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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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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