some setting even though they did poorly in others. Compared to football, baseball is an almost an Eastern game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones. Baseball is virtually a process game. Not that baseball is a process the way oceans and coffeehouses and conversations and love are, but in the context of sports it is more process oriented than many. Soccer has even fewer peaks than baseball. The action flows over an immense field. Moments of focused concentration are rare. There is very little resolution from minute to minute. Boxing, on the other hand, is very focused, involving constant action, frequent resolution and peaks of personal catharsis. Basketball, although it is a flow sport like soccer, is played on a small field and involves highlighted events—baskets—every few seconds. Naturally football has totally overpowered baseball on television and so have boxing and basketball. Meanwhile, soccer is rarely presented, and when it is, it communicates almost nothing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Television, which is better suited to football and boxing than to soccer, is also better suited to any sporting event than to probing of alternative consciousness or natural environments, or any delving into relationships, all of which require emphasis on process: the in-between spaces. Within the range of all human experience, and all possible programming, any sport contains more clearly highlighted action than, say, 99 percent of human relationships, except for those with a component of pleasures of the flesh or violent orientation. The dramatic programs, featuring jealousy, hatred, desire, fear, humiliation, ebullience, are not only the most visible on television, they are also the most emotionally loaded, with the larger cathartic payoffs, like home runs or touchdowns or wars. They pass the test of highlighted content, providing visibility in a dimmed-out medium. Television presents relationships in crisis; those that stand out from the usual fare of everyday life, which is not so explosive and dramatic most of the time. In the television World, relationships involve the same huge cycles of feeling as sports shows: big joys, great losses, ups and downs, sudden shocks, and surprises, explosive passions, frequent catharsis. We get soap operas, Elizabeth Gillies, Roots. Without crises, television drama would not be able to deliver any feeling. Conversation or smaller feelings—love, friendship, camaraderie—do not deliver on television. Violence does. It delivers fear. Producers and sponsors are well advised to make choices in favor of such programs. Fear qualifies as a bona fide pseudoexperience. It can fool viewers into believing that when they are watching television, some actual living is going on, when it is not. In the long run, experiencing artificial fear over and over again when nothing dangerous is actually going on eventually dulls one’s responses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

As a result, one becomes less subject to television fear while at the same time more paranoid about the real World one actually experiences less and less. It is a psychological fact that frustration can lead to aggression and that the more a person is frustrated from achieving a goal, typically the more aggressive one will become. If not able t vent that aggression against the cause of one’s frustration, one will readily deflect it to a less deserving object. Cult leaders and political demagogues have traditionally channeled and used those aggressive feelings by teaching their followers that they are the elect, and the rest of the World is inferior. Charles Mansion, who called himself Christ and Satan, taught his Family that the apocalypse, in the form of a race war in America (which many people suspect some local and state leaders are trying to egg on), was at hand, and that he, “the Beast of the bottomless pit,” would lead them to salvation. The Family would trigger these cosmic events by endling the lives of the rich, and blaming in on the less affluent, a reign of terror he called Helter Skelter, after a song from the Beatles’ White album. According to Manson, after a backlash against the rich, the less affluent would rise up and defeat the affluent, but being inferior and not capable of intelligent rule, they would be forced to ask Charlie, who would be waiting things out with his Family in the desert, to take over as World leader. As bizarre as these ideas may sound, the Haight for a few brief years in the sixties was a place out of time and space, and Manson had little trouble finding minds receptive to his acid-activated rap. He found Susan Atkins, an adult dance who had briefly been a member of the Church of Satan and had prophetically, played a blood-sucking vampire in LaVey’s “Witches’ Sabbath” stage show at Gigi’s nightclub in North Beach. He also found Beausoleil, guitar player for a Digger band called the Orkustra and former protégé of underground filmmaker and later author of Hollywood Babylon, Kenneth Anger, a Crowley disciple and one of the original members of Levey’s Magic Circle, out of which the Church of Satan evolved. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

God—after the work of destruction—explains His forgiveness, His resolution never again to strike the living thing He had made, precisely on the grounds that “the imagery of man’s heart is evil from His youth.” No longer “all the imagery,” no longer “only evil,” and curiously added afresh “from his youth.” It is not to be understood in any other manner than that God deliberates: imagination is not entirely evil, it is evil and good, for in the midst of it and from out of it decision can arouse the heart’s wiling direction toward Him, master the vortex of possibility and realize the human figure purposed in the creation, as it could not yet do prior to the knowledge of good and evil. For straying and caprice are not innate in man, they are not of the nature of original sin; in spite of all the burdens of past generations, he always begins anew as a person, and the storm of adolescence first deluges him with the infinitude of the possible—greatest danger and greatest opportunity at once. This was the point at which, several hundred years, the Talmudic doctrine of the two urges started. It found the word yester, which I have rendered by “imagery,” already transformed in meaning; as early as Jesus Sirach it signifies the own impulse, into whose hand created man is given by God, but with liberty to keep commandment and faith in order to do the will of God. In the Talmud, the concept, under the influence of increasing reflection, is partly used, without any attribute, to designate the second of these as the elemental one. Why cannot people learn to wait for developments before they commit themselves? Surely experience has given them warnings enough. Almost as a rule the apparently insane invention turns out well by and by, through the discovery and applications to it of improvements of one kind and another. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

To make that range of possibilities accessible, to overcome the regime’s tendency to discourage appreciation of important alternatives, the university must come to the assistance of unprotected and timid reason. The university is the place where inquiry and philosophic openness come into their own. It is intended to encourage the noninstrumental use of reason for its own sake, to provide the atmosphere where the moral and physical superiority of the dominant will not intimidate philosophic doubt. And it preserves the treasury of great deeds, great men and great thoughts required to nourish that doubt. Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense a man free, but thoughts, reasoned thoughts. Feelings are largely formed and informed by convention. Real differences come from difference in thought and fundamental principle. Much in democracy conduces to the assault on awareness of difference. In the first place, as with all regimes, there is what might be called an official interpretation of the past that makes it appear defective or just a step on the way to present regime. An example of this is the interpretation of Rome and the Roman empire in Augustine’s City of God. Rome is not forgotten, but it is remembered only through the lens of victorious Christianity and therefore poses no challenge to it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Second, sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist, and where, as I have said, there is no legitimate power other than the people to which a man can turn. Repugnance at the power of the people, at the fact that the popular taste should rule in all arenas of life, is very rare in a modern democracy. One of the intellectual charms of Marxism is that it explains the injustice or philistinism of the people in such way as to exculpate the people, who are said to be manipulated by corrupt elites. Thus a Marxist is able to criticize the present without isolating oneself from present and future. Almost no one wants to face the possibility that “bourgeois vulgarity” might really be the nature of the people, always and everywhere. Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particular among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience. Hostility and excessive contempt for the people is the vice of aristocracies, and is hardly our problem. Aristocracies hate and fear demagogues most of all, while democracies in their pure form hate and fear “elitists” most of all, because they are unjust, id est, they do not accept the leading principle of justice in those regimes. Hence each regime discounts those who are most likely to recognize and compensate for its political and intellectual propensities, while it admires those who encourage them. However, to repeat this tendency is more acute in democracy because of the absence of a nondemocratic class. In every regime there is a people; there is not necessarily any other class. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Third, the democratic concentration on the useful, on the solution of what are believed by the populace at large to be the most pressing problems, makes theoretical distance seem not only useless but immoral. When there is poverty, disease and war, who can claim the right to idle in Epicurean gardens, asking questions that have already been answered and keeping a distance where commitment is demanded? The for-its-own-sake is alien to the modern democratic spirit, particularly in matters intellectual. Whenever there is a crunch, democratic men devoted to thought have a crisis of conscience, have to find a way to interpret their endeavors by the standard of utility, or otherwise tend to abandon or deform them. This tendency is enhanced by the fact that in egalitarian society practically nobody has really grand opinion of himself, or has been nurtured in a sense of special right and a proud contempt for the merely necessary. Aristotle’s great-souled man, who loves beautiful and useless things, is not a democratic type. Such a man loves honor but despises it because he knows he deserves better, whereas democratic vanity defines itself by the honor it seeks and can get. The lover of beautiful and useless things is far from being a philosopher—at least as far as is the lover of the useful, who is likely to be more reasonable—but he has the advantage of despising many of the same things the philosopher does and is likely to admire the philosopher for his very uselessness, as an adornment. Great and unusual undertakings are more natural to him than to the lover of the useful, and he believes in and revers motives that are denied existence by utilitarian psychology. He can take for granted the things that are the ends of most men’s strivings—money and status. He is free, and must look for other fulfillments, unless he spends, as in the democratic view he should do, his life helping others to get what he already has. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Knowing as fulfillment in itself rather than as task required for other fulfillments is immediately intelligible to him. Finality as opposed to instrumentality, and happiness as opposed to the pursuit of happiness, appeal to the aristocratic temperament. All of this is salutary for the intellectual life, and none of it is endemic to democracy. Thus the mere announcement of the rile of reason does not create the conditions for the full exercise of rationality, and in removing the impediments to it some of its supports are also dismantled. Reason is only part of the soul’s economy and requires a balance of the other parts in order to function properly. The issue is whether the passions are its servitor, or whether it is the handmaiden of the passions. The latter interpretation, which is Hobbes’s play an important role in the development of modern democracy and is a depreciation as well as an appreciation of reason. Older, more traditional orders that do not encourage the free play of reason contain elements reminiscent of the nobler, philosophic interpretation of reason and help to prevent its degradation. Those elements are connected with the piety that prevails in such orders. They convey a certain reverence for the higher, a respect for the contemplative life, understood as contemplation of God and the peak of devotion, and a cleaving to eternal beings that mitigates absorption in the merely pressing or current. These are images of philosophic magnificence—which, it must be stressed, are distortions of the original, and can be its bitterest enemies, but which preserve the order of the cosmos and of the soul from which philosophy begins. If humanity is not to be grievously impoverished, the marvelously well, most perfect of men, a human type, the theoretical type is most threatened and it must be vigorously defended. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Much of the theoretical reflection that flourishes in modern democracy could be interpreted as egalitarian resentment against the higher type of man, denigrating it, deforming it and interpreting it out of existence. Marxism and Freudianism reduce his motives to those all men have. Historicism denies him access to eternity. Value theory makes his reasoning irrelevant. If he were to appear, our eyes would be blind to his superiority, and we would be spared the discomfort it would cause us. It is to prevent or cure this peculiar democratic blindness that the university may be said to exist in a democracy, not for the sake of establishing an aristocracy but for the sake of democracy and for the sake of preserving the freedom of the mind—certainly one of the most important freedoms—for some individuals within it. Do not let the TV, the Master of this World lead you into the dark paths of lust and licentiousness, and all the intricate pleasures of the flesh. Also, do not take the road to nowhere, half-in, half-out, half-up, half-down, your instincts and ideals buried in a deep morass of hypocritical compromise and respectable mediocrity. Time is running out. “But behold this my joy was vain, for their sorrowing was not unto repentance, because of the goodness of God; but it was rather the sorrowing of the damned, because the Lord would not always suffer them to take happiness in sin,” Mormon 2.13. It is an open question whether or not “liberal democracy” in its present form can provide a thought-World of sufficient moral substance to sustain meaningful lives. We are still incapable of understanding that the only genuine backbone of our actions—if they are to be moral—is responsibility. Responsibility to something higher than my family, my country, my firm, my success. It is not enough for one’s nation to liberate itself from one flawed theory; it is necessary to find another, and Technopoly provides no answer.  #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

There is another ideological conflict to be fought—between “liberal democracy” as conceived in the eighteenth century, with all its transcendent moral underpinnings, and Technopoly, a twenty-first-century thought-World that functions not only without a transcendent narrative to provide moral underpinnings but also without strong social institutions to control the flood of information produced by technology. Because that flood has laid waste the theories on which schools, families, political parties, religion, nationhood itself are based, American Technopoly must reply, to an obsessive extent, on technical methods to control the flow of information. Bureaucracy is foremost among all technological solutions to the crisis of control.  Bureaucracy is not, of course, a creation of Technopoly. Its history goes back five thousand years, although the word itself did not appear in English until the nineteenth century, as bureaucracies became more important, the complaints against them become more insistent. John Stuart Mill referred to them as “administrative tyranny.” Carlyle called them “the Continental nuisance.” There are two distinctions between two types of centralization, calling one governmental and the other administrative. Only the first exists in America, the second being almost unknown. If the directing power in American society had both these means of government at its disposal and combined the right t command with faculty and habit to perform everything itself, if having established the general principles of the government, it entered into the details of their application, and having regulated the great interests of the country, it came down to consider even individual interest, then freedom would soon be banished from the New World. I live in the Managerial Age, in a World of “Admin.” The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see final result. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clean, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state of the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern. Putting these attacks aside for the moment, we may say that in principle a bureaucracy is simply a coordinated series of techniques for reducing the amount of information that requires processing. It is the invention of the standardized form—a stable of bureaucracy—allow for the “destruction” of every nuance and detail of a situation. By requiring us to check boxes and fill in blanks, the standardized form admits only a limited range of formal, objective, and impersonal information, which in some cases is precisely what is needed to solve a particular problem. For an amputee to obtain motions when they are desired, one must give the microcomputer needed for information. This information can come in the form of myoelectric signals picked up on the surface of the amputee’s skin. These signals occur when the brain sends a signal to the muscle and the muscle tissues expand or contract to produce the requested motion. When a part of the body is amputated, many times the amputees continues to have a mental image of the missing part, a phenomenon known as the phantom limb syndrome. Mentally, the amputee can continue to move this phantom limb. Therefore, the brain continues to send signals to the remaining muscles and these muscles continue to try to produce desired motion. Grey Walter experimented with the E-wave, or expectancy wave, which is a voltage that “arises in the brain about one second before a voluntary action, which can be either a motor act (such as pushing a button) or simply an action with respect to making a firm decision about something. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The E-wave, like any electric signal from any source, can also be used to operate electrically controlled devices. Slow progress has finally resulted in a recent announcement that a researcher at Johns Hopkins University has learned to predict the arm movements of a monkey by analysis of its brain waves. These techniques, developed twenty years ago, are rather basic, but they are a first step in allowing machinery to be mentally or neurally controlled like alternate body parts. The opposite of thought-activated machinery is electrical brain stimulation which sinks electrodes into the brain and applies minor voltages. Just as thoughts and mental impulses produce electrical activity, most motor functions and emotions can be triggered or influenced by electrically stimulating the brain. When a patient is conscious during a brain operation, the surgeon can give electrical stimulation in the motor strip and produce definite movements; here a twisting of the foot, there an arm movement, at a third point a clamping of the jaw. Electrical brain stimulation provides researchers with a means of mapping and controlling brain functions, including stimulating formant sections (as in stroke victims) to produce useful body operation. Sequential computer control of serial stimulus has apparently been successful in producing “lifelike” movement in laboratory animals suffering paralysis. Stimulating the cortex directly to replace missing sensory input is another application. There was a case of a fifty-two-year-old woman, totally blind after suffering bilateral glaucoma, in whom an array of eighty small receiving coils were implanted subcutaneously above the skull, terminating in eighty platinum electrodes enchased in a sheet or silicone rubber placed in direct contact with the visual cortex of the right occipital lobe. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

With this type of transdermal stimulation, a visual sensation was perceived by the patient in the left half of her visual field…and simultaneous excitation of several electrodes evoked the perception of predictable simple visual patterns. Electrical stimulation of the auditory nerve has produced auditory sensations. Appropriately placed electrodes can alter blood pressure, sleep, motor functions, the sensation of pain and even hostile behaviour. These procedures and functions are also part of what bureaucracies do. For many years, it was conventional to assume that the road to very small devices led through smaller and smaller devices: a top-down path. On this path, progress is measured by miniaturization: How small a transistor can we build? How small a motor? How thin a line can we draw on the surface of a crystal? Miniaturization focuses on scale and has paid off well, spawning industries ranging from watchmaking to microelectronics. Researchers at AT&T Bell Labs, the University of California at Berkely, and other laboratories in the United States of America have used micromachining (based on microelectronic technologies) to make tiny gears and even electric motors. Micromachining is also being pursued successfully in Japan and Germany. These microgears and micromotors are, however, enormous by nanotechnological standards: a typical device is measure in tens of micrometers, billions of times the volume of comparable nanogrears and nanomotors. (In our simulated molecular World, ten microns is the size of a small town.) In size, confusing microtechnology with molecular nanotechnology is like confusing an elephant with a ladybug. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The differences run deeper, though. Microtehcnology dumps atoms on surfaces and digs them away again in bulk, with no regard for which atoms goes where. Its methods are inherently crude. Molecular nanotechnology, in contrast, positions each atom with care. The essence of nanotechnology is that people have worked for years making things smaller and smaller until we are approaching molecular dimensions. At that point, one cannot make smaller things except by staring with molecules and building them up into assemblies. The difference is basic: In microtechnology, the challenge is to build smaller; in nanotechnology, the challenge is to build bigger—we can already make small molecules. (A language warning: In recent years, nanotechnology has indeed been used to mean “very small microtechnology”; for this usage, the answers to the above question is yes, by definition. This use of a new word for a mere extension of an old technology will produce considerable confusion, particularly in light of the widespread use of nanotechnology in the sense found here. Nanolithography, nanoelectronics, nanocomposities, nanofabrication: not all that is nano– is molecular, or very relevant to the concerns raised in these reports. The terms molecular nanotechnology and molecular manufacturing are more awkward but avoid this confusion.) BMW has an iX SUV that used nanotechnology to change colour at the push of a button, and the grill can also repair itself from minor damages. Nanotechnology will be used to preform things like car maintenance in the future, making it easier for an auto science engineer to access things in the internal system of the car without removing anything. They may even be used to restores hoses and pumps. So, the future is very bright with all of this developing technology. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Our outdoor living space is just as important as our indoor one, and #Havenwood Model 1 has the goods. 😉

We’re picturing late nights with great wine and good friends in this airy backyard! Cue string lights. ✨

Get more info on all the homes in the Havenwood community on our website, and contact our leasing office with any questions!

Enjoy the ranch-style residence one. Although it is the smallest of the floor plans offered at Cresleigh Havenwood, at 2,293 square feet, there is plenty of space in this single story home. https://cresleigh.com/havenwood/residence-one/
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