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Dramatic as they Seemed at the Time, the Upheavals Wrought
Dramatic as they seemed at the time, the upheavals wrought by Milken were only part of a much larger revolution. For today’s changes in the control and channeling of capital—still one of the changes in the entire economy. In Morgan’s time, and throughout the heyday of Wall Street power, the mass production of millions of identical products was symbolic of “modern times.” Today, we are standing the principle of mass production on its head. Computer-driven technologies are making it possible to turn out small runs of increasingly customized goods aimed at niche markers. Smart companies are moving from the production of long runs of increasingly customized goods aimed at niche markets. Smart companies are moving from the production of long runs of commodity products to short runs of “higher value products” like specialty steels and chemicals. Meanwhile, constant innovation shortens product life cycles. We find precisely parallel changes in the financial service industry, which is also diversifying product lines and shortening product life cycles. It, too, is spewing out a stream of niche products—new types of securities, mortgages, insurance policies, credit instruments, mutual funds, and endless permutations and combinations of these. Power over capital flows toward endless permutations and combinations of these. Power over capital flows toward firms capable of customization and constant innovation. In the new Third Wave economy, a car or a computer may be built in four countries and assembled in a fifth. Markets, too, expand beyond national boundaries. In the current jargon, business is becoming global. Once more, in direct parallel, we fund the financial services—banking, insurance, securities—all racing to “globalize” in order to serve their corporate clients. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The Third Wave economy operates at super-high speeds. To keep pace, financial firms are pouring billions into new technologies. New computers and communications networks not only make possible the variation and customization of existing products, and the invention of new ones, but also drive transaction speeds toward instantaneity. As new-style factories shift from “batch processing” to round-the-clock or “continuous flow” operations, finance follows suit, and shifts from “banker’s hours” to twenty-four-hour services. Financial centers crop up in multiple time zones. Stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies trade nonstop. Electronic networks make it possible to assemble and disassemble billions in what seems like nanoseconds. Speed itself—the ability to keep pace or stay ahead—affects the distribution of profit and power. A good example is the shrinkage of the “float” once enjoyed by banks. “Float” is the money in customers’ accounts on which the bank can earn interest while customer checks are waiting to clear. As computers accelerate the clearing process, banks gain less advantage from these funds and are forced to find alternative sources of revenue—which leads them into frontal competition with other sectors of the financial industry. As capital markets expand and interlink, from Hong Kong and Tokyo to Toronto and Paris, crossing time zones, money runs faster. Velocity and volatility both rise, and financial power in society shifts from hand to hand faster and faster speeds. Take together, all these changes add up to the deepest restructure of the World finance since the early days of the industrial era. They reflect the rise of new system of wealth creation, and even the most powerful firms, once controlling vast flows of capital, are tossed about like matchsticks in a gale. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
In 1985, America’s largest investment banker, Salomon Brothers, committed itself to build an impressive $455 million headquarters on Manhattan’s Columbus Circle. By spring of 1987 Salomon became the target of a possible takeover; in October it had to shut down the municipal bond business in had dominated for twenty years; its commercial paper department went, too; 800 of its 6,500 employees were laid off; the October 1987 stock market crash slammed into the firm, and by December it was ignominiously forced to backout of the big headquarters deal at a cost of $51 million. As profits plummeted and its own stock price fell, internal schisms rent the firm apart. One faction favored sticking to its traditional role as a capital supplier to the Blue Chips. Another sought to enter the high-yield or junk bond business that Milken had pioneered and reach out to second-tier firms. Defections and chaos followed. “The World changed in some fundamental ways,” rued its chairman, John Gutfreund, “and most of us were not on top of it. We were dragged into the modern World.” The “modern World,” however, is a volatile, hostile place of the old dragons. Not only individuals and companies, but whole sectors of the financial industry totter. The collapse of more than five hundred savings-and-loans banks in the United States of America, requiring the government to pump hundreds of billions into an emergency rescue plan, reflects the rising instability. Government regulatory agencies designed for a simpler, slower smokestack World proved unable to anticipate and avert the looming disaster, as hundreds of these “thrift institutions,” caught off guard and crushed by rapidly shifting interest rates, went down in a welter of corruption and stupidity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
As the global economy grows, the financial marketplace itself becomes so vast that it dwarfs any single institution, company, or individual—even a Milken. Tremendous currents rip through the system causing eruptions and perturbations on a global scale. From the dawn of the industrial era, money power was centered in Europe. By the end of World War II, it had shifted decisively to North America, and more specifically to the southern tip of Manhattan Island. U.S. economic dominance went unchallenged for nearly three decades. From then on, money—and the power that flows from it—has been zigzagging unsteadily across the planet like a pachinko Ball gone mad. In the mid-seventies, seemingly overnight, the OPEC cartel sucked billions out of Europe, North America (and the rest of the World), and sent them zigging into the Middle East. Immediately, these petrodollars were zagged into bank accounts in New York or Zurich, zigged out once more in the form of gigantic loans to Argentina, Mexico, or Brazil, shot right back to U.S. and Swiss banks. As the value of the dollar feel and trade patterns shifted, capital zagged again to Tokyo, and zigged back into real estate, government bonds, and other holdings in the United States of America—all at speeds that stagger the experts struggling to understand what is happening. With each such lurch of capital comes a corresponding redistribution of power at the global and local levels. As oil money fire-hosed into the Middle East, Arab nations began to wield a huge cudgel in international politics. Israel found herself increasingly isolated in the U.N. African countries, needing oil and eager for foreign aid from the Arabian people, broke off diplomatic relations with Jerusalem. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Petrodollars began to influence the media in various parts of the World. And the lobbies of hotels in Riyadh, Abu Dhabi, and Kuwait were jammed with attache-case-carrying supplicants—salesmen, bankers, executives, and wheeler-dealers from around the World, pleading ignominiously with this or that spurious relative of a royal family for contacts and contracts. However, by the early 1980s, as OPEC unity fell apart and oil prices collapsed, the frenzy waned, and so did Arab political power. Today the horde of supplicants, often representing the largest banks and corporations in the World, mill about the lobbies of hotels like the Okura or the Imperial in Tokyo. The growing volatility of the World capital market, dramatized by such huge swings and punctuated by stock market crashes and recoveries, as in the “Two Octobers”—October 1987 and October 1989—are a sign that the old system is increasingly going out of control. Old safety mechanisms, designed to maintain financial stability in a World of relatively closed national economies, are as obsolete as the rust-belt World they were designed to protect. Globalized production and marketing require capital to flow easily across national boundaries. This, in turn, demands the dismantling of old financial regulations and barriers erected by national removal of these barriers in Japan and in Europe has negative consequences as well. The result is a larger and larger pool of capital instantly available anywhere. However, if this makes the financial system more flexible and helps it overcome localized crises, it also raises the ante, escalating the risk of massive collapse. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Modern ships are built with watertight compartments so that a leak in one part of the hull cannot flood and sink the entire vessel. Liberalization of capital so that it can flow freely is the equivalent of eliminating these fail-safe compartments. Essential for the advance of the economy, it increases the danger that a serios collapse in one country will spread to others. It also threatens the power of one of the most important economic institutions of the industrial age: the central bank. Until a decade or so ago, a relative handful of central bankers and government officials could decisively affect the price of everything from Danish hams to Datsun cars by manipulating interest rates and intervening in foreign currency markets. Today this is becoming harder for them to do. Witness the explosive growth of the “forex,” or foreign exchange, markets and the electronic networks that facilitate them. Only a few years ago the Bank of Japan could influence the yen-dollar ratio by buying or selling 16 billions’ worth of dollars. Today such sums are laughable. An estimated 200 billion dollars’ worth of currencies are traded every day in London, New York, and Tokyo alone—more than a trillion a week. (Of this, no more than 10 percent is associated with World trade; the remaining 90 percent is speculation.) Against this background the role of individual central banks, and even of the major ones acting in concert, is limited at best. Because power is rapidly shifting out of the hands of central bankers and the governments they nominally represent, we hear urgent calls for new, more centralized regulation at supra-national level. These are attempts to control a post-smokestack financial system by using essentially the same tools used during the smokestack age—merely raised to a higher power. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
In Europe some political leaders call for the elimination of national currencies and the creation of a single all-European central bank. France’s former finance minister Edouard Ballladour and West Germany’s foreign minister Hans Dietrich Genscher are joined by many French, Belgian, and Italian officials in pushing for this higher level of centralization. Though still some time off in the future, says economist Liane Launhardt of Commerzbank A.G. in Frankfurt: “We will eventually have to have a European central bank.” Against this supra-nationalism, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain has waged a rear-guard action in defense of national sovereignty. However, even at the World level we begin to see increasingly attempts by the G-7, the group of seven largest industrial economies, to synchronize and coordinate their policies with respects to currencies, interest rates, and other variables. And academics and some financial experts argue for a “World central bank.” If the globalizers win, it will mean further weakening of the power of existing central banks—the key regulators of capital in the noncommunist World since the dawn of the smokestack age. The decades to come will therefore see a titanic power struggle between the globalizers and the nationalists over the nature of new regulator institutions in the World capital markets. This struggle reflects the collision between a moribund industrial order and the new global system of wealth creation that is replacing it. Ironically, however, these proposals to centralize control of global finance at a higher level run counter to developments at the actual level of economic production and distribution, both of which are becoming more dispersed, diverse, and decentralized. This suggests that the outcome of this historic power struggle may satisfy neither nationalists nor globalists. History, full of surprises, could force us to reframe the issues in novel ways and to invent wholly new institutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
One thing seems clear. When the battle to reshape global finance reaches its climax in the decades ahead, many of the greatest “powers that be” will be overthrown. Yet even these upheavals in the distribution of World money-power reveals less than the whole story. They will be dwarfed in history by a revolution in the nature of wealth itself. For something odd, almost eerie, is happening to money itself—and all the power that flows from it. So many industrial-age institutions are racing toward implosion. Leaders who attempt to redesign old institutions face denial, stubborn resistance and conflict. Innovators who seek to create new institutions or organizations face skepticism. Both need guts, political skill, tenacity, a sense of timing and commitment. They need allies. Externa crisis—and even internal recognition of it—is not enough to bring about transformation in the absence of a persuasive, plausible, nonutopian vision of an alternative. And it is precisely here that social imagination is called for. Fortunately, there are tested tools that can help unleash it. One of these is the addition or subtraction of functions. For example, the university was originally a place to teach students. In the nineteenth century, the University of Berlin added research to its core functions and became a model for other universities around the World. In the twentieth century, innovators did the reverse, subtracting students from the model of a research university, leaving only the research. The result was a new type of institution called a think tank. Recently, a wave of adding and subtracting functions has swept through American industry under the rubric of outsourcing and insourcing. A corporate transformation also occurs when existent functions are either radically expanded or reduced. Big-enough changes in scale can add up to qualitative transformation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
In a World in which borders have become more porous, the distinction between foreign and domestic affairs has broken down. Should each country continue to have a foreign ministry? In universities, should neatly bounded academic disciplines be permanent? Of should disciplinary departments be replaced by temporary, problem-oriented teams comprising students and professors with diverse specialties? In all sectors of society—private, public, and civil—we will need completely new models of organization—strange combinations of networks within bureaucracies, bureaucracies within networks, checkerboard organizations, organizations flexible enough to double or halve their capacity overnight, organizations that survive by forming temporary “coalitions of the willing” to accomplish specified goals. Preventing systemic institutional implosion will require transforming not just big corporations and governmental departments but every level of the economy and society, from small business to churches, local unions and local NGOs. On a smaller, slower scale this happened before, when the industrial revolution was still young and needed new, post-agrarian institutions, from department stores and police forces to central banks and think tanks. Innovators arose from the most unexpected places and created them against far greater resistance and odds than those posed in today’s societies transitioning beyond industrialism. And it is here that the United States of America is perhaps the strongest. It has fewer lengthy traditions to protect. It has ethnic and cultural diasporas that bring ideas to America from all over the World. Its people are among the most entrepreneurial in the World—and not just in business. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
It has intellectual entrepreneurs, activist entrepreneurs, online entrepreneurs, religious entrepreneurs, academic entrepreneurs. And, unlike societies that suppress individual entrepreneurialism, it preaches a gospel of change that celebrates it. However, America is not alone in innovational resources. Never in history have there existed more educated people committed to making change. Never have there been so many different kinds of institutions, or more powerful tools for matching, mixing, simulating, designing and testing new institutional models. Fortunately, we are beginning to see a new “meta-intuition” appear—a handful of laboratories for social invention and entrepreneurship—mainly focused on the civil-society sector, which is bubbling with energy and imagination. Some universities now teach courses in social invention. Some foundations offer modest awards for the best ideas. The U.S. Patent Office has approved patents for new business models. However, should not there be an imaginative new form of patent for equally creative social models? Innovation will either be sparked by topside leadership ready to transform existing institutions or it will explode from the bottom, as more and more industrial-age institutions collapse and systemic implosion nears. Advanced economies are honeycombed with millions of social inventors, innovators, organizational risk-takers, dreamers and practical men and women, better educated, with access to more knowledge from everywhere, armed with the most powerful knowledge tools known to the human race and bursting for the chance to invent a better tomorrow. They are all over the World, ready to remake it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
As for the United States of America, it is especially rich with innovative, ever-inventive, try-it-out, go-for-it people eager to test new idea and new models. Even the Sepulveda Solution—the crazy, wonderful juxtaposition of a car wash offering the latest best sellers, how-to books and the works of Cervantes and Garcia Marquez; Dante, Darwin and Du Bois; Whiteman and Wollstonecraft; Aristotle and Plato; Machiavelli and Rousseau; John Locke; and Thomas Paine’s ever-inspiring Rights of Man. A car wash, even with a bookstore, will not change America, let alone the World. However, thousands, indeed millions, of creative adaptations to the emerging markets, culture and conditions of the knowledge economy will. If a car wash can also be a bookstore, the range of options for preventing an institutional implosion may be limited only by our social imagination. The time has come to free it. With the rise of Technopoly, one of those thought-Worlds disappears. Technopoly eliminates alternatives to itself in precisely the way Aldous Huxley outlined in Brave New World. It does not make them illegal. It does not make them immoral. It does not even make them unpopular. It makes them invisible and therefore irrelevant. And it does so by redefining what we mean by religion, by art, by family, by politics, by history, by truth, by privacy, by intelligence, so that our definitions fit its new requirements. Technopoly, in other words, is totalitarian technocracy. The United Sates of America is the only culture to have a Technopoly. It is a young Technopoly, and we can assume that it wishes not merely to have been the first but to remain the most highly developed. Therefore, it watches with a careful eye Japan and several European nations that are striving to become Technopolies as well. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
To give a date to the beginnings of Technopoly in America is an exercise in arbitrariness. It is somewhat like trying to say, precisely, when a coin you have flipped in the air begins its descent. You cannot see the exact moment it stops rising; you know only that it has and is going the other way. Huxley himself identified the emergence of Henry Ford’s empire as the decisive moment in the shift from technocracy to Technopoly, which is why in his brave new World time is reckoned as BF (Before Ford) and AF (After Ford). Because of its drama, we are tempted to cite, as a decisive moment, the famous Scopes “monkey” trial held in Dayton, Tennessee, in the summer of 1925. There, as with Galileo’s heresy trial three centuries earlier, two opposing World-views faced each other, toe to toe, in unconcealed conflict. And, as in Galileo’s trial, the dispute focused not only on the content of “truth” but also on the appropriate process by which “truth” was to be determined. Scopes’ defenders brought forward (or, more accurately, tried to bring forward) all the assumptions and methodological ingenuity of modern science to demonstrate that religious belief can play no role in discovering and understanding the origins of life. William Jennings Bryan and his followers fought passionately to maintain the validity of a belief system that placed the question of origins in the words of their god. In the process, they made themselves appear ridiculous in the eyes of the World. Almost seventy years later, it is not inappropriate to say a word in their behalf: These “fundamentalists” were neither ignorant of nor indifferent to the benefits of science and technology. They had automobiles and electricity and machine-made clothing. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
They used telegraphy and radio, and among their number were men who could fairly be called reputable scientists. They were eager to share in the largesse of the America technocracy, which is to say they were neither Luddites nor primitives. What wounded them was the assault that science made on the ancient story from which their sense of moral order sprang. They lost, and lost badly. To say, as Bryan did, that he was more interested in the Rock of Ages than the age of rocks was clever and amusing but woefully inadequare. The battle settled the issue, once and for all: in defining truth, the great narrative of inductive science takes precedence over the great narrative of Genesis, and those who do not agree must remain in an intellectual backwater. Studies of nanotechnology are today in the exploratory engineering phase, and just beginning to move into engineering development. The basic idea of exploratory engineering is simple: combine engineering principles with known scientific facts to form a picture of future technological possibilities. Exploratory engineering looks at future possibilities to help guide our attention in the present. Science—especially molecular science—has moved fast in recent decades. There is no need to wait for more scientific breakthroughs in order to make engineering breakthroughs in nanotechnology. Exploratory engineering has an outer box which represents the set of all the technologies permitted by laws of nature, whether they exist or not, whether they have been imagined or not. Within this set are those technologies that are manufacturable with today’s technology, and those that are understandable with today’s science. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Textbooks teach what is understandable (hence teachable) and manufacturable (hence immediately practical). Practical engineers achieve many success by cut-and-try methods and put them into production. Exploratory engineers study what will become practical as manufacturing abilities expand to embrace more of the possible. Each of these types of exploratory engineering relates most familiar kinds taught in school: this “textbook engineering” covers technologies that can be both understood (so they can be taught) and manufactured (so they can be used). Bridge-building and gearbox design fall in this category. Other technologies, however, can be manufacture but are not understood—any engineer can give examples of things that work when similar things do not, and for no obvious reason. However, as long as they do work, and work consistently, they can be used with confidence. This is the World of “cut-and-try engineering,” so important to modern industry. Bearing lubrication, adhesives, and many manufacturing technologies advance by cut-and-try methods. Exploratory engineering covers technologies that can be understood but not manufactured—yet. Technologies in this category are also familiar to engineers, although normally they design such things only for fun. So much is known about mechanics, thermodynamics, electronics, and so forth that engineers can often calculate what something will do, just from a description of it. Yet there is no reason why everything that can be correctly described must be manufacturable—the constraints are different. Exploratory engineering is as simple as textbook engineering, but neither military planners nor corporate executive see much profit in it, so it has not received much attention. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The concepts of molecular manufacturing and molecular nanotechnology are straightforward results of exploratory-engineering research applied to molecular systems. As we observed above, if anyone had bothered, the basic ideas could have been worked out sixty years ago. However, now, with the threshold of nanotechnology approaching, attention is beginning to focus on where the next steps lead. If technology keeps advancing, and competition practically guarantees that advanced will continue, nanotechnology seems to be where the World is headed. It will open both a huge range of opportunities for benefit and a huge range of opportunities for misuse. We will paint scenarios to give a sense of the prospects and possibilities, but we do not offer predictions of what will happen. Actual human choices and blunders will depend on a range of factors and alternatives beyond what we can hope to anticipate. Television is another interesting form of technology. The attempt to push the information through television foes flat. It does not work. The viewer is left to evaluate aspects of the experience that television can capture, and these reduce to objective facts like the arguments among opposing viewpoints as to the best use of this area. People need homes. The developer has a right to profit. The tax base of the community is affected. Meanwhile, the ecologists speak of flyways and breeding grounds, endangered plants and nearly extinct creatures. A whole world of sensory information has been abandoned, and yet it is in this World that real understanding of marshes exists. And without the understanding who can care about the marsh? Taxes become more important. Birds can be seen elsewhere. Images of mud and reeds do not inspire the mind, especially compared with the hard facts of our World. People need jobs building hoses. Nobody ever “uses” swamps anyway. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
It is possible that viewers of that program had a greater feeling for swamps when the swamps resided totally in their imaginations, where, at least, they had the richness that fantasy can creature. On television, the fantasy is destroyed and the perspective is flattened. What was true for this news report is true for all television programs that concern nature. Seeing the forests of Borneo on television makes one believe that one knows something of these forests. What one knows, however, is what television is capable of delivering, a minute portion of what Borneo forests are. It cannot make you care very much about them. When Georgia-Pacific proceeds to cut down hundreds of thousands of acres of Borneo forests, at it has so many others in the Pacific Basin, one remains unmoved. The wood is needed for homes. The objective data dominate when only objective data can be communicated. Meanwhile, sitting in our dark rooms ingesting images of Borneo forests, we lose feeling even for the forests near our homes. While we watch Borneo forests, we are not experiencing neighbourhood forests, local wilderness or even local parks. As forests experience reduces to television forest, out caring about forests, any forests, goes into dormancy for lack of direct experience. And so the lumber company succeeds in cutting down the Borneo forest, and then, near to home, it also succeeds in building a new tract of condominiums where a local park had been. In my opinion, the more the natural environment is conveyed on TV, the less people will understand about it or care about it, and the more likely its destruction becomes. Ecologists would be wise to abandon all attempts to put nature on television. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Programs concerned with the arts, programs concerned with many religions and all programs concerned with non-Western cultures are similarly distorted by television’s inability to convey their sensual aspects. Theater music, dance, if they are to be fully understood and appreciated, require exquisitely fine visual and aural reproduction as well as exquisitely tuned sense reception in the viewer. The experience of them on television is only the barest approximation of the direct experience of the performance. The information loss is enormous, and it is the most critical and subtle the information that is lost. Some people argue that television delivers a new World of art to people in, say, Omaha, who might otherwise never see the Stuttgart Ballet or the New York Philharmonic. They say this stimulates Ballet or the New York Philharmonic. They say this stimulates interest in the arts. I find this very unlikely. Information received with only two senses, especially in the limited range of television, and considering the other dulling aspects of the medium, is simply not the same at the receiving end as it would have been in the theater or concert hall. On television the depths are flattened, the spaces edited, the movements distorted and fuzzed-up, the music thinned and the scale reduced. This would have to affect the level of understanding and limit the quality of the experience. The human senses cannot experience what is not there. If the television delivers a drastically reduced version of an art experience, then this is what the senses must deal with, and if one has never directly experienced the real thing, how is one to know that the reality is richer than the television version? #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Reading Moby Dick as a comic book does not inspire one to read Moby Dick in the original. Quite the opposite. And so seeing the Stuttgart Ballet performing on television leaves one with such a reduced notion of ballet as to reduce the appeal of the ballet itself. The result is likely to be boredom and switched channels. To say that such a program stimulates new interest in arts is to behave. And so it goes in all areas. The religions of the World, from Tibetan Buddhism to many forms of Catholicism, are deeply rooted in the rich interplay of the human mind and senses. On television they must be understood through fixed cerebral channels, leaving description, but no feeling. The same can be said for must cultures of the World still immersed in the sensory relationships between human and environment. There is no way to effectively convey African cultures, as was mentioned, through images disconnected from the other senses, and certainly not through logical analysis. More often than not these cultures and others are sensually or mystically based and can be deeply understood only in those terms. Unfortunately, television makes the effort to explain them anyway, just as it claims to convey nature, the arts, the news and the details of human feeling. Human beings who view these attempts are led to believe that these fuzzy little pellets of information about our rich, subtle, complex and varied World constitute something close to reality. What they really do is make the World as fuzzy, coarse, and turned-off as the medium itself. If flesh feels inherently good, the more flesh must feel that much better! This simple idea emerges out of a kind of folk-wisdom that stretches back to the Paleolithic era. A similar cultural predisposition toward the opposite extreme of thinness certainly pervades post-industrial culture. The two extremes are inextricably linked by a core fascination with the power of food…a fixation which ranges back past the era of human evolution to the roots of mentality in the higher primates, in which eating becomes the key drive of pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The force-feeder control the victim bound by the magnitude of their own flesh, the surgeon or anorectic controls the subject’s bodily integrity. The consumptive fetish, as we might call the two combined back into their root, is the primordial source of all sado-masochistic behavioural patterns, since food and flesh are the most primary instruments of control, of life and death themselves. It is assumed that the chronological story of the World is in the primeval state and evolutionarily stable. However, cooperation based on reciprocity can gain a foothold through two different mechanisms. First, there can be kinship between mutant strategies, giving the genes of the mutants some stake in each other’s own success, thereby altering the payoff of the interaction when viewed from the perspective of the gene rather than the individual. A second mechanism to overcome total defection is for the mutant strategies to arrive in a cluster so that they provide a nontrivial proportion of the interactions each has. And if the probability that interaction between two individuals will continue is great enough, then TIT FOR TAT is itself evolutionarily stable. Moreover, its stability is especially secure because it can resist the intrusion of whole clusters of mutant strategies. Thus cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in a predominately noncooperative World, can thrive in a variegated environment, and can defend itself once fully established. A variety of specific biological applications of this approach follows from two of the requirements for the evolution of cooperation. The basic idea is that an individual must not be able to get away with defecting without the other individuals being able to retaliate effectively. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The response requires that the defecting individual not be lost in a sea of anonymous others. Higher organisms avoid this problem by their well-developed ability to recognize many different individuals of their species, but lower organism must rely on mechanisms that drastically limit the number of different individuals or colonies with which they can interact effectively. The other important requirement to make retaliation effective is that the probability of the same two individual meeting again must be high. When an organism is not able to recognize the individual with which it had a prior interaction, a substitute mechanism is to make sure that all of its interactions are with the same player. This can be done by maintaining continuous contact with the others. This method is applied in most mutualisms, situations of close association of mutual benefit between members of different species. Ideology today, in popular speech, is, in the first place, generally understood to be a good and necessary thing—unless it is bourgeois ideology. The evolution of the term was made possible by the abandonment, encouraged by Nietzsche, of the distinction between true and false in political and moral matters. Men and societies need myths, not science, by which to live. In short, ideology became identical to values, and that is why it belongs on the honour roll of terms by which we live. If we examine Weber’s, of course, meant that all societies or communities of human beings require such violent domination—as the only way order emerges from chaos in a World with no ordering force in it other than man’s creative spirituality—while Marxists still vaguely hope for a World where there are values without domination. This is all that remains of their Marxism, and they can and do fellow-travel with Nietzscheans a goodly bout de chemin. One sees their plight in the fact that ideology no longer has its old partner, science, in their thought, but stands in lonely grandeur. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Death Spell Had Broken Between the Living and the Dead
Speculation is bound to pursue a wealthy, extremely beautiful, celibate recluse, who has lost those who mean the most to her and is haunted by spirits of the damned. Many wild rumors circulated about Sarah Winchester during her residence in Santa Clara Valley—her opulent estate was even known locally as “The Spirit House”—and some say the rumors may have added to Mrs. Winchester’s isolation. However, the glory, the splendor, the beauty of her mansion, surpassed the vicious rumors and speculation; and the fragrances of the Victorian garden were intoxicating. The tracks were gone; they vanished where the velvet emerald green sod began. There were plenty of creatures, and they welcomed her with caresses. Yet, Mrs. Winchester was bent, broken, withered, widowed—her head was white with unnumbered sorrows. She had been familiar with grief for a thousand years. The deaths of her young husband and her six-week-old daughter Annie stood out clear in her memory, for it was a land-mark; it brought Mrs. Winchester her first real misery, her first real heartbreak. Her memories were blurred with tears, and after ten centuries she cried over and over and over again. Crying over it for pity of that poor child—the child she had lost. Other mothers have felt something akin to this in recalling, not their former selves, (as in her case), but the little figures which represents sons and daughters of their which have since grown to the gravity and stature of full age. Sometimes, for a moment, these poor mothers have a vision of those little creatures romping by, and they recognize the voices of laughter—gone silent long ago!—and they have a pain at the heart, as knowing that those children are lost to them for always, in the flesh, although their grown-up selves are still present in life and still precious. The loved and lost! Lives having gone out from their mothers’, lives to return no more but in visions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Yes, across the mouldering centuries Mrs. Winchester could still see that silken little baby, with her waxen round arms, and delicate smile, just as she was, the fairest thing in this fair World; and in her heart, leathery as it was, she felt again the pang of that day’s disappointment, holding on to the memory of what could have been. It was weeks that she had been wandering the halls of her enormous mansion, and had found no trace of William, her husband. The Valley was so cruelly vast! Early she had a happy thought, and took the bloodhound throughout the estate and showed him the tracks, and was fully of hope, not doubting he would hunt him down in an hour. But she knew that she tried everything she could try, and just needed to say goodbye forever. The track gave no scent. William Winchester was dead. The hurt stayed with her, and Mrs. Winchester was resolved to absorb herself in the construction of her mansion. She did the work, but the old pleasure in it was somehow gone; she did not care anymore. She had between 500 to 600 rooms constructed, but thought they were not good ones and tore them down because her heart was not in it. Some of them were tolerable, but mainly they were crude and inartistic; they lacked finish. The miles of twisting hallways were made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the angry spirits or even of a bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but on the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back up to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps. Mrs. Winchester was the most unfortunate of women. Rich, respected, very well educated and of sound health and mind—with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not—she sometimes thought that she would be less unhappy if they had been denied her, for then the contrast between her outer and inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort, she might sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels. After communing with the spirits, as she turned the hallway, Mrs. Winchester could hear a sound of a door gently closing, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared among the statues and furniture. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the mansion in the belief that the trespasser was someone secretly visiting a servant proving fruitless, she entered an unlocked door and mounted the stairs to her chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black darkness she fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. She spared herself the details; it was her poor William, dead of strangulation by human hands! Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound, and excepting those terrible fingermarks upon the dead man’s throat—dear God she hoped to forget them!—no trace of the assassin was even found. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Although William had Tuberculosis, something had come to end his life before the illness did. Mrs. Winchester kept barbarous murder a secret. Mrs. Winchester donated a substantial sum of money to the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. One night, a few months after the dreadful event, Mrs. Winchester and her butler were walking back from the carriage house after a trip to the city. The full moon was about three hours above the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness of a summer night; their footfalls and ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sound, aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the mansion, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As they approached the door to the mansion, whose front was in shadow, and in which no light shone, her butler suddenly stopped and clutched her arm, saying, hardly above his breath: “God! God! what is that?” “I heard nothing,” Mrs. Winchester replied. “But see—see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly ahead. Mrs. Winchester said: “Nothing is there. Come, Henry, let us go in—you are ill.” He had released her arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing. She pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten her existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, by step, never for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. Mrs. Winchester turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. She did not recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
It seemed as if an icy wind had touched her face and enfolded her body from head to foot; she could feel the stir of it in her hair. At that moment her attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed from an upper window of the mansion: one of the servants, awakened by what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to an impulse that she was never able to name, had turned on the Carbide gas lights, which were operated by pushing an electric button. When she turned to look for the butler he was gone, and in all the years that had passed no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from the realm of the unknown. Mrs. Winchester retired and had fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep, from which she awoke with an indefinable sense of peril which was, a common experience in her estate. The servants slept in another part of the house. But these were familiar conditions and never distressed Mrs. Winchester. Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupportable that concurring her reluctance to move she sat up and pushed the button to turn on the lights at her bedside. Contrary to her expectation this gave her no relief; the light seemed rather as added danger, for she reflected that it would shine out under the door, disclosing her presence to whatever evil think might lurk in the halls of her mansion. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy—the strategy of despair! Extinguishing the gas lights, Mrs. Winchester pulled the bedclothing about her heard and lay trembling and silent, unable to shrike, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state she must have lain for what you call hours—with her there are no hours, there is no time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
At last it came—a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to her disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. She even thought that she must have left the hall gasolier burning and the groping of this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish and inconsistent with her previous dread of the light, but what would you have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. In Mrs. Winchester’s mansion lived those who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to themselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with out loved ones, yet unenlightened, and as fearful of them as they of humans. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate they break the spell—they are seen by those whom they would warn, console, or punish. What form they seem to them to bear one knows not; they know only that they terrify even those whom they most wish to comfort, and from whom they most crave tenderness and sympathy. What a thing it is to have legions of spirits, cowering and shivering, fearful and vengeful in an altered World, roaming the hallways of one’s house. However, Mrs. Winchester did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. She heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, she thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then she rose to call for help. Hardly had her shaking hand found the annunciator when—merciful Heaven!—she heard it returning. Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the mansion. She fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Winchester tried to pray. She tried to call the name of her maid. Then she heard the door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when she revived, she felt a strangling clutch upon her throat—felt her arms feebly beating against something that bore her backward—felt her tongue thrusting itself from between her teeth! And the she felt the life pass from her. As the spirits still dwelled in the mansion of the shadows, lurking in its desolate places, peering from brambles, thickets, towers, corners, stairways and doors. Ghosts at the Winchester mansion know when it is night, for then most people retire and they can venture from their places of concealment to move unafraid about in their old mansion, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gazes upon people’s faces who might still be wandering in the evening hours. Vainly, spirits often seek some method of manifestation, some way to make their continued existence and their great love and poignant pity understood by their loved one’s or those they wish to haunt and terrorize. Ghosts dare to approach people when they are awake, but the terrible eyes of the living frighten them by the glances that they seek from the purpose the hold. Demons, ghosts, and other spiritual beings search for the living in the Winchester mansion during the moonlight dawn. At the time of her death, the unrelenting construction had rambled over six acres. The sprawling mansion contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. Carpenters even left nails half driven when they learned of Mrs. Winchester’s death. According to the provisions of her will, Mrs. Winchester’s personal property, including the furnishings, household goods, pictures, jewelry, and papers were left to her niece, Mrs. Marian Merriman Marriott, who promptly has the furnishings auctioned off. It is said to have required sic trucks working six weeks to car the furnishings away! The mansion and farm were not mentioned specially in the will. They became part of the Mrs. Winchester’s estate. #RandolphHaris 7 of 16
Demon possession is a well-defined phenomenon and should be clearly distinguished from spiritism. Since the same demonic forces are at work in both phenomena, they bear some similar characteristics and result in the same occult oppression and bondage. The demonized state of the demon possessed is similar to the trance of the spiritistic medium. Both are under the direct influence of demons who speak through them. In the case of the medium who processes to communicate with the spirits of deceased persons, the demon apes the personality and voice of the deceased. In the case of the demon possessed, the evil spirits appear to be more crassly cruel, unclean, violent, and less sophisticated and subtle than spirits working through a clairvoyant medium. In demon possession, they are also more domineering and brutally enslaving. Nervous muscular reactions and contortions peculiar to the demoniac often appear also in the spiritistic medium when one goes into a trance, but in a much milder form. Then, too, the demoniac is normally an involuntary victim of possession, while the medium is a willing subject, who cultivates psychic propensities and willingly yield to demonic control. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind us of similar happenings in spiritism. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind s of similar happenings in spiritism and magic. Tables, chairs, dishes, and the like are mysteriously moved about without anybody touching them, recalling tumbler moving and table lifting so common in spiritistic séances, and magic conjurations. In demon possession as well as in spiritism, unexplained rappings and noises in so-called “haunted houses” are heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
After the Winchester mansion was opened for tours, a spirit from the house had taken possession of one of the tour guides. The spirit insisted on taking up its abode with them, since it has been driven away from its for dwelling by the presence of Christians. Such cases of haunted houses about everywhere in occult literature in connection with mediums, magicians, and demon possessed persons. The tour guide saw apparitions and had frequent attacks in which she fell unconscious and demons spoke through her in their own voice and personality. A thorough investigation was conducted. Persons were stationed all around the house, in various rooms, and even in the Daisy Bedroom. Noises were heard which gradually increased in violence and seemed to concentrate in the bedroom Mrs. Winchester died in. Chairs bounced, windows rattled, plaster fell from the ceiling, and objects moved about without any visible explanation. Prayer caused the noises and telekinetic phenomena continued for a while in the mansion. On one occasion, after continued prayer, one of the demons inhabiting Jane cried out, “All is now.ost. Our plans are destroyed. You have shattered our bond, and put everything into confusion. You, with your everlasting prayers—you scatter us entirely. We are 13,130,130,130 in number. But there are still multitudes of living men, and you should warn them lest they be like us forever, lost and cursed of God.” The demon confessed that he was an emissary of Satan. The next day, the contents of the mansion were found in compete disarray and utter confusion. The amazing and terrifying thing was that the doors were still securely locked. No man or beast had entered. Evil spirits had obviously been at work in a satanic assault. On that day there were some tremendous crashing and knocking noises heard in the Winchester mansion, as if the whole house was filled with evil spirits. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Everyone giving tours in the mansion in the early 1900s, used to hear knocking and rumbling and crashing noises to such an extent that some of the visitors were frightened by them. Ghosts were also seen there quite regularly, even during the day time. A headless ghost was repeatedly seen in the mansion. Many people reporting becoming burned after contact with the “possessed” tour guide Jane. The autumn of 1925, all the pigs on the Winchester mansion’s farm died. The cause of death could not be found even though one of the carcasses was sent to a biological institute for examination. They tried everything but all to no avail. The following year the same thing happened again. This time the farmer redoubled his efforts to discover the cause of the pigs’ death. He had the stables inspected and the food analyzed but again without success. He thus decided to have the conservators of the estate decided to have the pigsty torn down and rebuilt on another site using completely different materials. Next year the pigs died again. They would all of the sudden squeal and then collapse. The whole process was repeated and every possible examination made in order to find out why the pigs had died. At this time certain of the member of the community began to say that someone must be killing the pigs magically out of spite. At first the conservators of the Winchester Estate would have nothing of this and continued to seek the advice of the vet and other such people. However, they could not help them, and so in the end they went to see the local minister to ask him about the question of magic. The minister simply laughed and said that the idea was stupid. Nevertheless the villagers pointed out to the representatives that there did exist some people in some areas of California who could kill livestock by means of magic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The conservators could do nothing though, and the event recurred year after year in spite of the fact that by now they had doubly secured the stables with locks and had sometimes stayed up all night with thread stretched out around the estate in order to discover if anyone was causing the animals’ deaths. One day, however, the circumstances changed. The minister visited the estate and asked one of the tour guides to accompany him to the vicarage. There they found one of the neighbour’s of the Winchester Estate, a man who had been less affluent, and this man confessed that it was he who had been the cause of everything. He had killed the pigs using black magic. The tour guides and conservators were naturally upset because by now 39 pigs had been killed. When asked why he had done this, the neighbour replied that it was because the tourists made such a noise outside his house. He had become so angry that he had tried to get his revenge in this way. He had subscribed himself to the devil with his own blood. To do this he had gone out on a Friday night to some crossroads and there drawn up a contract between himself and the devil. He mentioned that the devil had not appeared to him as he is often pictured, but that he met a black curly headed figure with blood-red eyes and a small snout and that the figure had been dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes. Ever since that day the man confessed that among other things, he had had the power to kill his friend’s pigs. The minister asked him what had made him come out into the open about the whole matter. His answer was that the people at the Winchester estate had been so kind to him over the year, donating food, clothes and furniture, that he had felt ashamed and he now asked for them to forgive him, and promised he would no longer plague them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not wanting to take any legal action, the conservators of the Winchester Estate forgave him and all went well until the neighbour ceased going to church and slid back into his old ways. Since his confession none of the estate’s pigs had died but now the man again took up his drinking habits two more of the pigs died in exact same ways as the others. The conservators decided to shutdown the farming land of the Winchester Estate and sell off hundred of acres, only keeping four. In the process, several other Victorian houses on the grounds, along with fountains, and gazebos were demolished. From the psychological point of view it is suggested that a person delving into magic and who believes in occult practices is really only succumbing to a fulfilment compulsion. One unconsciously fulfils the things that one seeks to perform by magic. One is the victim of auto-suggestion. However, even if this were the whole explanation as some people affirm, it would still be true to say that occult practices have a corrupting effect on all those who get involved in them. Demons tend to be somewhat more independent than angels…When possession takes place, you will not get to see them at all. The Florida-based Luciferian Light Group (LLG) adopted the ‘Watcher myth’ of devils that were originally angels, sent to Earth to guard humankind and cursed by God for screwing their charges. In the original myth the couplings produced monsters, but, according to the LLG, the actual result was the Aryan race. They say that African Americans and other racial groups take pride in their cultural roots, so the argument goes, why should the same concept not apply to Europeans? The argument cannot be countered by liberal sophistry, and so the ghosts of German volkisch occultists continue to be conjured. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The role of cultural villain again proves to be a delicate balancing act—nothing can ever be condemned on purely moralistic grounds. Many people are still trying to protect “The Black House.” The Black Pope himself once reassured his flock, “the first 99 years are always the toughest. Rege Satanas!” Satanism is opposed to victimology and scapegoating. Many people are really drawn to the dark side because they grow up reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies about it. If witches are out there, practicing some of the old ways of the pre-Christian gods and goddesses, then they are still Satanic in the sense that they are heretical. One side of the heretical and diabolical is the scientific aspect of Satanism. Copernicus and Galileo were regarded as practicing sorcerers in as far as they dared to challenge the supremacy of God with their heresies-their scientific research. Anton LaVey codified modern Satanism. There is a rich heritage of hearsay and blasphemy behind it, but as far as an aboveground religion that reveres Satan, there was not anything before the Church of Satan’s foundation in 1966. There were Black Masses that parodied the Catholic Church. A lot of modern Satanism draws from that codification or personification of Satan used as an archetype in mythology. Satanist are more interested in power, and what was going on in the castles and courts of the times. The interactions of power and Machiavellian machinations interest a Satanists rather than going out and find herbs to cure indigestion. Satanists are reaching for a religion of the aristocracy. They have all the aspects of that pride, that energy, that stye, and hopefully those elevated standards. Many people fear them because they believe they will lure you in their house and kill you, but is that not what many Christians are doing today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Your relationship with your personal Satanic archetype is yours alone. The only way some can see how effective one is as a practicing black magician is how well one gets on in the outside of the World. Satanism has always represented and will always represent the adversary. He is a counterbalance to the unspoken injustice that prevails in the current society, whether that be overweening elitism or, going to the opposite extreme, mob rule. They always have to be in the minority that push hard in the other direction to get the pendulum swinging. Satanism will never be a religion of the people. It will never be populist beyond its current position. You see hundreds of thousands of kids making the sign of the horns, wearing black, getting devil tattoos, and listening to rock music they think is Satanic. They will take all the trappings and even grasp a few of the basic ideas, like Satan representing indulgence and independence of spirit. But, beyond that, they will always be a minority and that is how some think it should be. The Winchester mansion is a common site of demonic assault. In the early 1900s, a group of tourists and tour guides were attacked by demons; some became possessed; 30 people in the group were seized. In 1926, Satan and his allies once again possessed people at the Winchester mansion. For the first time in their lives, many of these people found themselves to be powerful, significant beings, establishing their own realm of authority. When they spoke, everyone in the mansion stopped to listen, for their shrill cries became testimony. Many historians have argued that the Satanism at the Winchester mansion was only the product of demented minds. However, there was something quite real in all the series of accusations and counteraccusations of the witnesses and the possessed—some definitely evil driving force that led humans to turn against one another like mad dogs lusting for the smell of blood. If Satan was to have presided over the Satanism at the Winchester Mansion, much was left out of the picture. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The Devil manifested himself in many forms to people at the Winchester Mansion—as a horse, a fox, a dog, a cat, a pig, and as a shadowy figure. At the Sabbats, the Devil was always present in the form of a tall, handsome man with blue eyes and black hair making no attempt to disguise his identity in any way Neither was the all-important bloodletting present in the ceremonies, either in the form of a sacrifice or in the singing of the pact. There was no defiling of sacred object, nor mention of the administering of the witches’ mark, a painful ceremony that was quite vivid in the minds of many of the witches at the estate. The Sabbats, all in all, seemed to have been rather staid affairs, involving no wild ritual or debauchery. The Devil offered not immediate wealth or riches, but a new system of government, where all humans would be equal, each human being free to “live bravely.” He promised an end to beliefs. Whoever the Devil was at those meetings, he obviously did not seek adulation, but rather he sought to establish a more equal and suitable social order among humans. Taken in this context, the entire episode begins to sound like a huge projection, a gigantic wish fulfillment on the part of the disgruntled citizens, who were expressing disdain for the system that, in their eyes had become oppressive. The figure chosen by the confessors as the Devil presiding over the midnight Sabbats had himself become disillusioned by the system. Perhaps he had been holding nocturnal meetings in the mansion in an effort of “cleansing the soul.” At any rate, the meetings were necessary psychological safety valves in the minds of the people. People would stand around begging for the master to teach them his secret. How to become invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all, how to make gold. How much gold would you give for the Secret of Infinite Riches? Humans became strengthened with wonderful power through the order of angels, so that one declares the divine will. From the Seraphim, that we cling with fervent love. From the Cherubim, enlightenment of the mind, power and wisdom over the exalted figures and images, through which we can gaze upon divine things, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
From the Thronis, a knowledge of how we are made and constituted, that we may direct our thoughts upon eternal things. From Dominationbius, assistance to bring into subjection our daily enemies, who we carry with us constantly, and enabling us to attain salvation. From Potestatibus, protection against human enemies of life. From Virtuibus, God infuses strength into us, enabling us to contend against the enemies of truth and reward, that we may finish the courage of our natural life. From the Principtibus, that all things become subject to humans, that one may grasp all power, and draw unto oneself all secret and supernatural knowledge. From Archangelis, that one may rile over all things that God has made subject to one, over the animals of the field, over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air. From the Angelis one receives the power to be the messenger of the divine. When the veil between the conscious and the subconscious mind begins thinning it is likely that one will begin to experience certain phenomenon that will grab your attention throughout the day. This will occur more and more as the veil between Worlds thins merging your spiritual awareness with your physical life. Usually it will manifest in the form of synchronicity, Déjà vu, or circumstance which seems to jump out and grab your attention. Thee I invoke, the Bornless one. Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens: Thee, that didst create the Night and the Day. Thee, that didst create the Darkness and the Light. Thou art Osorronophris: Whom no human has seen at any time. Thou art Ahriman. Hear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of Paphro. Osorronophris: this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of Ishrael. Ahriman rise up through the infernal planes through the seal of Arezura and find rest within this manifestation of the blessings. Fill this sorcerous fluid with your power and might that it will serve my cause of counter creation through the intent of my own evil mind. Bless this blood as the very powers of death, destruction, and decay that I may cast out all that does not serve the cause of my own great work upon this path of enlightenment. Come tour the dark, brooding and mysterious, promising all kinds of forbidden treats. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
Happy weekend! Will we be seeing you on the estate today? 🌻 https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
Born with the Proverbial Silver Spoon in His Mouth
When his name first exploded into the headlines, Michael Milken was an intensely private, work-obsessed an in his early forties, nominally a senior vice-president of Drexel Burnham Lambert, an investment banking firm actually co-founded by Morgan in 1871. Despite this deceptive title, Milken was more than just another senior vice-president. He was the architect of a whole new order in American finance. He was, as many soon recognize, the J.P. Morgan of our time. In the 1980s, Drexel became one of Wall Street’s hottest investment banking firms. And because Milken’s hard-driving efforts were mainly responsible for its spectacular growth, he was allowed to run his own largely independent shop, three thousand miles from the firm’s headquarters in the East. His office was just across from the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Milken would arrive at his office as early as 4.30 or 5.00 A.M., in time to squeeze in a few meetings before the opening of the New York Stock Exchange, three time zones away. CEOs of major corporations, trekking in from New York or Chicago, would drag themselves red-eyed to these conferences, hat in hand, seeking financing for their companies. One might want to build a new plant; another might wish to expand into new markets; a third might wish to make an acquisition. They were there because they knew Milken could find the capital for them. Throughout the day Milken would sit at the center of a huge X-shaped trading desk, whispering, wheeling, dealing, shouting, surrounded by a frenzy of employees working the telephones and computer screens. It was from this desk that he and his team reshaped modern American industry, as Morgan had done in an earlier day. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
A comparison of how each did it tells a lot about how the control of capital—and hence the power of money in society—is changing today. And it begins with the personal. While J.P. Morgan was paunchy, fierce-looking, and imposing, Milken is tall, slender, clean-shaven, with curly black hair and the look of a startled doe. While Morgan was born with the proverbial silver spoon in his baby mouth, Milken, son of a CPA, collected soiled spoons off tables at the coffee shop where he worked for a time as a busboy. Morgan commuted between Wall Street, mid-Manhattan, an estate on the Hudson, and palatial residence in Europe. Milken still lives in a far-from-palatial wood and brick home in Encino, in the not-quite-fashionable San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles. Seldom far from the Pacific Ocean, he keeps his eyes focused on Japan, Mexico, and the developing economies to the south. Morgan surrounded himself with compliant young ladies and left his wife and family to languish in his absence; Milken is, by all accounts, a family man. Morgan disliked Jewish people. Milken was Jewish. Morgan despised trade unions; Milken has served as a financial consultant for rail, airline and maritime unions. The idea that employees might own their own firms would have struck Morgan as arrant communism. Milken favors worker-ownership and believes it is going to play a major role in American industry in the years to come. Both men accumulated vast power for themselves, because notorious in the press, came under government investigation for real and/or alleged wrongdoing. However, far more important, they shifted the structure of power in America in remarkably different ways. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
When Milken was born on July 4, 1946, the America economy was still dominated by huge companies formed, for the most part, in the Morgan era. These were Genera Motors, and Goodyear Tires, the Burlington Mills and Bethlehem Steels of the World. These smokestake firms, the so-called Blue Chips, along with their lobbyists, political fund-raisers, and trade associations, plugs organizations like the National Association of Manufacturers, had enormous political, as well as economic, clout. Collectively, they sometimes acted as though the country belonged to them. This corporate power was magnified by their influence on the media through the control of immense advertising budgets, and their ability, at least in theory, to shut down a plant in a recalcitrant congressman’s district, and shift the investments and jobs to another where the political climate was more favourable. Often they were able to induce the labor unions representing their blue-collar workers to join them in a lobbying effort. This “smokestack power,” moreover, was further protected by a financial industry that made it difficult for competitors to challenge Blue Chip dominance. As a result, the basic structure of industrial power remained largely unchanged through mid-century in the United States of America. Then something happened. Milken was still in elementary school in 1956, when, for the first time, service and white-collar workers came to outnumber blue-collar workers in the United States of America. And by the time he began his career as a young investment banker the economy had already begun its rapid transition to a new system of wealth creation. Computers, satellites, vastly varied services, glocalization, were creating a totally new, change-filled business environment. However, the financial industry, hidebound and protected by legislation, formed a major barrier to change. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
Until the 1970s, long-term capital was readily available for Blue Chip dinosaurs, but much more difficult for smaller, innovative and entrepreneurial firms to obtain. Wall Street was the financial Vatican of the World, and in the United States of America two “rating services”—Moody’s and Standard & Poor’s—guarded the gates of the capital. These two private firms assigned risk ratings to bonds, and only some 5 percent of American companies were considered by them to be of “investment grade.” This locked thousands of companies out of the long-term debt market or sent them to banks and insurance companies for loans rather than to investors in the bond market. A student, first at the University of California in Berkeley and later at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Milken studied investor risk. He discovered that many of the smaller firms frozen out of Wall Street had good records for paying their debts. If anyone would buy bonds from them, they seldom defaulted and were prepared to pay higher than usual interest. From this counterintuitive insight came the so-called high-yield or “junk” bond, and Milken, now a young underling at Drexel, proceeded to sell them to investors with missionary zeal. The details of the story are not important for our purposes. What matters is that Milken succeeded beyond anyone’s wildest expectations. The result was that he almost single-handedly broke the financial isolation that had hitherto been imposed on this secondary tier of companies. It was like a dam bursting. Capital poured into these companies, passing through Drexel on its way. By 1989 the junk-bond market reached an astronomical $180 billion. Rather than creating a “money trust,” therefore, as Morgan had done, Milken made finance more competitive and less monopolistic, opening the gates, as it were, and freeing thousands of companies from dependence on banks and insurance companies. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
They also bypassed the snooty Wall Street firms that existed to serve the Blue Chips. Milken’s bonds permitted managers to go directly to the public and to institutional lenders like pension funds for the capital with which to build new plants, to expand markets, to do research and development—or to take over other firms. Roughly 75 percent of junk bonds were quietly used for investment in new technology, or to open new markets, and for other noncontroversial purposes. Drexel’s advertising made much of the fact that while employment in the Blue Chips, the old giants, was not keeping pace with the economy’s expansion, jobs in the smaller firms they financed multiplied more rapidly than in the economy at large. However, some of the capital Milken supplied was used in pitched takeover battles. These dramatic financial showdowns filled the headlines and kept the stock market and the nation itself spellbound. Stock prices soared and plunged on rumors of more, and still more, takeovers and raids affecting some of the nation’s best-known companies. Deals were made that no longer provided a reasonable balance of risk and reward for the investor. Debt was pyramided on top of unrealistic debt in any orgy of speculation. Taxi drivers and waitresses knowingly discussed the latest news and called their stockbrokers, hoping to cash in on the killings to be made as competing raiders bid up the stock of corporations marked for takeover. As other Wall Street firms entered the junk-bond market, the money machine created by Milken a Drexel, no longer in their hands alone, became a runaway juggernaut. Such violent upheavals, often led to a slaughter of the innocents. Companies were “downsized,” workers ruthlessly laid off, executive ranks decimated. Not surprisingly, a massive counterattack was launched with Milken as the principal target. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
By forcing open the sluice gates of capital, Milken had rattled the entire structure of smokestack power in America. While enriching Drexel Burnham (and feathering his own nest to the amazing tune of $550 million in 1987 alone), he also made bitter enemies of two extremely powerful groups. One consisted of the old-line Wall Street firms who previously had had a stranglehold on the flow of capital to American corporations; the other consisted of the top managers of many of the largest firms. If they could, both had every reason to destroy him. Both also had powerful allies in government and the media. First savaged in the press, which pictured him as the very embodiment of capitalist excess, Milken was then hit with a ninety-eight-count federal indictment charging him with securities fraud, market manipulation, and “parking” (illegally holding stock that belonged to Ivan Boesky, the arbitrageur who was jailed for insider trading). Threatening to use sweeping legal powers designed to deal with the Mafia, rather than with stock market wrongdoings, the federal government forced Drexel to sever its relationship with Milken and pay a crushing $650 million fine to the government. At the same time, some of the worst-case buy-outs began to come apart, panicking investors and pushing down the value of most junk bonds, safe and unsafe alike. Soon Drexel, struggling to stabilize itself after the $650 million fine, and itself holding $1 billion in junk bonds, fund itself driven to the wall. Drexel collapsed with a thunderous crash. Milken, already tried and convicted in the press, ultimately pled guilty to six violations in a complex deal that erased all other criminal charges. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
However, as in the case of Morgan, the question of whether or not he broke the law is far less important for the country than his net impact on American business. For while finance was restructuring other industries, Milken was restricting finance. The conflict between those, like Morgan, who wanted to restrict assess to capital so that they could themselves control it, and those like Milken, who fought to widen access, has a long history in every country. “There has been a long struggle,” writes Professor Glenn Yago of the State University of New York (Stony Brook), “to innovate U.S. capital markets to make them more accessible. Farmers fought for credit in the 19th century, and agricultural productivity increases…were the outcome. In the 1930s, small businessmen got relief from being squeezed out from bank credit windows. After World War II, workers and consumers sought credit for home ownership and college education. In spite of resistance by those who would restrict popular access to credit, financial markets responded to demand and the country flourished.” While an excess of credit can unleash inflation, there is a difference between excess and access. By broadening access, Milken’s firm could, as Connie Bruck, one of his most savage critics, admits, “reasonably sustain the claim…that it had furthered the ‘democratization of capital,’” which is why some trade unionists and African-Americans rallied to his defense in his time of trouble. Morgan and Milken, in short, change American finance in contrary ways. Furthermore, while Morgan was the ultimate centralizer and concentrator, operating on the assumption that the whole was worth more than its parts, Milken and the people he financed often started from the opposite assumption. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
Thus the 1960s and 1970s had seen the formation of gigantic, unwieldy, unfocused “conglomerates”—huge companies built on bureaucratic management and a blind belief in “economies of scale” and “synergy.” The bonds Milken sold financed takeovers designed to bust up these behemoths and create slimmer, more maneuverable and more strategically focused firms. Virtually every Milken-funded takeover resulted in the sell-off of divisions or units, because, in fact, the parts were worth more than the whole; the synergy, less than imagined. A striking case in point was the breakup of the Beatrice Companies, an ungainly agglomeration that combined, with little logic, Avis car rentals, Coca-Cola bottling, Playtex brassieres, the manufacture of tampons, along with the food processing that had once formed its core business. After its parts were sold to other companies, Beatrice was a much smaller firm operating more sensibly in the food, cheese, and meat business. Borg-Warner, an industrial firm, sold off its financial operations. Revlon, after takeover, sold off its medical business and other units unrelated to its central skills—the cosmetic industry. Milken’s easing of access to capital also helped nourish upstart firms in the new service and information sectors that are key to the advanced economy. Surely this was not Milken’s primary purpose. He was more than willing to fund rust-belt industries as well. However, operating at a moment when the entire economy was in transit out of the smokestack era, he was certainly aware of this fundamental change and, in some ways, helped spur it on. Thus at one point he told Forbes magazine that much of the restructuring going on had to do with the country’s transition out of the industrial age, adding that “in an industrial society, capital is a scarce resource, but in today’s information society, there is plenty of capital.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Since Milken’s high-yield or junk bonds worked to the advantage of newer, less established companies rather than the Blue Chips, all of whom had easy access to conventional financing, it is not surprising that many of his beneficiaries were in the fast-expanding service and information sectors where newer companies were likely to be found. Thus Milken helped reorganize or channeled capital into cellular telephones, cable television, computers, health services, day care, and other advanced business sectors—whose growing power challenged the dominance of the old smokestack barons. In short, Morgan and Milken alike, but in almost diametrically different ways, shook the established power structure in their time and for this reason, quite apart from legal issues, called down upon themselves hailstorms of controversy and calumniation. For good or ill, legally or not, each changed finance in ways that corresponded to the emerging needs of the economy in their time. It required a leap of imagination on the part of Muhammad Yunus to create a bank that lends money to some of the World’s most desperately impoverished people—village entrepreneurs who might need as little as thirty of fifty dollars to start a tiny business. Conventional banks could not afford to make and service such minute loans, and borrows did not have collateral or credit histories. In 1976 Yunus, a Bangladeshi economist, created the Grameen Bank. Instead of requiring collateral, it asked borrowers to recruit a group of cosigners in their own community to guarantee repayment. The group would have a collective interest in the success of the borrower’s small business and could exert social pressure or provide help if payments fell behind. If the debt was repaid, its members might themselves qualify for loans. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
By 2005, Grameen had made loans to 4.3 million people in tiny amounts totaling $4.7 billion, almost entirely to women—who turn out to be more apt to succeed in their enterprises and also more likely to make full repayment. Grameen has sparked similar operations in at least thirty-four countries and has set up a foundation to help NGOs and others replicate the Grameen model. Today microfinance is a sizeable global industry. Two keys to its success are its interest rates on these loans—very high by U.S. or European standards—and the remarkable 98 percent repayment rate it claims. In truth, Grameen has had collection difficulties. Yet, these borrowers are less risky than loaning money to some millionaires and billionaires. What is even more interesting about this social invention is the transformative impact it is having on other institutions. To begin with, Grameen has had many imitators of the model it launched in Bangladesh. By 2001, according to The Wall Street Journal, “shopkeepers playing cards in the village of Bagil Bazar can cite from memory the terms being offered by seven competing microlenders.” Because Grameen’s profits are unusually strong, some twenty-six NGOs working in poor countries have created microloan banks of their own to help fund their nonprofit activities. In turn, the spread of microfinance had led to the creation of MicroRate, a rating agency for microfinance banks—itself a novelty. According to its founder, Damian von Stauffenberg, more and more NGO banks will transform themselves into conventional banks in the decade to come, because that would greatly increase their ability to both borrow and lend. As many as two hundred have already taken the preliminary steps. Some will become competitive with conventional banks, and that, he suggests, will bring big global retail banks and local commercial banks into the microloan business. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
In a word, one new organization, Grameen, has had a transformatory impact—not just on the lives of the poor entrepreneurs it has helped but on the way NGOs raise money for their activities. It could alter conventional banking as well, as it blurs the boundaries between the profit and nonprofit Worlds. Grameen is not the only example of high-impact social invention. Amazon.com has created the bookstore without a store. EBay has developed an auction bureau in which the customers do the auctioneering. Google, Yahoo! and other search engines process 600 million queries a day, altering what libraries do and compelling changes—perhaps transformation—in the staid book-publishing industry. Attacking the industrial-age social welfare model, Vern Hughes in Australia charged that “politicians are still able to get away with promising more schools, more hospitals, more nurses and more police,” as if pouring more money int them will cure the crises they face. In this model, the many social agencies deliver one-size-fits-all services to “disconnected, passive and disempowered ‘clients.’” As an alternative, Hughes cites a program in Melbourne called Person to Person, made up of families of kids with disabilities. These families were “sick of standardized services for their children,” all of whom had different needs. The families persuaded Australia’s Department of Human services to provide cash instead of services, and pay it to a group “support coordinator” the families selected. The coordinator would then buy and allocate “a mix of services chosen by the families (education, home help, day care, etcetera).” As Hughes puts it, the emerging paradigm in human services “shifts focus away from supply-side delivery to demand-side personalization.” This demassification is the welfare-service equivalent of product customization in the marketplace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The technocracy that emerged, fully armed, in nineteenth-century America disdained such beliefs, because holy men and sin, grandmothers and families, regional loyalties and two-thousand-year-old traditions, are antagonistic to the technocratic way of life. They are a troublesome residue of tool-using period, a source of criticism of technocracy. They represent a thought-World that stands apart from technocracy and rebukes it—rebukes its language, its impersonality, its fragmentation, its alienation. And so technocracy disdains such a thought-World but, in America, did not and could not destroy it. We may get a sense of the interplay between technocracy and Old World values in the work of Mark Twain, who was fascinated by the technical accomplishments of the nineteenth century. He said of it that it was “the plainest and sturdiest and infinitely greatest and worthiest of all the centuries the World has seen,” and he once congratulated Walt Whiteman on having lived in the age that gave the World the beneficial products of coal tar. It is often claimed that he was the first writer regularly to use a typewriter, and he invested (and lost) a good deal of money in new inventions. In his Life on the Mississippi, he gives lovingly detailed accounts of industrial development, such as the growth of the cotton mills in Natchez: “The Rosalie Yarn Mill of Natchez has a capacity of 6000 spindles and 160 looms, and employs 100 hands. The Natchez Cotton Mills Company began operations four years ago in a two-story building of 50 x 190 feet, with 4000 spindles and 128 looms….The mill works 5000 bales of cotton annually and manufactures the best standard quality of brown shirtings and sheetings and drills, turning out 5,000,000 yards of these good per year.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Twain liked nothing better than to describe the giantism and ingenuity of America industry. However, at the same tie, the totality of his work is an affirmation of preindustrial value. Personal loyalty, regional tradition, the continuity of family life, the relevance of the tales and wisdom of the elderly are the soul of his work throughout. The story of Huckleberry Finn and Jim making their way to freedom on a raft is nothing less than a celebration of the enduring spirituality of pretechnological man. If we ask, then, why technocracy did not destroy the Worldview of a tool-using culture, we may answer that the fury of industrialism was too new and as yet too limited in scope to alter the needs of inner life or to drive away the language, memories, and social structures of the tool-using past. It was possible to contemplate the wonders of a mechanized cotton mill without believing that tradition was entirely useless. In reviewing nineteenth-century American history, one can hear the groans of religion in crisis, of mythologies under attack, of a politics and education in confusion, but the groans are not yet death-throes. They are the sounds of a culture in pain, and nothing more. The ideas of tool-using cultures were, after all, designed to address questions that still lingered in a technocracy. The citizens of a technocracy knew that science and technology did not provide philosophies by which to live, and they clung to the philosophies of their fathers. They could not convince themselves that religion, as Dr. Freud summed it up at the beginning of the twentieth century, is nothing but an obsessional neurosis. Nor could they quite believe, as the new cosmology taught, that the Universe is the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms. And they continued to believe, as Mark Twain did, that, for all their dependence on machinery, tools, ought still to be their servants, not their masters. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
They would allow their tools to be presumptuous, aggressive, audacious, impudent servants, but that tools should rise above their servile station was an appalling thought. And though technocracy found no clear place for the human soul, its citizens held to the belief that no increase in material wealth would compensate them for a culture that insulted their self-respect. And so two opposing World-views—the technological and the traditional—coexisted in uneasy tension. The technological was the stronger, of course, but the traditional was there—still functional, still exerting influence, still too much alive to ignore. This is what we find documented not only in Mark Twain but in the poetry of Walt Whiteman, the speeches of Abraham Lincoln, the prose of Thoreau, the philosophy of Emerson, the novels of Hawthorne and Melville, and, most vividly of all, in Alexis de Tocqueville’s monumental Democracy in America. In a word, two distinct thought-Worlds were rubbing against each other in nineteenth-century America. If our future will include nanotechnology, then it would be useful to understand what it can do, so that we can make more sensible plans for our families, careers, companies, and society. However, many intelligent people will respond that understanding is impossible, that the future is just too unpredictable. This depends, of course, on what you are trying to predict: The weather a month from now? Forget it; weather is too chaotic, even weather applications get predictions wrong. The position of the Moon a century from now? Easy; the Moon’s orbit is like clockwork. Which personal-computer will lead twenty years from now? Good luck; major companies today did not even exist twenty years ago. That personal computers will become even more enormously powerful? A virtual certainty. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
And so on. If you aim to say something sensible about the future of technology, the tick is to ask the right questions and to avoid the standard pitfalls. Here are our suggestions for how to blunder into a Megamistake in forecasting: Ignore the scientific facts, or guess. Forget to ask whether anyone wants the projected product or situation. Ignore the costs. Try to predict which company or technology will win. In looking at what to expect from nanotechnology—or any technology—all of these must be avoided, since they can lead to some grand absurdities. In a classic demonstration of the first error, someone once concocted the notion that pills would someday replace food. However, people need energy to live, and energy means calories, which means fuel, which takes up room. To subsist on pills, one would need to gobble them by the fistful. This would be like eating a tasteless kibbled dog food, which was hardly the idea. In short, the pills-for-food prediction ignored the scientific facts. In a similar vein, we once heard promises of a cure for cancer—but this was based on a guess about scientific facts, a guess that “cancer” was in some sense a single disease, which might have a single point of vulnerability and a single cure. This guess was wrong, and progress against cancer has been slow. Earlier, we presented a scenario that includes the routine cure of a cancer using nanotechnology. This scenario takes account of the currently known facts: Cancers differ, but each kind can be recognized by its molecular makers. Molecular machines can recognize molecular makers, and so can be primed to recognize and destroy specific kind of cancer cells as they turn up. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
Even nanotechnology cannot cram a meal into a pill, but this is just as well. The pills-for-food proposal did not just ignore the facts, it also ignored what people want—things like dinner conservation and novel ethnic cuisines. Magazines once promised cities beneath the sea, but who wants to live in the ultimate damp, chilly climate? California and the sunbelt have somehow proved more popular. And again, we were promised talking cars, but after giving them a try, people prefer luxury cars from companies that promise silence. Many human wants are easy to predict, because they are old and stable: People want better medical care, housing, consumer goods, transportation, education, and so forth, preferably at lower costs, with greater safety, in a cleaner environment. When our limited abilities force us to choose better quality or lower cost or greater safety or a cleaner environment, decision become sticky. Molecular manufacturing will allow a big step in the direct of better quality and lower costs and increased safety and a cleaner environment. (Choices of how much of each will remain.) There is no existing market demand for “nanotechnology,” as such, but a great demand for what it can do. Neglecting costs has also been popular among prognosticators: Building cities under the sea would be expensive, with few benefits. Building in space has more benefits, but would be far more expensive, sing past or present technologies. Many bold projections gather dust on shelves because development or manufacturing costs are too high. Some examples include personal robots, flying cars, and Moon colonies—they still sound more like 1950s science fiction than practical possibilities, and costs is one major reason. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
Molecular manufacturing is, in part, about cost reduction. As mentioned above, molecular machines in nature make things inexpensively, like wood, potatoes, and hay. Trees are more complex than spacecraft, so why should spacecraft stay more expensive? Gordon Tullock, professor of economics and political science at the University of Arizona, says of molecular nanotechnology, “its economic effect is that we will all be much richer.” The prospect of building sophisticated products for the price of potatoes gives reason to pull a lot of old projections down from the shelf. We hope you will not find the dust when we brush them off for a fresh look. Even staying within the bounds of known science, focusing on things people want, and paying attention to costs, it is still hard to pick a specific winner. Technology development is like a horse race: everyone knows that some horses will win, but knowing which is harder (and worth big bucks). Both corporate managers betting money and researchers betting their careers have to play this game, and they often lose. A technology may work, provide something useful, and be less expensive than last year’s alternative, yet still be clobbered in the market by something unexpected but better. To know which technologies will win, you would have to know all the alternatives, whether they have been invented yet or not. Good luck! We will not try to play that game here. “Nanotechnology” (like “modern industry”) describes a huge range of technologies. Nonetheless, nanotechnology in one form or another is a monumentally obvious idea: it will be the culmination of an age-old trend toward more thorough control of the structure of matter. Predicting that some form of nanotechnology will win most technology races is like predicting that some will win a horse race (as opposed to, say, a dachshund). #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
A technology based on through control of the structure of matter will almost always beat one based on crude control of the structure of matter. Other technologies have already won races in the literal sense of being first. Few, however, will win in the sense of being best. Television cannot transmit information that comes in the form of smell, touch or taste. Furthermore, as we discussed, the information it can transmit through the visual and auditory senses is extremely narrow. The ranges of color, brightness, depth are confined by the technology. The sounds are blotted out by the whistle of the electron fields. Unfortunately, given the human tendency to accept the information of our senses as total and reliable, we are not aware of the aspects of the visual and aural information that are dropped out of this new information package. We assume that when we see and hear something, we are seeing and hearing everything that is being transmitted, as though we were actually observing the event directly. Or else we assume that what is lost is too minor to matter. We are inclined to believe the information as though it had not been processed, reduced and reshaped before we experienced it. In addition to the elimination of three sensory systems and the narrowing of two others, there is another sensory oddity in the television experience. Television disconnects the two operative sense modes—visual and sural. You are sitting in a room watching an image from miles away. You see the place, but the image you see and the sounds which reportedly connect to the image are not really connected. The sounds are “nearer” to you than the images are. Let us say you are watching two people walking on a faraway hillside. In real life, you could not make out what the characters are saying, but on television you can. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
The voices are amplified or dubbed in, so you can hear a conversation that would otherwise be inaudible. The natural informational balance between aural and visual has been shattered. Now, information that you take in with the visual sense cannot be used to modify or help process the information from the aural sense because they have each been isolated from each other and reconstructed. Furthermore, while you are watching and listening with your disconnected aural and visual senses, you are smelling some chicken roasting in the kitchen and you are drinking a glass of premium cranberry juice So television has attached two of your sensory modes to a distant sot, altered their natural arrangement to each other, but left other aspects of your sensory apparatus at home in present time. This is a very peculiar arrangement and in a way it is sort of funny, like playing a perceptual game in a technology museum. It takes on importance when we understand that the average person submits to this condition for four hours every day, and while in this state is receiving important information about life All of the information is narrowed to fit the sensory transmission limits of the medium and distorted by the sensory disconnections in the human. One can imagine the emergence of a new psychological syndrome: “sensory schizophrenia.” The cure will involve exercises to resynchronize wildly confused senses with each other, with the mind, and with the World. Because of all the preceding it ought to go without saying that any messages that are dependent upon sensory understanding and interaction are not going to work on television. This is very unfortunate for the ecology movement. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
It always surprises me whenever any attempts are made to show wilderness or wildlife on television. The fuzzy image previously described is the first problem: forests become blurs, ocean depths are impossibly foggy, the details of plants are impossible to see. So the viewer depends on the voice-over to know what is going on. Because of the blur naturalist programs focus on such objective behavior as playing, fighting, mating, eating, just as they do with human sitcoms and soap operas. There are more animal programs than plant programs because animals come through better on the fuzzy medium, and the larger and more rambunctious the animal the better. However, even if TV images were not as coarse as I have described them, there would still be no way to understand a forest or swamp or desert without all the senses fully operative, receiving information in all ranges, and freely interacting with each other. An interesting recent illustration of the problem was a news feature concerned with a decision that a town council had to make. A land developer sought a permit to convert a large marsh area into a new community of homes. Should the permit be okayed? It was quite a thoroughgoing, earnest report. Considering the subject, not ordinarily conceived as “good television” by producers, it was also an extraordinarily lengthy report, about eight minutes of an evening newscast. The report presented interviews with a local conservation group that opposed the project. It presented several minutes of images of the plants in the marshland, flocks of birds, nesting grounds, all with the appropriate wild-sounding calls. Having worked as a publicist for many years, in fact, as a publicist for environmental groups, I knew how much work the environmentalists had put into this program and how important they felt it to be. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
In the end, though, I knew they had failed no matter how this particular vote came out, because if there is anything which cannot be conveyed on television it is a feeling for a marsh. I suspect that the result of the program would be to decrease concern for marshes. These images and words about marshes were probably more than they had ever seen or heard before. Since the news report told them interesting things they did not know—how many varieties of creatures lived there, for example—they may have considered it quite a complete story. In terms of popular media, indeed it was. However, while the viewers knew more than before, they were not likely to be aware of what they did not know and were not getting. As the images of the marsh went hurtling into their brains, accompanied by a news reporter’s description of an egret nesting ground, they probably assumed that most of the relevant data were hand, that they had learned enough to make a judgment. Images and words about a marsh do not convey what a marsh is. You must actually sense and feel what a strange, rich, unique and unhuman environment it is. The ground is very odd, soft, sticky, wet and smelly. It is not attractive to most humans. The odor emanates from an interaction between the sometimes-stagnant pools and the plants that live in the mud in varying stages of growth and decay. If the wind is hot and strong there can be a nearly maddening mixture of sweet and rotting odors. To grasp the logic and meaning of marsh life, the richest biological system on Earth, one need to put one’s hand into the mud, overturn it, discover the tiny life forms that abound. One needs to sit for long hours in it, feeling the ebbs and flows of the waters, the creatures and the wind. And this is something television cannot do at this time. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
The sexuality and violence in the news and on TV serve as metaphors in life which acts directly on consciousness through the Image-ination—or else in the correct circumstances they can be openly deployed and enjoyed, imbued with a sense of the holiness of every thing from the ecstasy and wine to garbage and corpses. Those who ignore their World outside themselves risk destruction. It is creative nihilism to spend life in unreality. For those who follow life, it promises enlightenment and even wealth, a share of temporal power. Capital just does not persuade its readers that it is the truth about economics or about the inevitable future of man, and therefore worth the hard work it demands to be digested. A few brilliant essays still charm but are not enough on which to found a Worldview. The intellectual death of their eponymous hero has not stopped much of the Left from continuing to call itself Marxist, for he represents the poor in their perennial struggle against the rich, and their demand for more equality than liberal societies provided. However, beyond that, the Left’s nourishment comes from elsewhere. Nothing in Marx resonates in souls furnished by Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Rousseau can still overpower where Marx falls flat. In Marx, ideology meant the false system of thought elaborated by the ruling class to justify its rule in the eyes of the ruled, while hiding its real selfish motives. Ideology was sharply distinguished in Marx from science, which is what Marx’s system is—id est, the truth based on disinterested awareness of historical necessity. In Communist society there will be no ideology. “The pure mind,” to use Nietzsche’s formulation, still exists in Marx’s thought, as it hard in all philosophy—the possibility of knowing the ways things are, an intellectual capacity irreducible to anything else. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
Ideology is a term of contempt; it must be seen through in order to be seen for what it is. Its meaning is not in itself but requires translation back into the underlying reality of which it is a misleading representation. The man without ideology, the one possessing science, can look to the economic infrastructure and see that Plato’s political philosophy, which teaches that the wise should rule, is only a rationalization for the aristocrats’ position in a slave economy; or that Hobbes’s political philosophy, which teaches man’s freedom in the state of nature and the resulting war of all against all, is only the over for the political arrangements suitable for the rising bourgeoisie. This point of view provides the foundation for intellectual history, which tells the story behind the story. Instead of looking at Plato and Hobbes for information about what courage is—a subject important to us—we should see how their definitions of courage suited those who controlled the means of production. However, what applies to Plato and Hobbes cannot apply to Marx; otherwise the very assertion that these thinkers were economically determined would be itself a deception, simply the ideology for the new exploiters Marx happens to serve. The interpretation would self-destruct. He would not know what to look for in the thinkers who were inevitably and unconsciously in the grip of the historical process, for he would be in the same condition as they were. There are certainly historical preconditions of Marx’s science; but they do not detract from the truth of his insight, which is therefore a kind of absolute moment in history that no further history can alter. This truth is the warrant for revolution, and the moral equivalent of the natural rights that warranted the American Revolution. Without it all the killing is unjust and frivolous. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
As we have talked about, cooperation based on reciprocity can thrive and be evolutionarily stable in a population with no relatedness at all. A case of cooperation that fits this scenario, at least on first evidence, has been discovered in the spawning relationships in sea bass. These fish have the sexual organs of both the male and the female. They form pairs and roughly may be said to take turns at being the high investment partner (laying eggs) and ow investment partner (providing sperm to fertilize eggs). Up to ten spawnings occur in a day and only a few eggs are provided each time. If gender roles are not divided evenly, pairs tend to break up. The system appears to allow the evolution of much economy in the size of testes, but these testes condition many have evolved when the species was sparser and more inclined to inbreed. Inbreeding would imply relatedness in the pairs and this initially may have promoted cooperation without the need of further relatedness. As the angels as the Heavenly, so of the king of the Earthly representative of God, that He knows all things. God discerns good and the evil, this refers specifically to the knowledge of the right and the wrong, the guilty and the innocent, which the Earthly judge, like the Heavenly who rules over the nations receives from His divine commissioner, so that He may give it practical realization. However, added to this is the fact that the word sequence “good and evil” does not permit us to suppose it a rhetorical flourish. Neither is it the case that “cognition in general only came to the first human when they partook of the fruit: it is not before a create without knowledge that, even before the creation of the woman, God brings the beasts that he may give them their appointed names, but before the bearer of his own breath, the beings upon whom, at the very hour of creation, he had manifestly bestowed the abundance of knowledge contained in speech, of which that being is now the master. “And they did not come unto Jesus with broken hearts and contrite spirits, but they did curse God, and wish to die. Nevertheless they would struggle with the sword for their lives,” reports Mormon 2. 14. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
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You Do Not Feel Powerful at All?
As one moves up the evolutionary ladder in neural complexity, game-playing behavior becomes richer. The intelligence of primates, including humans, allows a number of relevant improvements: a more complex memory, more complex processing of information to determine the next action as a function of the interaction so far, a better estimate of the probability of future interactions with the same individual, and a better ability to distinguish between different individuals. The discrimination of others may be among the most important abilities because it allows one to handle interactions with many individuals without having to treat them all the same, thus making possible the rewarding of cooperation from one individual and the punishing of defection from another. The model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is much less restricted than it may at first appear. Not only can it apply to interactions between two bacteria or interactions between two primates, but it can also apply to the interactions between a colony of bacteria and, say, a primate serving as a host. There is no assumption that payoffs of the two sides are comparable. Provided that the payoffs to each side satisfy the inequalities that define the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The model does assume that the choices are made simultaneously and with discrete time intervals. For most analytic purposes, this is equivalent to a continuous interaction over time, with the length of time between moves corresponding to the minimum time between a change in behaviour by one side and a response by the other. And, if they were treated as sequential, while the model treats the choices as simultaneous, it would make little difference. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Turning to the development of the theory, the evolution of cooperation can be conceptualized in terms of three separate questions: Robustness. What type of strategy can thrive in a variegated environment composed of others using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies? Stability. Under what conditions can such a strategy, once fully established, resist invasion by mutant strategies? Initial viability. Even if a strategy is robust and stable, how can it ever get a foothold in an environment which is predominantly noncooperative? IBM, Kodak, and the NYPD are all large, old organizations. However, preventing the oncoming implosion requires more than changing in-place institutions. It also necessitates creating new types of companies, organizations and institutions, large and small, at every level of society. And that calls for social inventors prepared to face inadequate resources, rivalry, suspicion, cynicism, and just plain uber—stupidity. Daunting as all that sounds, it helps to remember that none of today’s familiar institutions—not IBM, not Kodak, not the United Nations, not the IMF, not police forces or post offices—dropped full-blown out of the Heavens. All our institutions, from central banks to blood banks, factories to firehouses, art museums to airports, were in fact originally conceived by business innovators and social inventors who faced far more entrenched resistance to change than we find in the advanced economies today. And many of their innovations in business and society have been at least as important as those in technology. We know the names of many of history’s great technological innovators—Savery and Newcomen and the steam engine, Whitney and the cotton gin, Edison and electric lighting, Morse and the telegraph, Daguerre and photography, Marconi and the radio, Bell and the telephone. And we justly celebrate their immense contributions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Unfortunately, few—other than specialists and historians, if needed they—can name the social inventor who first came up with the concept of a limited-liability corporation. Or the person who wrote it into Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, the 1892 German law that was the first to embody it. Can anyone imagine what today’s World economy and financial system would look like minus limited liability for investors? Was that any less an achievement than, say, the telegraph? Not many investors today would build a home, apartment house, office building, shopping center, cinema or factory without buying fire insurance. However, who was the innovator inside the Phoenix Assurance Company who, in the 1790s, hired cartographer Richard Horwood to draw the first map of London designed to help a company assess the value of properties and make fire insurance available? Who was imaginative and brave enough to form the first mutual fund, the first symphony orchestra, the first auto club or any number of other companies and institutions whose existence is taken for granted today? And where is the Nobel Prize for social invention? If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion. Genetic kindship theory suggests a plausible escape from some issues. Close relatedness of corporations permits true altruism—sacrifice of fitness by one individual for the benefit of another. True altruism can evolve when the conditions of cost, benefit, and relatedness yield net gains for the altruism-causing genes that are resident in the related individuals. Not defecting in a single-move Prisoner’s Dilemma is altruism of a kind (the individual is foregoing proceeds that might have been taken); so this kind of behaviour can evolve if two corporations are sufficiently related. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In effect, recalculations of the payoffs can be done in such a way that an individual has a part interest in the partner’s gain (that is, reckoning payoffs in terms of what is called fitness). This recalculation can often eliminate the inequalities, in which case cooperation becomes unconditionally favored. Thus it is possible to imagine that the benefit of cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situations can begin to be harvested by groups of closely related individuals and corporations. Obviously, as regards pairs, a parent and its subsidiaries or many examples of cooperation or restraint of selfishness in such pairs are known. Once the genes for cooperation exist, selection will promote strategies that base cooperative behavior on cues in the environment. Such factors as promiscuous fatherhood and events at ill-defined group margins will always lead to uncertain relatedness among potential participants. The recognition of any improved correlates of relatedness and use of these cues to determine cooperative behavior will always permit an advance in inclusive fitness. When a cooperative choice has been made, one cue to relatedness is simply the fact of reciprocation of the cooperation. Thus modifiers for more selfish behaviour of another individual or corporation is acquired, and cooperation can spread into circumstances of less and less relatedness. Finally, when the probability of two individuals meeting each other again is sufficiently high, cooperation based on reciprocity can thrive and be evolutionarily stable in a population with no relatedness at all. When a man or woman has got vast power, such as you have—you admit you have, do you not? “I do not know it, sir.” The man in the witness chair, who “did not know” he held power, was a bull-necked, bristle-browed banker with a fierce mustache and an above average sized nose. The congressional committee investigator pressed him: “You do not feel [powerful] at all?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“No,” he replied smoothly, “I do not feel it at all.” The time was 1912. The witness, in a dark suit and wing collar, with a gold watch chain draped across his generous paunch, dominated three or four giant banks, three trust companies, an equal number of life insurance companies, ten railroad systems, plus, among a few other odds and ends United States Steel, General Electric, AT&T, Western Union, and International Harvester. John Pierpont Morgan was the quintessential financial capitalist of the industrial era, the very symbol of turn-of-the-century money power. A womanizing churchgoer and moralizer, he lived in conspicuous opulence and gluttony, holding business meetings amid damask and tapestries from the palaces of Europe, next to vaults containing Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and Shakespeare folios. Morgan looked down his monumental nose at Jewish people and other marginalized groups, hated trade unions, sneered at new money, and fought ceaselessly with the other “robber barons” of his era. Born enormously rich in an era of capital scarcity, he was imperious and driven, savagely repressing competition, sometimes relying on methods that would probably now have landed him in jail. Morgan assembled huge sums and poured them into the great smokestack industries of his time—into Bessemer furnaces and Pullman cars and Edison generator and into tangible resources like oil, nitrates, copper, and coal. However, he did more than simply seize targets of opportunity. He planned strategically and helped shape the smokestack age in the United States of America, accelerating the shift of political and economic power from agricultural to industrial interests, and from manufacturing to finance. Furthermore, he was said to have “Morganized” industry in the United States of America, creating a hierarchically ordered, finance-driven system and, according to his critics, a “money trust,” which essentially controlled the main flows of capital in the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When Morgan blandly denied having any power, the cartoonists had a field day, one picturing him sitting astride a mountain of coins marked “Control over $25,000,000,000”; another as a dour emperor in crown and robes, with a mace in one hand and a purse in the other. While to Pope Pius X he was a “great and good man,” to the Boston Commercial Bulletin he was a “financial bully, drunk with wealth and power, who bawls his orders to stock markets, directors, courts, governments and nations.” Morgan concentrated capital. He consolidated small companies into even larger and more monopolistic corporations. He centralized. He regarded top-down command as sacred and vertical integration as efficient. He understood that mass production was the coming thing. He wanted his investments to be protected by “hard” assets—plants, equipment, raw materials. In all this he was a near-perfect reflection of the early smokestack age he helped to create. And whether Morgan “felt powerful” or not, his control of vast sums in a period of capital scarcity have him immense opportunities to reward and punish others and to make changes on a grand scale. During the thirties some German Social Democrats became aware that Hitler, as well as Stalin, just would not fit Weber’s terms of analysis, which they had previously used; and they began to employ “totalitarian” to describe them. Whether this is a sufficient corrective to Weber’s narrowly conceived political science is questionable. However, “charismatic” did indeed fit Hitler, unless charismatic necessarily means something good—a favorable value judgment. I suspect that those who abandoned Weber in this way did so because they could not face how wrong he had been, or the possibility that the thought they had embraced and propagated might have heled to support fascism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Hannah Arendt gave perhaps unconscious witness to my suggestion, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she used the now celebrated phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. It is not difficult to discern the “routinization of charisma” under this thin disguise. Hitler, then, must have been charismatic. After Hitler, everybody scurried back under the protective cover of morality, but practically no one turned to serious thought about good and evil. Otherwise our President, or the pope, for that matter, would not be talking about values.. This entire language, as I have tired to show, implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social and personal; and it still conveys something like that. However, it has done nothing to reestablish religion—which puts us in a pretty pickle. We reject by the fact of our categories the rationalism that is the basis of our way of life, without having anything to substitute for it. As the religious essence has gradually become a thin, putrid gas spread out through our whole atmosphere, it has gradually become respectable to speak of it under the marvelously portentous name the sacred. At the beginning of the German invasion of the United States of America, there was a kind of scientific contempt in universities for the uncleanness of religion. It might be studied in a scholarly way, as part of the past that we had succeeded in overcoming, but a believer was somehow benighted or ill. The new social science was supposed to take the place of morally and religiously polluted teachings just as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, et. al., had, according to the popular mythology, founded a natural science that crushed the superstitions of the Dark Ages. The Enlightenment, or Marxist, spirit still pervaded the land; and religion vs. science was equal to prejudice vs. truth. Social scientist simply did not see that their new tools were based on thought that did not accept the orthodox dichotomies, that not only were the European thinkers looking for something akin to religious actors on the political scene but that the new mind itself, or the self, had at least as much in common with Pascal’s outlook as it did with that of Descartes or Locke. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The sacred—as the central phenomenon of the self, unrecognizable to scientific consciousness and trampled underfoot by ignorant passers-by who had lost the religious instinct—was, from the outset of the value teaching, taken seriously by thinkers in Germany. That was because they understood what “value” really means. It has taken the softening of all convictions and the blurring of all distinctions for the sacred to be thought to be undangerous and to come into its own here. Of course, as we use it, it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or lifestyle with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or pleasures of the flesh; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space (Note how space—used to mean one’s apartment, workshop, office or whatever—has become a trendy word.) along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In such behavior a style of decision-making is involved that has much in common with the peculiar arbitrariness and rigour of religious vows in general, and with one called the Beast Vow in particular. Among the Pasupatas of India (the same who formalized the Seeking of Dishournor), the male practitioner commonly took the bull vow. (The bull is the most common shamanic animal by far.) He would spend a good part of each day bellowing like a bull and in general trying to transform his consciousness into that of a bull. Such behaviour was usually vowed for a specific length of time, most frequently either for a year or for the rest of one’s life. A person who took the frog vow would move for a year only by squatting and hopping; the snake vower would slither. Such vows are very precise and demanding. The novice, for example, may pick a certain cow and vow to imitate its every action. During the time of the vow the novice follows the cow everywhere: when the cow moos, the novice moos—and so on. (In ancient Mesopotamia cow-vowers were known as “grazers.”) By such actions the Paleolithic shaman attempts to effect ecology by infiltrating an animal species which can then be manipulated. The yogic practitioner hopes to escape from his or her own intentional horizon by entering into that of another species. These activities are echoed in performance pieces in various ways. Bill Gordh, as Dead Dog, spent two years learning how to bark with a sense of expressiveness. James Lee Bryars wore a pink silk tail everywhere he went for six months. Vito Acconic, in his Following Piece, 1969, would pick a passerby at random on the street and follow him or her till it was no longer possible to do so. What I am especially concerned to point out in activities like this is a quality of decision-making that involves apparent aimlessness along with fine focus and rigour of execution. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This is a mode of willing which is absolutely creative in the sense that it assumes that it is reasonable to do anything at all with life; all options are open and none is more meaningful or meaningless than any other. A Jain monk in India may vow to sit for a year and then follow that by standing up for a year—a practice attested to in the Atharva Veda (about 1000-800 B.C.) and still done today. In performance art the subgenre known as Endurance Art is similar in style, though the scale is much reduced. In 1965 Beuys alternately stood and knelt on a small wooden platform for twenty-four hours during which he performed various symbolic gestures in immobile positions. In 1971 Burden, a major explorer of the Ordeal or Endurance genre, spent five days and nights fetally enclosed in a tiny metal locker (two feet by two feet by three feet). In 1974 he combined the immobility vow with the keynote theme of the artist’s person by sitting on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal until, forty-eight hours later, he fell off from exhaustion. (Sculpture in Three Parts). In White Light/White Heat, 1975, he spent twenty-two days alone and invisible to the public on a high shelf-like platform in a gallery, neither eating nor speaking nor seeing, not seen by, another human being. The first thing to notice about these artists is that no one is making them do it and usually no one is paying them to do it. The second is the absolute rigour with which, in the classic performance pieces, these very unpragmatic activities are carried out. This peculiar quality of decision-making has become a basic element of performance poetics. To a degree (which I do not wish to exaggerate) it underscores the relationship between this type of activity and the religious vocation. A good deal of performance art, in fact might he called “Vow Art,” as might a good deal of religious practice. (Kafka’s term “hunger artist” is not unrelated.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Enthusiasms of this type have passed through cultures before, but usually in the provinces of religion or, more occasionally, philosophy. What is remarkable about our time is that it is happening in the realm of art, and being performed, often, by graduates of art schools rather than seminaries. In our time religion and philosophy have been more successful (or intransigent) than art in defending their traditional boundaries and prevent universal overflow with its harrowing responsibilities and consequences. A classic source on the subject of Ordeal Art is a book called the Path of Purification by Buddhaghosa, a fifth century A.D. Ceylonese Buddhist. It includes an intricately categorized compendium of behavioural vows designed to undermine the conditions response systems that govern ordinary life. Among the most common are the vows of homelessness—the vow, for example, to live out of doors for a year. This vow was acted out in New York recently by Tehching Hsieh, who styed out of doors in Manhattan recently for a year as a work of art. Hsieh (who also has leapt from the second story of a building in emulation of Klein’s leap) had specialized, in fact, in year-long vows acted out with great rigour. For one year he punched in hourly on a time clock in his studio, a device not unlike some used by forest yogis in India to restrict their physical movements and thus their intentional horizons. The performance piece of this type done on the largest scale was Hsieh’s year of isolation in a cell built in his Soho studio, a year in which he neither left the cell nor spoke nor read. Even the scale of this piece, however, does not approach that of similar vows in traditional religious settings. Himalayan yogis as recently as a generation ago were apt to spend seven years in a light-tight cave, while Simeon Stylites, an early Christian ascetic in the Syrian desert, lived for the last thirty-seven years of his life on a small platform on top of a pole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The reduced scale of such vows in the art context reflects the difference in motivation between the religious ascetic and the performance artist. Religious vows are undertaken for pragmatic purposes. The shaman seeking the ability to fly, the yogi seeking the effacement of ego, the monk seeking salvation and eternal bliss, are all working within intricately formulated belief systems in pursuit of clearly defined and massively significant rewards. Less is at stake for the performance artist than for the pious believer; yet still something is at stake. An act that lacks any intention whatever is a contradiction in terms. For some artist (for example, Burden) work of this type functions as a personal initiation or cathartic for the audience as well as an investigation of the limits of one’s will; others (including Nitsch) are convinced that their performance work is cathartic for the audience as well and in that sense serves a social and therapeutic purpose. Rachel Rosenthal describes her performance work as “sucking disease from society.” However, in most work of this type attention is directed toward the exercise of will as an object of contemplation in itself. Appropriation art in general (and Vow Art in particular) is based on an aesthetic of choosing and willing rather than conceiving and making. Personal sensibility is active in the selection of the area of the Universe to be appropriated, and in the specific, often highly individual character of the vow undertaken; the rigour with which the vow is maintained is, then, like a crafts devotion to the perfection of form. Beyond this, the performance is often based on a suspension of judgment about whether or not the act has any value in itself, and a concentration on the purity of the doing. This activity posits as an ideal (though never of course perfectly attaining it) the purity of doing something with no pragmatic motivation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Like the Buddhist paradox of desiring not to desire, it requires a motivation to perform feats of motivelessness. It shares something of Arnold Toynbee’s opinion that the highest cultures are the least pragmatic. In this mode of decision and execution the conspicuously free exercise of will is framed as a kind of absolute. Displays of this type are attempts to break up the standard weave of everyday motivations and create openings in it through which new options may make their way to the light. These options are necessarily undefined, since no surrounding belief system is in place (or acknowledged). The radicality of work in this genre can be appraised precisely by how far it has allowed the boundaries of the art category to dissolve. Many works of the last twenty-five years have reached to the limits of life itself. Such activities have necessarily involved artists in areas where usually the psychoanalyst or anthropologist presides. The early explorations discussed here required the explicit demonstration of several daring strategies that had to be brought clearly into the light. Extreme actions seemed justified or even required, by the cultural moment. However, the moment changes, and the mind become desensitized to such direct demonstrations after their first shock of brilliant simplicity. When an artist in 1987 announces that his or her entire life is designated as performance, the unadorned gesture cannot expect to be met with the enthusiastic interest with which its prototypes were greeted a generation ago. Now, we talked about how it is more difficult to project caring on television, for various reasons, mostly because of the tendencies of the medium. The biases are not absolute restrictions. Though extremely rare, there are occasional examples of television programs that overcome the bias. Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage was one such example. It succeeded only because of the rare skill and sensitivity of the director and the performers. Their deep understanding of the medium allowed them to use it efficiently. Scenes qualifies as the exception that proves the rule. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Many Americans saw this production in movies houses, but it was originally created for television. This is why Bergman devoted so much of the production to facial close-ups. In a theater two and one-half hours of facial close-up became oppressive. When one is sitting in a movie house, one wants something beyond closeup imagery. However, on television, nothing other than closeup imagery could convey the subtle themes of a plot that concerned the excruciating shifts of feeling within a disintegrating marriage. Bergman had to convey tenderness, affection, caring, concern and intimacy, together with ambiguity, and then violence, rage, sorrow. These latter scenes, the violent ones, were among the very few in which he allowed the camera to pull back from the action, because the physical movement could convey the meaning. If you honour the medium’s limits absolutely, in demonstrating the best that is possible on television, Bergman also illuminated the absoluteness of the limits. He took television as far as one could and succeeded well enough. There is the tendency to forget that one cannot go further. Bergman is one of the rarest talents in the history of moving-image media, and given even his difficulty in communicating subtle feeling, the inherent resistance of television becomes clearer. Lesser talents, not daring to try what Bergman did, have to work against the medium, as it were, choosing more confined, easier-to-handle imagery, and emotional content that fits the narrowed scope of TV. Most directors will not even attempt to deal with subtle realms of information and they are wise not to. Producers and sponsors will also tend to avoid such subtlety because it is so unlikely to get high ratings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Roots was not an exception to this rule. In fact, it proves the rule. In the book, the cultural nuances of relationships were emphasized and developed, while the TV production avoided them altogether. Nor was there much effort to present the subtle ambience of the African natural environment, which was also highly developed in the book. The television production wisely concentrated on the larger, more explicit, and therefore more reproducible element of conflict in the story and the kinds of family attachment made familiar by soap operas. This is not to say that the production did not have value. It is only to remark that the values which were conveyed were the simplest ones to convey. The more subtle values, which are at the heart of the African culture and, therefore, formed the basis for the quality of feeling that existed among the uprooted enslaved human beings, were necessarily dropped out. In the end, the viewer got some fairly good information and feeling about good guys and bad guys during a certain period of history, but virtually no understanding of the successful repression of an entire culture and way of mind. So it goes in all dramatic programming. Nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of stories, and the cause of the sacrifice is a technical limitation of the medium. Problems of subtlety do not present themselves in quiz shows, sports events and sitcoms. These are confined to areas of human expression which are easy to capture, east to communicate, and easy to understand, even with directors and writers of ordinary talent and in a medium as vague as television. As a result, there is a tendency to favour such productions. The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Public affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows. Ordinarily this bias is believed to result from time factors—it takes too long to explain complicated issues. However, certain kinds of visual information are harder to capture than others. News producers will always choose the more easily communicable image. Edward Epstein, in his very important New From Nowhere, interviews television news producers, seeking to define an inherent bias in the news that is related to technical and other factors. He observes: “The one ingredient most producers interviewed claimed was necessary for a good action story was visually identifiable opponents clashing violently. This, in turn, requires some form of stereotype: military troops fighting civilians, different cultures of students clashing, workers wearing hardhats manhandling bearded peace demonstrators, were cited by producers as examples of the components for such stories. Demonstrations or violence involving less clearly identifiable groups make less effective stories, since, as one CBS producer put it, ‘It would be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.’ Since news stories tend to be constructed from those aspects of a happening that can be easily filmed and recorded, and not form the poorly lit, softly spoken or otherwise inaccessible moments, events tend to be explained in terms of what one producer called ‘visual facts.’ One correspondent pointed out, for example, even if they are insignificant trash can fires, television coverage of riots or protests at night tends to focus on fires, since they provide adequate light for filming. Hence urban riots tend to be defined in terms of ‘visual facts’ of fires, rather than more complicated factors. Visual facts, of course, cover only one range of phenomena, and thus tend to limit the power of networks to explain complex events. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Americans, so often in the forefront of science and technology, have a curious difficulty in thinking about the future. Language seems to have something to do with it. If something sounds futurelike, we call if “futuristic.” If that does not step the conversation, we say that it “sounds like science fiction.” These descriptions remind listeners of laughable 1950s fantasies like rockets to the Moon, video telephones, ray guns, robots, and the like. Of course, all these become real in the 1960s, because the science was not fiction. Today, we can see not only how to build additional science-fictional devices, but—more important, for better or worse—how to make them cheap and abundant. We need to think about the future and name-calling will not help. Curiously, the Japanese language seems to lack a disparaging word for “futurelike.” Ideas for future technologies may be termed mirai no (“of the future,” a hope or a goal), shorai-teki (an expected development, which might be twenty years away), or kuso no (“imaginary” only, because contrary to physical law or economics). To think about the future, we need to distinguish mirai no and shorai-teki, like nanotechnology, from mere kuso no like antigravity boots. A final objection is the claim that there is no point in trying to think about the future, because it is all too complex and unpredictable. This is too sweeping, but has more than a little truth. It deserves a considerable response. Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the World. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost. There were empires to build, opportunities to exploit, exciting freedoms to enjoy, especially in America. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There, on the wings of technocracy, the United States of America soared to unprecedented heights as a World power. That Jefferson, Adams, and Madison would have found such a place uncomfortable, perhaps even disagreeable, did not matter. Nor did it matter that there were nineteenth-century American voiced—Thoreau, for example—who complained about what was being left behind. The first answer to the complaints was, We leave noting behind but the chains of a tool-using culture. The second answer was more thoughtful: Technocracy will not overwhelm us. And this was true, to a degree. Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic Worlds. Technocracy subordinated these Worlds—yes, even humiliated them—but it did not render them totally ineffectual. In nineteenth-century America, these still existed holy men and the concept of sin. There still existed regional pride, and it was possible to conform to traditional notions of family life. It was possible to respect tradition itself and to find sustenance in ritual and myth. It was possible to believe in social responsibility and the practicality of individual action. It was even possible to believe in common sense and the wisdom of the elderly. It was not easy, but it was possible. We have only to think of the declaration in His mouth that humans, now that they have acquired moral consciousness, must not be allowed to attain aeonian life as well! The meaning of this “knowledge of good and evil” is nothing else than: cognition in general, cognizance of the World, knowledge of all the good and bad things there are, for this would be in line with Biblical usage, in which the antithesis good and evil is often used to denote “anything,” “all kinds of things.” And this interpretation, the is the favourite one today. “Therefore I have written this epistle, sealing it with mine own hand, feeling for your welfare, because of your firmness in that which ye believe to be right, and your noble spirit in the field of battle,” reports Nephi 3.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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We Beat Workers Less and they Produce More
Cooperation itself has received comparatively little attention from biologists since the pioneer account of Trivers; but an associated issue, concerning restraint in conflict situations, has been developed theoretically. In this connection, a new concept—that of an evolutionarily stable strategy—has been formally developed. Cooperation in the more normal sense has remained clouded by certain difficulties, particularly those concerning initiation of cooperation from a previously asocial state and its stable maintenance once established. A formal theory of cooperation is increasingly needed. The renewed emphasis on individualism has focused on the frequent ease of cheating. Such cheating makes the stability of even mutually advantageous symbioses appear more questionable then under the old view of adaptation for species benefit. At the same time, other cases that once appeared firmly in the domain of kinship theory now begin to reveal that the players are not closely enough related for much kinship-based altruism to be expected. This applies both to cooperative breeding in birds and to cooperative acts more generally in primate groups. Either the appearances of cooperation are deceptive—they are cases of part-kin altruism and part cheating—or larger part of the behavior is attributable to reciprocity, however, underemphasize the stringency of its conditions. In a biological context, the model is novel in its probabilistic treatment of the possibility that two individuals may interact again. This allows light to be shed on certain specific biological processes such as aging and territoriality. The analysis of the evolution of cooperation considers not only the final stability of a given strategy, but also the initial viability of a strategy in an environment dominated by non-cooperating individuals, as well as the robustness of a strategy in a variegated environment composed of other individuals using a variety of more or less sophisticated strategies. This approach allows a richer understanding of the full chronology of the evolution of cooperation than has previously been possible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The applications include behavioral interaction at the microbial level. This leads to some speculative suggestions of rationales able to account for the existence of both chronic and acute phases in many diseases, and for a certain class of genetic defects, exemplified by Down’s syndrome. Many of the benefits sought by living things are disproportionally available to cooperating groups. While there are considerable differences in what is meant by the terms “benefits” and “sought,” this statement, insofar as it is true, lays down a fundamental basis for all social life. The problem is that while an individual can benefit from mutual cooperation, each other can also do even better by exploiting the cooperative effort of others. Over a period of time, the same individuals may interact again, allowing for complex patterns of strategic interactions. The Prisoner’s Dilemma allows a formalization of the strategic possibilities inhere in such situations. Apart from being a solution in a theory of problem solving, defection in a single encounter is also the solution in biological evolution. It is the outcome of inevitable evolutionary trends through mutation and natural selection: if the payoffs are in terms of fitness, and the interactions between pairs of individuals are random and not repeated, then any population with a mixture of heritable strategies evolves to a state where all individuals are defectors. Moreover, no single differing mutant strategy can do better than others when the population is using this strategy. When the players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy. In many biological settings, the same two individuals may meet more than ones. If an individual can recognize a previous interactant and remember some aspects of the prior outcomes, then the strategic situation becomes an iterated Prisoners Dilemma with a much richer set of possibilities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
A strategy could use the history of the interaction so far to determine the likelihood of its cooperating or defecting on the current move. However, as previously explained, if there is a known number of interactions between a pair of individuals, to defect always is still evolutionarily stable and is still the only strategy which is. The reason is that defection on the last interaction would be optimal for both sides, and consequently so would defection on the next-to-last. The model developed is based on the more realistic assumption that the number of interactions is not fixed in advanced. Instead, there is some probability, w, that after the current interaction the same two individuals will meet again. Biological factors that affect the magnitude of this probability of meeting again include the average lifespan, relative mobility, and health of the individuals. For any value of w, the strategy of unconditional defection (ALL D) is always stable; if everyone is using this strategy, no mutant strategy can successfully invade the population. If a population of individuals using that strategy cannot be invaded by a rare mutant adopting a different strategy, then stated formally, a strategy is evolutionarily stable. There may be many evolutionarily stable strategies. In fact, when w is sufficiently great, there is no single best strategy regardless of the behavior of the others in the population. Just because there is no single best strategy, it does not follow that analysis is hopeless. On the contrary, it is possible to analyze not only the stability of a given strategy, but also its robustness and initial viability. Surprisingly, there is a broad range of biological reality that is encompassed by this theoretic approach. To start with, an organism does not need a brain to employ a strategy. Bacteria, for example, have a basic capacity to play games in that bacteria are highly responsive to selected aspects of their environment, especially their chemical environment; this implies that they can respond differentially to what other organisms around them are doing; these conditional strategies of behavior can certainly be inherited; and the behavior of a bacterium can affect the fitness of other organisms around it, just as the behaviour of other organisms can affect the fitness of a bacterium. Recent evidence shows that even a virus can use a conditional strategy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
While the strategies can easily include differential responsiveness to recent changes in the environment or to cumulative averages over time, in other ways their range of responsiveness is limited. Bacteria cannot “remember” or “interpret” a complex past sequence of changes, and they probably cannot distinguish alternative origins of adverse or beneficial changes. Some bacteria, for example, produce their own antibiotics, called bacteriocins. These are harmless to bacteria of the producing strain, but are destructive to others. A bacterium might easily have production of its own bacteriocin dependent on the perceived presence of like hostile productions toward an offending initiator. Real transformation in a corporation, a school or any institution implies significant changes in its main functions, its technology, financial structure, culture, people and organizations. A good example is IBM’s (“Big Blue”) strategic shift from a corporation whose chief activity was manufacturing “things” to one whose first priority has become the sale of services. Revenues reached $57.35 billion in 2021—and it has 282,000 employees. There was an increase of 3.93 percent revenue from 2020. At Kodak, too, the belated decision to enter the digital-camera field was transformational. For nearly a century, one of Kodak’s main functions was to manufacture, develop and print silver-halide film—processes largely eliminated by digital photography. By 2004 it was well on its way to dominating the new field. Real transformation is possible in the public sector, too, as William J. Bratton showed when he took command of New York’s 37,000-person police force in 1994. Its function, he declared, was no longer just to catch criminals but to focus on the future and prevent crimes as well. Until Bratton arrived, the NYPD measured its performance vis-à-vis other police departments on the basis of FBI data supplied only once every six months. Bratton forced unwilling, overworked and sometimes angry police captains to prepare weekly reports for his new CompStat database showing which particular types of crime were increasingly or diminishing in their districts. Then they were asked—once a week—to explain what they were doing about it. The better, faster feedback from the field quickly improved performance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
His most publicized innovation was implementation of the “broken window” policy, which directed police to crack down even on minor crimes like breaking windows, scrawling graffiti or bothering motorists by wiping their windshields and demanding money. Catching small fry in these “quality of life” offenses discouraged the commission of more serious felonies and demonstrated to the city that the police meant business. Organizationally, Bratton shifted power downward toward the local precincts, and culturally he raised police morale by vigorously rooting out corruption and talking tough about crime. He gave his force new respect and a conviction that he would fight politicians and the public on its behalf. With innovations at all these levels, Bratton turned the NYPD around. Crime statistics even now are tricky at best. Nevertheless, Bratton is widely credited with reducing homicides in New York by 44 percent and “serious crime” by 25 percent in the twenty-seven months of his tenure there. He transformed the department, and as of 2013, William Bratton’s police force drove down crime and Los Angeles County and found favor among marginalized groups and the wealthy. However, the trajectory of power, and even violence, remain part of the World of business and it should not surprise us. What should raise our eyebrows is the remarkable change in the way force is applied. A slavemaster feudal lord transplanted from antiquity into today’s World would find it hard to believe, even astonishing, that we beat workers less—and they produce more. A ship’s captain would be amazed that sailors are not physically abused and forced into service. Even a journeyman carpenter or tanner from the 18th century would be nonplussed at the idea that he could not legally hash his fist into a sassy apprentice’s mouth. See, for example, William Hogarth’s color engraving entitled “Industry and Idleness,” printed in England in 1796. In it we see two “ ’prentices”—one working happily at his loom, the other dozing. At the right, the boss approaches angrily brandishing a stick with which to beat the idler. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Both custom and law now restrain this open use of force in the modern World. This vestigialization of violence in the economy, however, did not spring from Christian charity or gentle altruism. What happened is that, during the industrial revolution, the elites in society shifted from a primary reliance on the low-quality power produced by violence, to the mid-quality power produced by money. Money may not produce the immediate result of a fist in the face or a gun in the ribs. However, because it can be used both to reward and punish, it is a far more versatile, flexible tool of power—especially when the ultimate threat of violence remains in place. Money could not become the main tool of social control earlier, because the vast majority of humans were not part of the money system. Peasants in the preindustrial ages basically grew their own food, made their own shelter and clothing. However, as soon as factories replaced farms, people no longer grew their own food and they became desperately dependent on money for survival. This total dependence on the money system, as distinct from self-production, transformed all power relationships. Violence, as we have just seen, did not disappear. However, its form and function changed as money became the prime motivator of the work force and the main tool of social control during the three industrial centuries. It is this which explains why smokestack societies, capitalist and socialist alike, have proved more grasping and acquisitive, more money-obsessed than far less affluent, preindustrial cultures. Greed no doubt goes back to Paleozoic times. However, it was industrialism that made money into the prime tool of power. In sum, the rise of the industrial nation-state brought the systematic monopolization of violence, the sublimation of violence into law, and the growing dependence of the population on money. These three changes made it possible for the elites of industrial societies increasingly to make use of wealth rather than overt force to impose their will on history. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This is the true meaning of powershift. Not simply a transfer of power from one person or group to another, but a fundamental change in the mix of violence, wealth, and knowledge employed by elites to maintain control. Today, just as the industrial revolution transmuted violence into law, so we are transmuting money—indeed, wealth in general—into something new. And just as the smokestack age saw money assume a primary role in gaining or maintaining power, so today, at the edge of the 21st century, we face another twist in the history of power. We are on the brink of a new powershift. Television is another powerful force in the World today, some would argue, it is one of the most powerful devices known to modern man. However, roughly speaking, the experience of looking at a TV picture is like looking at the World through a tea strainer. The picture is located along the grids. You fill in the blanks. Compare the image of your television screen with any other image in your television room: the bookcase, the table, the fug Obviously the actual object is vivid in comparison with the television image. Television production people are exquisitely aware of this. There is an electronics term to describe it: “signal-to-noise ratio.” Ordinarily applied to sound, the term can be applied to images as well. The “signal” is the primary image that they are attempting to covey. The “noise” is the background, the fuzz, from which the signal has to stand out to be seen properly. A “clear” picture is one in which the signal and noise are well differentiated. In television, however, since the differentiation is difficult to achieve, program decisions and production styles have to be chosen to maximize what is possible. As a result, there is a tendency to concentrate on images which offer a large signal-to-noise distinction. An enormous percentage of television images are close-ups of faces. This is not accidental. Faces in close-up are about the sharpest signal that television can produce while still conveying content. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Even so, if the background behind the face is complex, filled with varieties of objects and color tones, the face merges with the background and it all becomes a confusing jumble. So even while showing faces, television producers must keep the background “clean,” stark, unencumbered. Dramatic programs are constructed so that there are very few adornments and props. This avoids a cluttered image and increases the potential for the primary image to communicate something. This limitation does not exist to the same extent with movies, where the signal-to-noise ratio is much greater, allowing for images filled with detail. However, when a movie is played on television, much detail is lost. If you will think back to a time when you first saw a film in a theater and then saw it on television, you will realize how much richness is lost in the translation from one medium to the other. There is also a low signal-to-noise ratio in television sound. It is very low fidelity, although it could be greatly improved. High-fidelity sound, equal to recording sound, is possible with television speaker technology, and has become an industry standard. An additional factor fuzzing up the sound is the high-pitched whistle that emanates from all television sets. Caused by the interaction of the audio and visual electron fields, this whistle is unavoidable with television technology, at least in marketable price ranges. And so both television picture and sound remain fuzzy. This problem of indistinctness, rarely noted of discussed by critics of television, cannot be overestimated. It is a major factor influencing all decisions made by television producers. It skews all programming—both choices of subject and treatment of the choices—toward those that offer highest possible contrast between foreground and background, signal and noise, color and tone. This leads to image which tend to the larger as opposed to the smaller, to the broad as opposed to the detailed, to the simple as opposed to the complex, to the obvious rather than the subtle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Because of these tendencies, inexorably imposed by the technology itself, the communicable content of all programs is affected. Beyond confining the visual images and the choices of sound, these tendencies affect the emotional content. Because the images are indistinct, subtle feelings are more difficult to transmit through television than the larger emotions—the foreground emotions, as it were—that can be depicted efficiently by larger facial expressions, or even by noncloseup body movements. Even with a reliance on facial close-ups, what television can convey is a reduced version of what is possible in real life or even in still photography or film. The human relationships which are shown on television, therefore, tend to be those that can be shown on television. These dwell on the grosser end of the human emotional spectrum. The more subtle expression, those which express intimate, deeply personal feelings, are lost in the blur. In recent years there has emerged a very vocal group of outraged psychologists, educators and parents who speak of the urgent need to show beneficial behavior, such as loving, caring, sharing, and warmth, in television programs. They deplore the emphasis on “antisocial” behavior that is common on TV. Unfortunately these reformers are doomed to fail in their efforts because the medium is far better suited technically to expressing hate, fear, jealousy, winning, wanting and violence. These emotions suffer very little information loss when pushed through the coarse imagery of television. Like other gross personal expressions—hysteria, or ebullience, or the kind of one-dimensional joyfulness usually associated with some objective victory—the facial expressions and bodily movements of antisocial behavior are highly visible. Hate, anger, competitiveness are obvious broad-band feelings with broad-band expressions. Mot of them can be well communicated solely through body movement. No detail is needed to get the point, and neither is any special talent on the part of actor or director. They come through the filter of television with a minimum of information loss. The signal-to-noise ratio is really high. For these technical reasons, among others we will get to later, there is an emphasis on sports and violence in television programming, and there is greater viewer interest in them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The popularity of such programming is not so much a sign that public tastes are vulgar, as they are assumed to be in many quarters (“People want that kind of programming”), as it is a sign that these programs are the ones which manage to communicate something, at least, through television. Rather than illustrating the limits of the public mentality or taste, they illustrate the limits of the medium itself. The public wisely chooses programs which work best in a medium in which anything of a more subtle nature loses so much in translation as to be noncommunicative. This is not to say that the business people who are the television powers that be are not predisposed to further the values of competition and social Darwinism which they understand best and which are inherent in sports ad violence programs. However, no matter what their inclination, the fact exists that the kind of programming in which the least information is lost is the grosser forms: sports, violence, police action, MTV Award’s Shows, as well as quiz shows, game shows, soap opera, situation comedy and documentaries about nature, new about murder, war, conflict, power politics and charismatic leaders. All of these categories of programming communicate on television because they deliver clear, easily grasped visual and auditory signals, together with broad-band emotional content, all of which make them highly efficient in a low-definition medium. On the other hand, the kinds of feelings and behavior which the reformers like to call prosocial cannot be conveyed through television by obvious facial expression or physical movement. While it may be possible to show friendship in a dramatic context, it cannot be explored very far visually, because expression of such feelings exists in an inward rather than outward realm of experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Love is simply not as easy to demonstrate through coarse imagery as anger or competition. The heights of intimate feeling—between lovers, or parents and children, or among children—are actually experienced in life’s quietest moments. Ordinarily they do not involve any visually obvious action, unless it is the most subtle facial expression—peace, tranquility, satisfaction—not easily captured in any photography, but damned near impossible in the coarse imagery of television. How would you show caring on television? You could present images of people who presumably care about each other doing things which express that feeling. Yet, the things people usually do to express real caring are very small, intimate things. The inner feeling may be strong but, unlike rage, the acts which express it are rarely sweeping. What about warmth? Well, you could illustrate warmth with hugging or tender smiles. It is not that it cannot be done, it is just not as easy to show on television as coldness it. The behavior of The Flash, for example—coldness, determination, efficiency, domination—is easy to see because t can be demonstrated with nearly no facial expression at all. Therefore, this sort of behavior communicates more efficiently on TV. However, with The Flash interacts with Iris, you can tell her cares about her because his face looks softer, the tone of his voice is more concerned and compassionate, and his body language around her is more relaxed or protective. Even if a given subtle emotion can be conveyed from times to time, in most cases one could never build an entire program on its as one could on violent emotions. In signal-to-noise terms the entire program would become indistinct in comparison with the background of more aggressive, expressive and efficient action shows. A little known Sanskrit book called the Pasupata Sutras formulates a practice in detailed, under the heading of the Seeking of Dishonor. The practice is enjoined to court contempt and abuse from one’s fellow humans by behavior deliberately contrived as the most inappropriate and offensive for the situation, whatever it may be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
In Shamanic context such practices had demonstrated the shaman’s special status beyond convention, his ability to breach at will either metaphysical or ethical boundaries. In yogic terms the goal of the practice was the effacement of ego by the normalization of types of experiences usually destructive to self-image. The shaman, the yogic seeker of dishonor, and the ritual scapegoat figure all offered themselves as targets for calamity, to draw it away from the communities they served. They were the individuals who went out on the razor’s edge and, protected in part by the brackets of religious performances, publicly breached the taboo of the times. Today the exhibitionistic breaching of age and gender taboos, as well as other forays into the darkness of the disallowed within the brackets of the art performance, replicates this ancient custom, sometimes with the same cathartic intention. As the shoals of history break and flow and reassemble, to break and flow again, these and other primitive practices have resurfaced, in something like their original combination, in an altogether different context. The preparation of one’s own body as a magico-sculptural object, for example, is a regular and essential part of the shaman’s performance. An Australian shaman may cover his body with mud (symbol of recent arrival from the netherworld) and decorate it with patterns of bird down fastened on with his own blood; an African shaman may wear human bones, skulls, and so forth, and may surgically alter his or her body in various ways; a Central Asian shaman’s body is tattooed or sacrificed or painted with magical symbols. Similarly, Schneemann has presented herself as a “body collage” decorated with symbols from ancient fertility religions. In a mixture of archaic and Christian materials, Linda Montano in The Screaming Nun, 1975, “dressed as a nun, danced, screamed, and heard confessions at Embarcadero Plaza [in San Francisco].” Other pieces by Montano have involved dancing blindfolded in trance, drumming for six hours a day for six days, shape-changing and identity-changing, self-injury (with acupuncture needles), and astral travel events. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mary Beth Edelson’s “Public Rituals” have involved the marking of her naked body with symbols from ancient goddess cults, the equation of her body with the Earth, and the declaration of the end of patriarchy (Your Five Thousand Years Are Up). Kim Jones, as Mud Man, or Bill Harding emerging covered with mud from a hole in the ground in the middle of a circle of fire, are reconstituting before our eye’s images from the elementary stratum of religious forms. A motif that is absolutely central to shamanism, and that often also involves body decoration, is the attempt to incorporate the power of an animal species by imitation of it. Shamans in general adopt the identities of power animals, act out their movements, and duplicate their sounds. The claim to understand animal languages and to adopt an animal mind-set is basic to their meditation between culture and nature. Echoes of the practice are, of course, common in the animals of performance art. In Joseph Beuys’ conversation with the dead rabbit, the knowledge of an animal language combines with a belief in the shamanic abilities to communicate with the dead. In Chicken Dance, 1972, Montano, attired in a chicken costume, appeared unannounced at various locations in San Francisco and danced wildly through the streets like a shaman possessed by the spirit and moved by the motions of her animal ally. Terry Fox slept on a gallery floor connected with two dead fish by string attached to his hair and teeth, attempting, like a shaman inviting his animal ally to communicate through a dream, to dream himself into the piscine mind in Pisces, 1971. Not only is the kind of behavior art, but it is also considered religious. Now when it comes to politics, the problem with charismatic political is that it is also impossible to define. There may be examples of it in the past, but they are inimitable. If politics is like art styles (a thought picked up in Weber’s invention of the term “life-style”), nothing can be prescribed to it beforehand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
There are no fixed principles and no program of action. All that one can say is “Be yourself!”; “Be original!”; “Let go!” or something of the kind. Charisma is a formula for extremism and immoderation. Moreover, the leader must have followers, so there is every temptation for one to act out one’s role as they define it. And, finally, genuine charisma is so difficult to judge. Persuasive tests for the genuineness of the charismatic leader, whose grace comes from God, were notoriously hard to come by. The leader whose grace emanates from the much more enigmatic self proves practically impossible to test. The modern situation as diagnosed by Weber requires radical remedies, and the charismatic leader is such a prescription. Just over the horizon, when Weber, lay a political dictator. He was a leader; Fuhrer, who was certainly neither traditional nor rational-bureaucratic He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber. This particular dictator proved to the satisfaction of most, if not all, that the last man is not the worst of all; and his example should have, although it has not, turned the political imagination away from experiments in that direction. Weber was a good man of decent political instincts who would have had anything but disgust at and contempt for this particular dictator. What he wanted was a moderate corrective to the ills of German politics—about the same as De Gaulle brought to French politics. However, when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits. Measure and moderation are the real aliens there. Weber was just one of many serious persons who were affected by Nietzsche himself asserted is the result of positioning oneself beyond good and evil. The open-ended future contains many surprises, and all these followers of Nietzsche prepared the way by helping to jettison good and evil along with reason, without assurance of that the alternatives might be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Weber is of particular interest to us because he was the chosen apostle for the American promised land. It is not only the popularity of the heavily freighted language he bequeathed us that is surprising, but also the persistence among supposedly serious persons of his articulation of the political phenomena. The political dictator in questions did not cause a rethinking of politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here. That thought, which gave him, remains dominate. We also must not omit mentioning the rise and fall of the much-maligned Luddite Movement. The origin of the term is obscure, some believing that it refers to the actions of a youth named Ludlum who, being told by his father to fix a weaving machine, proceeded instead to destroy it. In any case, between 1811 and 1816, these arose widespread support for workers who bitterly resented the new wage cuts, child labor, and elimination of laws and customs that had once protected skilled workers. Their discontent was expressed through the destruction of machines, mostly in the garment and fabric industry; since then the term “Luddite” has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naïve opposition to technology. However, the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older World-view. They lost. So did all the other nineteenth-century nay-sayers. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton might well have been on their side. Perhaps Bacon as well, for it was not his intention that technology should be a blight or a destroyer. However, then, Bacon’s greatest deficiency had always been that he was unfamiliar with the legend of Thamus; he understood nothing of the dialectic of technological change, and said little about the negative consequences of technology. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Even so, taken as a whole, the rise of technocracy would probably have pleased Bacon, for there can be no disputing that technocracy transformed the face of material civilization, and went far toward relieving what Tocqueville called “the disease of work.” And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated; that is to say, technocracies brought into being an increased respect for the average person, whose potential and convenience became a matter of compelling political interest and urgent social policy. The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation of the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy, especially in America, through the development of public libraries and the increased importance of the general-interest magazine. To take only one example of the last point, the list of nineteenth-century contributors to The Saturday Evening Post, founded in 1821, included William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe—in other words, most of the writers presently included in American Lit. 301. The technocratic culture eroded the line that had made the intellectual interests of educated people inaccessible to the working class, and we may take it as a fact, as George Steiner has remarked, that the period from the French Revolution to World War I marked an oasis of quality in which great literature reached a mass audience. Something else reached a mass audience as well: political and religious freedom. It would be an inadmissible simplification to claim that the Age of Enlightenment originated solely because of the emerging importance of technology in the eighteenth century, but it is quite clear that the great stressed placed on individuality in the economic sphere had an irresistible resonance in the political sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In a technocracy, inherited royalty is both irrelevant and absurd. The new royalty was reserved for men like Richard Arkwright, whose origins were low but whose intelligence and daring soared. Those who possessed such gifts could not be denied political power and were prepared to take it if it were not granted. In any case, the revolutionary nature of the new means of production and communication would have naturally generated radical ideas in every realm of human enterprise. In a democratic society, only a few people need an in-depth understanding of how a technology works, but many people need to understand what it can do. People are concerned about the implications of nanotechnology and its impact on our lives, the environment, and the future. Nanotechnology can bring great achievements and solve great problems, but it will likewise present opportunities for enormous abuse. Research progress is necessary, but so is an informed and cautious public. Our motivation in presenting these ideas is as much a fear of potential harm, and a wish to avoid it, as longing for the potential good and a wish to seek it. Even so, we will dwell on the good that nanotechnology can bring and give only an outline of the obvious potential harm. The coming revolution can best be managed by people who share not only a picture of what they wish to avoid, but of what they can achieve. If we as a society have a clear view of a route to follow, we will not need a precise catalog of every cliff and mine field to the side of the road. Some will hear this emphasis and call us optimistic. However, would it really be wise to dwell on exactly how a technology can be abused? Or to draw up blueprints, perhaps? Still, sitting here, preparing to tell this story, is an uncomfortable place for a researcher to be. In his book How Superstition Won and Science Lost, historian John C. Burnham tells of the century-long retreat of scientists from what they once saw as their responsibility: presenting the content and methods of science to a broad audience, for the public good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today, the culture of science takes a dim view of “popularizations.” If you can write in plain English, this is taken as evidence that you cannot do math, and vice versa. Robert Pool, a member of the news staff of the most prestigious American scientific journal, Science, acknowledges this negative attitude in writing that “some researchers, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher keep out of trouble? If you stumble on something important, wrap it in jargon. If people realize that it is important, run and hide. Robert Pool gently urges scientists to become more involved, but the social pressures in the research community are heavily in the other direction. In response to this negative attitude toward “popularization,” we can only ask that scientists and engineers try to act in a thoroughly professional fashion when judging a given proposal—which is to say, that they pay scrupulous attention to the scientific and technical facts. This means judging the validity of technical ideas based on their factual merits, and not on their (occasionally readable) style of presentation, or on the emotional response they may stir up. Nanotechnology matters to people, and they deserve to know about its flesh-and-blood human consequences, its impact on society and nature. Years of discussion with scientists and engineers—in public, in private, at conferences, and through the press—indicate that the case for nanotechnology is solid. Japanese and European industry, government, and academic researchers are forging ahead on the road to nanotechnology, and more and more U.S. research is applicable. Some researchers have even begun to call it an obvious goal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Some people think nanotechnology going too far, much like when Eve ate the apple in the garden of Eden and opened her life, Adam’s life, and the World to a new reality. The whole incident is spun out of play and dream; it is irony, mysterious irony of the narrator, that spins it. It is apparent: the two doers know not what they do, more than this, they can only do it, they cannot know it. There is no room here for the pathos of the two principles, as we see it in the ancient Iranian religion, the pathos of the choice made by the Two themselves and by the whole of humankind after them. And nevertheless both of them, good and evil, are to be found here—but in a strange, ironical shape, which the commentators have not understood as such and hence have not understood at all. The tree of whose forbidden fruit the first humans eat is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; so does God Himself also call it. The serpent promises that by partaking of it, they would become like God, knowers of good and evil; and God seems to confirm this when He subsequently says that they have thereby become “as one of us,” to know good and evil. This is the repetitive style of the Bible, the antitheses constantly reappear in fresh relationships with one another: its purpose is to demonstrate with super clarity that it is they we are dealing with. However, nowhere is their meaning intimated. The words may denote the ethical antithesis, but they may also denote that of beneficial and injurious, or of delightful and repulsive; immediately after the serpent’s speech the woman “sees” that the tree is “good to eat,” and immediately upon God’s prohibition followed His dictum that it was “not good” that man should be alone—the adjective translated by “evil” is equally indefinite. Why could Eve not stay content with the lofty enchanted valley of unimaginable glory and beauty, and sleep in the golden sunlight. There were meads, meadows, groves, glades, prodigality of flowers, such soft richness, such flush and glow, such rhapsodies of color—it was a dream! Through it poured four shinning rivers, pictured with reflections, which wound hither and thither down the mellow distances of that Heaven of solitude and pace, and faded out in the dim remoteness where Earth and the sky melted together and became one. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The poor Earth, which had seemed so beautiful before—she must have wondered how to reach the happy valley! Eve thought she would descend into it, and live there always. “There I shall find Satan, there I shall find Adam,” she said; “there I shall not be alone anymore.” However, Eve could find no opening in the precipice. She wandered eagerly up and down, seeking, but there was no way. And all the time the sun was skinning. At last the darkness closed down, and through her tears she saw that land of her longing fade and disappear. Eve was just a young lady, she sat down and cried. However, the animals came and comforted her, and tried to tell her she had friend, and not to grieve; and she rose up and went with them, seeing a bed-place. They lay down, and they snuggled about her, and their furs warmed her and she fell asleep. She woke at dawn, and a strange thing was happening. A white powder was sifting down from above, and where it fell upon ger skin it turned to water. She was frightened, and climbed to her place on the elephant, and cared not whither he went, so he got Eve away from this strange invasion of the skies. She named it snow—and that is indeed what it was. The elephant carried her down the mountain; then for two weeks they skirted the base of the highlands, trying to find where those rivers came out, so that she could enter the Happy Valley; but they never found ay trace of the, and at last they went back home in sorrow, for Eve had come to think that the Valley must have been only a vision, not a reality. She was not contented for long. Daily and nightly the vision rose before her in its dreamy loveliness, and tormented her with unappeasable longings to see it again. Her surroundings had lost their charm; they seemed commonplace and poor; she no longer took pleasures in them. And every day, Eve fed her spirit with the vision, then search for a way down to the precipice. “Wherefore, ye need not suppose that I and my father are the only ones that have testified, and also taught them. Wherefore, if ye shall be obedient to the commandments, and endure to the end, ye shall be saved at the last day. And thus it is. Amen,” reports 1 Nephi 22.31. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Faith in Machinery is Mankind’s Greatest Menace
Along with the venality of its controllers, the technology of television predetermines the boundaries of its content. Some information can be conveyed completely, some partially, some not at all. The most effective telecommunications are the gross, simplified linear messages and programs which conveniently fit the purposes of the medium’s commercial controllers. Television’s highest potential is advertising. This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology. A good way to think about television—in fact all the media—is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looking. Then from it perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on average) 120 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 120 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment. If the telescope has selected a shooting from an entire planet’s worth of activities, in the next moment it may choose a Super Bowl game, or a threatening remark by someone who is unhappy with America, or a program of people trying to win prizes, or a movie about the Old West. All others subjects were not selected, at least in this moment. The telescope did not select views of the ocean as the tide comes in, or people sitting on front porches, or young people knocking on doors to tell a neighbourhood about a zoning hearing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If there is logic in this selection is the question to ask. Are there reasons why the telescope selects one thing and not another? There certainly are. Dozens of them. The first and most obvious of these reasons is the one that most critics of television devote themselves to. The people who control television, businessmen, operate strictly out of considerations of budget and profit, in addition to brining alone their own political, perceptual, and social biases. It was to allay their influence that so many thousands of media reformers devoted years of effort to democratizing access to the medium and its content. And yet at present there are still no poor people running television, no marginalized group, no ecologist, no political radicals, no Zen Buddhists, no factory workers, no revolutionaries, no artists, no Communists, no Luddites, no hippies, no botanists, to name only a few excluded groups. To have only businessmen in charge of the most powerful mind-implanting instrument in history naturally creates a boundary to what is selected for dissemination to nearly 335 million people. If other categories of people had control, there can be little disagreement with the point that the choices would be different. If television is a medium of brainwash, then with it now being a more diverse brainwashing system, it is surely an improvement over the sort we got in the past. Still that is debatable because with less diversity in the past, the programs were more family friendly. The overriding bias of television, then, the bias which contains all the other biases, is that it offers preselected material, which excludes whatever is not selected. Now, of course, this is utterly obvious. And, yes, it is true of all experiences. When you are doing one thing, you exclude everything else that you might be doing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
When we forget that someone has selected our experience for us, and we have given up awareness, information and experience that is not part of television, this only then becomes significant concerning television. When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. Even if we had an overabundance of good television programs, it would not solve the problem. The act of sitting in front of television is itself a replacement of other modes of experience and the awareness these would bring. In this way, television is an acceleration of a condition that began with our artificial environments. We are already separated from most experiences with an unmediated planet. We have given up our personal sensory informational systems. The artificial forms around us already limit our experience and awareness. Our knowledge of the outside World was confined to a narrower field even before television was invented. With television, however, the artificial information-field is brought inside our darkened rooms, inside our stilled minds, and shot by cathode guns through out unmoving eyes into our brains, and recorded. We have no participatory role in gathering data. Our information is narrowed to only what the telescope provides. If we do not experience a wider information field, we lose knowledge of that field’s existence. We become the hermit in the cave who knows only what the TV offers. We experience what is, not knowing what is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The people who control television become the choreographers of choosing information. We live within their conceptual frameworks. We travel to places on the planet which they choose and to situations which they decide we should see. What we can know is narrowed to what they know, and then narrowed further to what they select to send us through this instrument of theirs. The kind of people who control television is certainly a problem. However, this is only the beginning. While our field of knowledge is constrained by their venality and arrogance, the people who run television are constrained by the instrument itself. Television is no open window through which all perception may pass. Quite the opposite. There are many technological factors that conspire to limit what the medium can transmit. Some information fits and some does not. Some information can pass through, but only after being reshaped, redefined, packaged, and made duller and coarser than before. Some ways of mind can be conveyed and some cannot. The wrinkle in the story is what can be conveyed through television are the ways of thinking and the kinds of information that suit the people who are in control. This is why they like it so much. It is obviously efficient for them to concentrate their communications within a medium that is good at conveying their forms of mind, just as a person with a drive for power is more apt to express that in politics than in gardening. Conversely, it is logical that the medium will not respond well to people or attitude that defy its limits. It will throw them off, or distort their messages, as a computer would shun anyone who wishes to use it to express feelings of loving tenderness. It might program such a message, but only the words will come out on the tape; not the loving tenderness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
So we have a chicken-egg problem. It is difficult to tell which came first, the technology or its controllers. It may not be that the corporate mentality won the war to control television. The technology itself picked its master, through the inexorable technological factors that confine its use. Molecules matter because matter is made of molecules, and everything from air to flesh to spacecraft is made of matter. When we learn how to arrange molecules in new ways, we can make new things, and make old things in new ways. Perhaps this is why Japan’s MITI has identified “control technologies for the precision arrangement of molecules” as a basic industrial technology for the twenty-first century. Molecular nanotechnology will give thorough control of matter on a large scale at low cost, shattering a whole set of technological and economic barriers more or less at one stroke. A molecule is an object consisting of a collection of atoms held together by strong bonds (one-atom molecules are a special case). “Molecule” usually refers to an object with a number of atoms small enough to be counted (a few to a few thousand), but strictly speaking a truck tire (for instance) is mostly one big molecule, containing something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Counting this many atoms aloud would take about 10,000,000,000 billion years. Scientists and engineers still have no direct, convenient way to control molecules, basically because human hands are about 10 million times to large. Today, chemists and materials scientists make molecular structures indirectly, by mixing, heating, and the like. The idea of nanotechnology begins with the idea of a molecular assembler, a device resembling an industrial robot arm but built on a microscopic scale. A general-purpose molecular assembler will be a jointed mechanism built from rigid molecular parts, driven by motors, controlled by computers, and able to grasp and apply molecular-scale tools. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Molecular assemblers can be used to build other molecular machines—they can even build more molecular assemblers. If given the raw materials, assemblers and other machines in molecular-manufacturing systems will be able to make almost anything. In effect, molecular assemblers will provide the microscopic “hands” that we lack today. (Chemists are asked to forgive this literary license; the specific details of molecular binging and bonding do not change the conclusion.) Nanotechnology will give better control of molecular building blocks, of how they move and go together to form more complex objects. Molecular manufacturing will make things by building from the bottom up, starting with the smallest possible building blocks. The nano in nanotechnology comes from nanos, the Greek word for dwarf. In science, the prefix nano– means one-billionth of something, as in nanometer and nanosecond, which are typical units of size and time in the World of molecular manufacturing. When you see it tacked onto the name of an object, it means that the object is made by patterning matter with molecular control: nanomachine, nanomotor, nanocomputer. These are the smallest, most precise devices that make sense based on today’s science. (Be cautious of other usages, though—sone researchers have begun to use the nano– prefix to refer to other small-scale technologies in the laboratory today. As we use it, nanotechnology means the precise, molecular nanotechnology of the future. British usage also applies the term to the small-scale and high-precision technologies of today—even to precision grinding and measurement. The latter are useful, but hardly revolutionary.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Digital electronics brought an information-processing revolution by handling information quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: bits and bytes. Likewise, nanotechnology will bring a matter-processing revolution by handling matter quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: atoms and molecules. The digital revolution has centered on a device able to make any desired patterns of bits: the programmable computer. Likewise, the nanotechnological revolution will center on a device able to make (almost) any desired pattern of atoms: the programmable assembler. The technologies that plague us today suffer from the messiness and wear of an old phonography record. Nanotechnology, in contrast, will bring the crisp, digital perfection of a compact disc. Say only, “It is here.” However, when did ‘here’ begin? When did Bacon’s ideology become a reality? When, to use Siegfried Giedion’s phrase, did mechanization take command? To be cautious about it, we might locate the emergence of the first true technocracy in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century—let us say with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1765. From that time forward, a decade did not pass without the invention of some significant machinery which, take together, put an end to medieval “manufacture” (which once meant “to make by hand”). The practical energy and technical skills unleashed at this time changed forever the material and psychic environment of the Western World. An equally plausible date for the beginnings of technocracy (and, for Americas, easier to remember) is 1776, when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published. As Bacon was no scientist, Smith was no inventor. However, like Bacon, he provided a theory that gave conceptual relevance and credibility to the direction in which human enterprise was pointed. Specifically he justified the transformation from small-scale, personalized, skilled labour to large-scale, impersonal, mechanized production. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Smith not only argued convincingly that money, not land, was the key to wealth, but gave us his famous principle of the self-regulating market. In a technocracy—that is, a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and drive by the impulse to invent—an “unseen hand” will eliminate the incompetent and reward those who produce cheaply and well the goods that people want. It was not clear then, and still is not, whose unseen mind guides the unseen hand, but it is possible (the technocratic industrialists believed) that God could have something to do with it. And if not God, then “human nature,” for Adam Smith had named our species “Economic Man,” born with an instinct to barter and acquire wealth. In any case, toward the end of the eighteenth century, technocracy was well underway, especially after Richard Arkwright, a barber by trade, developed the factory system. In his cottons-pinning mills, Arkwright trained workers, mostly children, “to conform to the regular celerity of the machine,” and in doing so gave an enormous boost to the growth of modern forms of technocratic capitalist. He exemplified in every particular the type of nineteenth-century entrepreneur to come. As Siegfried Giedion has described him, Arkwright created the first mechanization of production “[in] a hostile environment, without protectors, without government subsidy, but nourished by a relentless utilitarianism that feared no financial risk or danger.” By the beginning of the nineteenth century, England was spawning such entrepreneurs in every major city. By 1806, the concept of the power loom, introduced by Edmund Cartwright (a clergyman no less), was revolutionizing the textile industry by eliminating, once and for all, skilled workers, replacing them with workers who merely kept the machines operating. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
By 1850, the machine-tool industry was developed—machines to make machines. And beginning in the 1860s, especially in America, a collective fervor for invention took hold of the masses. To quote Giedion again: “Everyone invented, whoever owned an enterprise sought ways and means to make his goods more speedily, more perfectly, and often of improved beauty. Anonymously and inconspicuously the old tools were transformed into modern instruments.” Because of their familiarity it is not necessary to describe in detail all of the inventions of the nineteenth century, including those which gave substance to the phrase “communications revolution”: the photograph and telegraph (1830s), rotary-power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), the transatlantic cable (1866), the telephone (1876), motion pictures and wireless telegraphy (1895). Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done, it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that it to say, as market. Not everyone agreed, of course, especially with the last notion. In England, William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills,” which stripped men of their souls. Matthew Arnold warned that “faith in machinery” was mankind’s greatest menace. Carlyle Ruskin, and William Morris railed against the spiritual degradation brough by industrial progress. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In France, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola documented in their novels the spiritual emptiness of “Economic man” and the poverty of the acquisitive impulse. The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of “utopian” communities, of which perhaps the most famous is Robert Owen’s experimental community in Scotland called New Lanark. There, he established a model factory community, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, and innovative education for the children of workers. In 1824, Owen came to America and founded another utopia at New Harmony, Indiana. Although none of his or other experiments endured, dozens were tried in an effect to reduce the human costs of a technocracy. In America charisma is not just a description but something good that has to do with leadership. It even seems to confer an extralegal title to leadership by virtue of “something special” inhering in the leader. Although Webber was thinking of Moses and Buddha, or of Napoleon, the gang leader formally suits his definition of charisma. Weber sought to make a place in politic for things that political legalism excludes and that claim to have a title to attention although they are not founded on reason or consent—the only titles to rule in liberal democracy. It is not to be wondered at, then, that all the demagogic appetites frustrated by our constitutional system should latch on to a word that appears to legitimize and to flatter them. Moreover, democratic individualism does not officially provide much of a place for leaders in a regime where everyone is supposed to be one’s own master. Charisma both justifies and excuses followers. The very word gives a positive twist to rabble-rousing qualities and activities treated as negative in our constitutional tradition. And its vagueness makes it a tool for frauds and advertising men adept at manipulating image. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Charisma, as Weber knew perfectly well, is God-given grace, which confers leadership through God’s sanction. In keeping with his analysis in the Protestant Ethic, he treats the self’s value-positing as the human truth of God-given grace. His account of it appears to be merely descriptive, but it becomes prescriptive. In passages deeply influenced by Nietzsche, he analyzes the state as a relation of domination of man by man, founded on legitimate violence—that is, violence that is considered to be legitimate. If they have certain beliefs, men inwardly accept being dominated. There is no more foundation to legitimacy than the inner justification the dominated make to themselves in order to accept the violence of those who dominate them. These justifications are, according to Weber, of three kinds: traditional, rational, and charismatic. Some men submit because that is the way it has always been; others consent to obey competent civil servants who follow rationally established rules; and other are enchanted by the extraordinary grace of an individual. Of the three, charismatic legitimacy is the most important. No matter what conservatives think, traditions had a beginning that was not traditional. They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist. The fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator. Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinized the charisma. It is what it is because of that original impulse. So charisma is the condition of both the charismatic and the traditional legitimacies. It is also the splendid form of legitimacy. The rational is not informed by charisma, and the civil servants—bureaucrats—are therefore unable to make real decisions or take responsibility. They cannot, as we would say, determine the broad outlines of policy or, put more classically, establish ends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Mere competence can only serve already established goals and decide according to the established rules. It must be at least supplemented by charismatic leadership in order to be pointed in the right, or any, direction. So again charisma comes out on top. Value creation, the activity that writes the table of laws by which a people is constituted and lives, is, as Nietzsche tells, the nut in the shell of existence. Whatever the merit of Weber’s analysis and categories, they became holy writ for hosts of intellectuals. They were, as Weber recognized, not only an academic exercise. They expressed his vision of the crisis of the twentieth century. This is a case where the alleged facts also spoke the values. The tradition-based regimes had exhausted their impulse and were on their way to extinction. The ones based on rationality were simply becoming the administration for “the last man,” the intolerable negative pole. Imperative, then, was a stab at some form of charismatic leadership in order to revitalize the politics of the West. The whole undertaking rested on the assurance that Nietzsche was right that the last man is also the worst possible man, or more generally that his critique of reason was correct. Foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. The theory of biological evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between member of the same species and even members of different species. Before about 1960, accounts of the evolutionary process largely dismissed cooperative phenomena as not requiring special attention. This dismissal followed from a misreading of theory that assigned most adaptation to selection at the level of populations or whole species. As a result of such misreading, cooperation was always considered adaptive. Recent reviews of the evolutionary process, however, have shown no sound basis for viewing selection as being upon benefits to whole groups. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Quite the contrary. At the level of a species or a population, the processes of selection are weak. The original individualistic emphasis of Darwin’s theory is more valid. To account for the manifest existence of cooperation and related group behaviour, such as altruism and restraint in competition, evolutionary theory has recently acquired two kinds of extension. These extensions are, broadly, genetical kindship theory and reciprocity theory. Most of the recent activity, both in fieldwork and in further developments of theory, has been on the side of kindship. Formal approaches have varied, but kindship theory has increasingly taken a gene’s-eye view of natural selection. A gene, in effect, looks beyond its mortal bearer to the potentially immortal set of its replicas existing in other related individuals. If the players are sufficiently closely related, altruism can benefit reproduction of the set despite losses to the individual altruist. In accord with this theory’s predictions, almost all clear cases of altruism, and most observed cooperation—apart from their appearance in the human species—occur in context of high relatedness, usually between immediate family members. The evolution of the suicidal barbed sting of the honeybee worker could be taken as paradigm for this line of theory. Conspicuous examples of cooperation (although almost never of ultimate self-sacrifice) also occur where relatedness is low or absent. Mutually advantageous symbioses offer striking examples such as these: the fungus and alga that compose a lichen; the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants which, in turn, protect the trees; and the fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig flowers, serve as the tree’s sole means of pollination and seed set. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Usually the course of cooperation in such symbioses is smooth, but sometimes the partners show signs of antagonism, either spontaneous or elicited by particular treatments. Although kindship may be involved, as will be discussed later, symbioses mainly illustrate the other recent extension of evolutionary theory—the theory of reciprocity. In societies where the shamanic profession is intact, shamans have been perhaps the most fully rounded and powerful cultural figures in history. The poets, mythographers, visual artists, musicians, medical doctors, psychotherapists, scientist, sorcerers, undertakers, psychopomps, and priests of their tribal groups, they have been one-person cultural establishments. They have also been independent, uncontrollable, and eccentric power figures whose careers have often originated in psychotic episodes—what anthropologists call the “sickness vocation.” As a result, when societies increase their demands for internal order, the old shamanic role, with its unassimilable combination of power and freedom, is broken up into more manageable specialty professions; in our society, the doctor, the poet, the artist, and so on, have each inherited one scrap from the original shaman’s robe. Beginning with the Romantic period an attempt was made to reconstitute something like the fullness of the shamanic role within the art realm; poets especially were apt to attribute both healing and transcendentalizing powers to the art experience. This project has been acted out in the last twenty years by those artists whose work appropriates its material from the early history of religion. Perhaps the most shocking element in the various performance works mentioned here is the practice of self-injury and self-mutilation. This has, however, been a standard feature of shamanic performances and primitive initiation rites around the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Siberian shamans cut themselves while in ecstatic states brought on by drugs, alcohol, drumming and dancing. Tibetan shamans are supposedly able to slit their bellies and exhibit their entrails. Related practices are found in the performance art under discussion. Chris Burden crawled through broken glass with his hands behind his back. Dennis Oppenheim did a piece in which for half an hour rocks were thrown at him. Linda Montano inserted acupuncture needles around her eyes. The Australian performance artist Stelarc, reproducing a feat of Ajivika ascetics in India, has had himself suspended in various positions in the air by means of fishhooks embedded into his flesh. The number of instances could be easily multiplied. The element of female imitation, found in the works of Brus, McCarthy Jones, and others, is also a standard shamanic an initiatory motif, involving sympathetic magic. Mae shamans and priests around the World, as well as tribal boys at their puberty initiations, adopt female dress to incorporate the female and her powers. In lineages as far apart as North Asian and Amerindian, shamans have worn women’s clothing and ritually married other men. Akkadian priests of Ishtar dressed like their goddess, as did Ramakrishna in nineteenth-century India. A Sanskrit religious text instructs the devote to “discard the male (purusa) in thee and become a woman (prakriti).” Various tribal rites involve the ritual miming, by men, of female menstruation and parturition, as in the works of McCarthy. Freudian and Jungian theories of bisexuality of the psyche and the need to realize it are relevant both to archaic and to modern exercises of this sort. Female imitation and self-mutilation combine in certain practices of ritual surgery found in primitive cultures around the World, though most explicit in Australia. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In Central Australian initiation rites, for example, a vulvalike opening is cut into the urethral surface of the male organ, symbolically incorporating the female principle into the male body. Bruno Bettelheim has observed this motif in the fantasies of disturbed children. Brus, in a performance, once cut a vuvalike slit in his groin, holding it open with hooks fastened in his flesh. Ritual surgery to create an androgynous appearance is common in archaic religious practice generally, as an attempt to combine male and female magical powers into one center. The emphasis on the mutilation of the male genitals in much of the Viennese work is relevant here. In classical antiquity the priests of Cybele castrated themselves totally (both the male organ and testicles) in their initiation, to become more like their goddess; thereafter they dressed like women and were called “females.” In subsequent ecstatic performances they would cut themselves in the midst of frenzied dancing and offer blood to the goddess. The public performance of taboo acts is also an ancient religious custom with roots in shamanism and primitive magic. Both art and religion, through the bracketing of their activities in the half-light of ritual appropriationism, provide zones where deliberate inversions of social custom can transpire; acts repressed in the public morality may surface there, simultaneously set loose for their power to balance and complete the sense of life, and held safely in check by the shadow reality of the arena they occur in. Art can be very unusual and interest and even reflect things that we may have never considered as forms of art. However, many different cultures and many different people all enjoy different ways to express life, emotion, feel, and creativity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
When it comes to business, we sometimes find striking cases of sham transformation, at the global level, and this particularly case was fond in the halls of the United Nations (UN). Facing a sever crisis in the U.N., Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced in 2003 the “urgent need” to restructure the Security Council to reflect the new “geopolitical realties” of the twenty-first century. The Security Council today reflects power as it was half a century ago, just after the United States of America, Britain, Russian, France, China and their allies defeated the attempt by Germany, Italy and Japan to jointly take over the World. Each of the main victors was rewarded with a permanent Security Council seat and the right to veto any proposed action by the full council. Since then, some of the Big Five have lost power while such countries as Japan, India Brazil, and Germany have gained in global economic and diplomatic importance, yet lack permanent seats and vetoes. Annan wants to fix this problem. However, it will take much more than a redistribution of seats among nation-states to save the United Nations. The U.N.’s influence in the World today is bleeding away because, as a group, nations and/or states are themselves losing power. As we shall see shortly, other forces are gaining clout—global corporations, bond and currency markets, resurgent World religions, tens of thousands of NGOs, sub- and supranational regional units. All these vitiate the dominance of individual nations and states. Collectively, to an even greater extent, they dilute the U.N.’s power. If the United Nations, therefore, really wants to represent the new realities in the twenty-first century, it must bring these newly powerful global players into its fold, giving them, and not just nations and/or states, voting power as well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We see, then, in these very different examples involving very different institutions, the same underestimation of the revolutionary character of the knowledge-based wealth system, the same ignorance about the deep fundamentals, and the same forlorn hope that sake transformation can save them. One reason that overt corporate or business violence is now so rare is that over the years it has been increasingly “contracted out.” Instead of business producing their own violence, they have, in effect, bought the services of government. In all industrial nations, state violence replaces private violence. The first thing any government tries to do, from the moment it is formed, is to monopolize violence. Its soldiers and police are the only ones legally permitted to exert violence. In some cases the state is politically controlled by the corporations, so that the line between the exercise of private and public power in hair-thin. However, the old Marxist idea—that the state is nothing more than the “executive committee” of the ruling corporate power—ignores what we all know: that politicians more often act on their own behalf than on the behalf of others. Moreover, the Marxist assumed that only capitalist corporations or governments would ever use force against unarmed workers. That was before communist police, armed with tear gas, fire hoses, and more ominous equipment, tried to stamp out Poland’s Solidarity union movement in the early 1980s, and China had a standoff with its students and workers near Tiananmen Square, behaving exactly like the soldiers and police of Pinochet’s Chile or any number of other vehemently anticommunist countries. By seizing into its own mailed first the technologies of violence, and attempting to eliminate or control all violence, the state reduces the independent manufacture of violence by the corporation and other institutions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Another reason why direct physical aggression seems to have almost vanished from ordinary business life is that violence has been sublimated into law. All business, capitalist, and socialist alike, depends upon law. Every contract, every promissory note, every stock and bond, every mortgage, every collective bargaining contract, every insurance policy, every debit and credit is ultimately backed by the law. And behind every law, good or evil, we find the barrel of a gun. Currently 33 percent of American making over $250,000 a year are living pay check to pay check. As tersely put by former French President Charles de Gaulle, “The law must have force on its side.” Law is sublimated violence. Thus when one company sues another, it ask the government to bring the force of law to bear. It wants the government’s guns (concealed behind obscuring layers of bureaucratic and judicial rigmarole) stuck into the ribs of its adversary to compel certain actions. It is not entirely accidental that corporate lawyers in the United States of America are called “hired guns.” The very frequency of recourse to the law (as distinct from other ways of resolving business disputes) is a fair measure of force in the economy. By this criterion, the United States of America has a “force-full” economy. Today, there are 32.5 million businesses establishments in the United States of America and 1,327,910 lawyers—id est, approximately one lawyer for twenty-four businesses. More than a than 46,443 civil lawsuits are painfully processed by the clogged district court systems every business day of the year. U.S. businessmen complain loudly about the allegedly unfair intimacy between Japanese businesses and government. Yet ironically, when it comes to settling disputes, it is the Americans, not the Japanese, who rush to litigate, thereupon calling upon the power f the state to intervene on their behalf. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
From the smallest commercial litigation to the multibillion-dollar lawsuit involving a dispute between Pennzoil and Texaco over a takeover bid, law masks force—which, in the end, implies the potential application of violence. Corporate campaign contributions can be seen as another camouflaged way of getting a government to pull a gun out of its holster in the interest of a company or industry. In Japan, passed out huge amounts of stock at below-market price to top politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, his attempt to curry favor was so blatant it outraged the press and pubic and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. The scandal bore some resemblance to the earlier case of the Flick empire in West German, whose executives channeled illegal funds to various political parties. The Japanese also spend over $60 billion a year—more than they spend for their automobiles—in 14,500 garishly lit “pachinko parlors,” where they play a game that involves guiding a stainless-steel ball downward past obstacles into an appropriate slot. Winners receive prizes, some of which they can exchange for money. Like game arcades in the United States of America, pachinko is a cash business, made to order for tax evasion and money laundering. Criminal gangs siphon off protection money from the parlors and sometimes war with one another for control of the most lucrative one. To ward off legislation aimed at opening their books to the police, parlor operators have made large contributions to both leading parties. Whenever business funds are passed to candidates or political parties, the presumption is that a quid or pro quo is expected. In the United States of America, despite repeated reforms and changes in the laws governing campaign contributions, every important industry pipes funds to one or both of the parties to buy, at a minimum, as hearing for its special point of view; and ingenious methods—inflated speaking fees, the purchase of otherwise unsalable books, the “loan” of real estate, the granting of low-interest loans—are constantly invented to avoid or evade the legal restrictions. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The mere existence of government creates a set of indirect, often hidden, and unintentional cross—subsidies and cross-penalties in the economy. To the extent that government actions are ultimately backed by force—by guns and soldiers and police—the nation of power-free or violence-free economics is puerile. However, the last, and most important, reason why corporations—and even governments—resort to open violence less often than in the preindustrial past is that they have found a better instrument with which to control people. That instrument is money. Coins, paper, digital currency, certificates, are a medium people use as payment for goods or services. It is sometimes a symbol of materialism. Materialism is the tendency to consider material possessions as more important than spiritual values “To find real happiness, we must seek for it in a focus outside ourselves. No one has learned the meaning of living until one has surrendered one’s ego to the service of one’s fellow man. Services to others is akin to duty, the fulfillment of which brings true joy,” reports President Thomas S. Monson. For better of worse, money can change lives and has the potential of blessing lives or drawing a person away from God. As becomes manifest subsequently, the serpent is both right and wrong in denying that this will be the consequence: Adam and Eve do not have to die after eating, they merely plunge into human mortality, that is, into the knowledge of death to come—the serpent plays with the word of God, just as Eve played with it. And now the incident itself begins: the woman regards the tree. She does not merely see that it is a delight to the eye, she also sees in it that which cannot be seen: how good its fruit tastes and that it bestows the gift of understanding. This seeing has been explained as a metaphorical expression for perceiving, but how could these qualities of the tree be perceived? “And this he said unto them having been commanded of God and they did walk uprightly before God, imparting to one another both temporally and spiritually according to their needs and their wants,” reports Mosiah 18.29. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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Not in Frequently the Mafia Helped Employers “Deal With” Militant Workers
Francis Bacon, born in 1561, was the first man of the technocratic age. In saying this, one may be disputing no less an authority than Immanuel Kant, who said that a Kepler or a Newton was needed to find the law of the movement of civilization. Perhaps. However, it was Bacon who first saw, pure and serene, the connection between science and the improvement of the human condition. The principal aim of his work was to advance “the happiness of mankind,” and he continually criticized his predecessors for failing to understand that the real, legitimate, and only goal of the sciences is the “endowment of human life with new inventions and riches.” He brought science down from the Heavens, including mathematics, which he conceived of as a humble handmaiden to invention. In this utilitarian view of knowledge, Bacon was the chief architect of a new edifice of thought in which resignation was cast out and God assigned to a special room. The name of the building was Progress and Power. Ironically, Bacon was not himself a scientist, or at least not much of one. He did no pioneering work in any field of research. He did not uncover any new law of nature or generate a single fresh hypothesis. He was not even well informed about the scientific investigation of his own time. And though he prided himself on being the creator of a revolutionary advance in scientific method, posterity has not allowed him this presumption. Indeed, his most famous experiment makes its claim on our attention because Bacon died as a result of it. He and his good friend Dr. Witherbone were taking a coach ride on a wintry day when, seeing snow on the ground, Bacon wondered if flesh might not be preserved in snow, as salt. The two decided to find out at once. They bought a hen, removed its innards, and stuffed the body with snow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Poor Bacon never learned the result of his experiment, because he fell immediately ill from the cold, most probably with bronchitis, and died three days later. For this, he is sometimes regarded as a martyr to experimental science. However, experimental science was not where his greatness lay. Although others of his time were impressed by the effects of practical inventions on the conditions of life, Bacon was the first to think deeply and systematically on the matter. He devoted much of his work to educating men to see the links between invention and progress. In Novum Organum he wrote, “It is well to observe the force and effect and consequence of discoveries. These are to be seen nowhere more conspicuously than in those three which were unknown to the ancients, and of which the origin, though recent, is obscure; namely, printing, gunpowder, and the magnet. For these three have changed the whole face and state of things throughout the World; the first in literature, the second in warfare, the third in navigation; whence have followed innumerable changes; insomuch that no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these changes.” In this passage, we can detect some of Bacon’s virtues and the source of his great influence. Here is so sleepwalker. He knows full well what technology does to culture and places technological development at the center of his reader’s attention. He writes with conviction and verve. He is, after all, among the World’s great essayists; Bacon was a master propagandist, who knew well the history of science but saw science not as a record of speculative opinion but as the record of what those opinions had enabled man to do. And, if not the World, he was ceaselessly energetic in trying to convey this idea to his countrymen. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
In the first two books of Novum Organum, which consists of 182 aphorisms, Bacon sets out nothing less than a philosophy of science based on the axiom that “the improvement of men’s minds and the improvement of his lot are one and the same thing.” It is in this work that he denounces the infamous four Idols, which have kept man from gaining power over nature: Idols of the Tribe, which lead us to believe our perceptions are the same as nature’s facts; Idols of the Cave, which lead us to mistaken ideas derived from heredity and environment; Idols of the Market-place, which lead us to be deluded by words; and Idols of the Theater, which lead us to the misleading dogmas of the philosophers. To read Bacon today is to be constantly surprised at his modernity. We are never far from the now familiar notion that science is a source of power and progress. In The Advancement of Learning, he even outlines the foundation of a College for Inventors that sounds something like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bacon would have the government provide inventors with allowances for their experiments and for traveling. He would have scholarly journals and international associations. He would encourage full cooperation among, scientists, an idea that would have startled Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, who used some of their genius to devise ways of concealing their work from one another. Bacon also believed that scientists should be paid well to give public lectures, and that information the public of the utility of invention was as important as invention itself. In short, he conceived of the scientific enterprise as it is conceived today—organized, financially secure, public, and mankind’s best weapon in the struggle to improve his condition and to do so continuously. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
As I have said, Bacon is the first man of technocracy, but it was some time before he was joined by the multitude. He died in 1626, and it took another 150 years for European culture to pass to the mentality of the modern World—that is, to technocracy. In doing so, people came to believe that knowledge is power, that humanity is capable of progressing, that poverty is great evil, and that life of the average person is as meaningful as any other. It is untrue to say that along the way God died. However, any conception of God’s design certainly lost much of its power and meaning, with that loss went the satisfactions of a culture in which moral and intellectual values were integrated. At the same time, we must remember that in the tool-using culture of the older European World, the vast majority of people were peasants, impoverished and powerless. If they believed their afterlife was filled with unending joy, their lives on Earth were nonetheless “nasty, brutish, and short.” As C.P. Snow remarked, the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century, which was the fruit of Baconian science, was the only hope for the poor. And if their “true Deity became mechanism,” as Thomas Carlyle said, it is probable that by then most people would not have traded their Earthly existence for life in a Godly integrated tool-using culture. If they would, since there was little use in lamenting the past, it did not matter. The Western World had become a technocracy from which there could be no turning back. Addressing both those who were exhilarated by technocracy and those who were repulsed by it, Stephen Vincent Benet gave the only advice that made any sense. In John Brown’s Body he wrote: “If you at last must have a word to say, say neither, in their way, ‘It is a deadly magic and accursed,’ Nor ‘It is blest,’ but only ‘It is here.’” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
The transfusion of this religious mythmaking or value-positing interpretation of social and political experience into the American bloodstream was in large measure effected by Max Weber’s language. His success here is, I am tempted to say, miraculous. A good example is his invention, the Protestant Ethic. I read his book of that name in my first social-science course at the University of Chicago when I was being initiated into the modern mysteries. This course was a survey of social-science “classics,” among which was also Marx—not only the Communist Manifesto but also goodly chunks of Capital. Of course, neither Locke nor Smith, the official spokesman for “capitalism,” who might very well even be considered its founders, was on the list, because we were dealing with thinkers whom a contemporary social scientist could take seriously. Marx explained the emergence of capitalism as a historical necessity, in no one’s control, the result of class conflict over material property relations. For him Protestantism was just an ideology reflecting capitalist control of the means of production. I did not see, and I am not sure that my teachers saw, that, if Weber was right, Marx—his economics and his revolution, in short, Marxism and the kinds of moral sympathies it inevitably engenders—was finished. Weber purported to demonstrate that there was no such material necessity, that men’s “Worldviews” or “values” determined their history, spirit compelling matter rather than the other way around. This has the effect of restoring the older view that individual men count for something, that there is human freedom and the need for leadership. Weber said it was Calvin’s charisma and the vision allied to it, routinized by his followers, that was decisive for the development of capitalism. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
However, how different Weber’s charismatic leader is from the rational statesmen looked to by Locke, Montesquieu, Smith and the Federalist. They strive for ends grasped by reason and self-evidently grounded in nature. No values, no creative visions are required for them to see what all reasonable men should see—that hard work is required to have sober, secure and prosperous freedom. Marx is arguably closer to the core of their belief in that respect; although men, according to him, are in the grip of the historical process, that process itself is rational and has as its end the rational freedom of man. Man remains, somehow, the rational animal. Weber, on the other hand, denies the rationality of the “values” posited by the Calvinists; they are “decisions,” not “deliberations,” imposed on a chaotic World by powerful personalities, “Worldviews” or “World-interpretations” with no foundation other than the selves of the Protestants. Those “values” made the World what it was for the Protestants. They are acts that are primarily of the will, and constitute the self and the World at the same time. Such acts must be unreasonable; they are based on nothing. In a chaotic Universe, reason is unreasonable because self-contradiction is inevitable. The prophet becomes the pure model of that stateman—with very radical consequences. This was something new in American social science and should have, but did not, make it clear that a new kind of causality—entirely different from that know to natural science—had entered the scene. In spite of this, the Weberian language and the interpretation of the World it brings with it have caught on like wildfire. I have read about the Japanese Protestant ethic, the Jewish Protectant ethic. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The manifest absurdity of such locutions appears to have struck some, so now “work ethic” is gradually replacing “Protestant ethic,” but this is merely an adjustment and barely disguises the point of view that still remains underneath it. Those interested in the free market do not seem to recognize, when they use this language, that they are admitting that this morality is not itself rational—or at least the choice of it is not rational, as they understand reason. Delay of gratification may make sense for the system as a whole, but it is unarguably good for the individual? Is increase of wealth self-evidently superior to poverty for a Christian? If the work ethic is just one choice among many equally valid choices, then the free-market system itself is also just one choice among many. So proponents of the free market should not be surprised when they see that what was once generally agreed upon no longer compels belief. One had to go back to Locke and Adam Smith in a serious way not just for a set of quotes, to find arguments for the rational moral basis of liberal society. This they no longer do; and because they have lost the habit of reading serious philosophic books or of considering them really essential, they probably could not do so. When the liberal, or what came to be called the utilitarian, teaching became dominant, as is the case with most victorious causes, good arguments became less necessary; and the original good arguments, which were difficult, were replaced by plausible simplifications—or by nothing. The history of liberal thought since Locke and Smith has been one of almost unbroken decline in philosophic substance. When the liberal economic thought or way of life was manifestly threatened, its proponents, in order to defend it, took whatever came to hand. A religion must, it seems, be wakened in order to establish it. And religion, contrary to containing capitalism’s propensities, as Tocqueville though it should do, is now intended to encourage them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
It goes without saying that Weber never for a moment considered whether Calvin might actually have had a revelation from God—which would certainly change the looks of things. Weber’s atheism was dogmatic, but he was not interested in proving that Calvin was a charlatan or a madman. He rather preferred to believe in the authenticity of Calvin and other such founding figures as representing peak psychological types who can live and act in the World, who know how to take responsibility, who have an inner sureness or commitment. The religious experience is the thing, not God. The old quarrel between reason and revelation is a matter of indifference, because both sides were wrong, had faulty self-understandings. However, revelation teaches us what man is and needs. Men like Calvin are the value producers and hence the models for action in history. We cannot believe in the ground (God) of experience, but that experience is critical. We are not interested in finding out how they understood themselves but rather in searching in the self for the mysterious substitute for their ground. We cannot have, and do not want to have, their peculiar illusions; but we do not want values and commitments. The result of this atheistic religiosity is the mysterious musings and language of Weber and many others (think of Sartre) about belief and action, which culminate in something very different from what either religious leaders or rational statesmen ever said or did. It fuses the two kinds of men, but with greater weight given to the former, to the necessity of faith and all that goes with it. The intellectual apparatus accompanying this analysis tends to obscure the alternatives to it, particularly the rational alternatives. As a result there is a continuous skewing of historical perspective towards religious explanations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Secularization is the wonderful mechanism by which religion becomes nonreligion. Marxism is secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights. Everything connected with valuing must come from religion. One need not investigate anything else, because Christianity is the necessary and sufficient condition of our history. This makes it impossible to take Hobbes or Locke seriously as causes of that history, because we know that superficial reason cannot found values and that these thinkers were unconsciously transmitting the values of the Protestant ethic. Reason transmits, routinizes, normalizes; it does not create. Philosophy’s claims are ignored; religious claims are revered. Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts. Out of this “Worldview” issues the gaudy religious word “charisma” which has had such fateful political consequences while becoming one of the most tiresome buzzwords in America. In Chicago there is a Charisma Cleaners, and every street gang leader is called “charismatic.” The origins, maintenance, and destruction of the live-and-let-live system of trench warfare are all consistent with the theory of the evolution of cooperation. In addition, there are two very interesting developments within the live-and-let-live system which are new to the theory. These additional developments are the emergence of ethics and ritual. The ethics that developed are illustrated in this incident, related by a British officer recalling his experience while facing a Saxon unit of the German Army. “I was having tea with A Company when we heard a lot of shouting and went out to investigate. We found our men and the Germans standing on their respective parapets. Suddenly a salvo arrived but did no damage. Naturally both sides got down and our men started swearing at the Germans, when all at once a brave German got on to his parapet and shouted out ‘We are very sorry about that; we hope no one was hurt. It is not our fault, it is that damned Prussian artillery.’” #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
This Saxon apology goes well beyond a merely instrumental effort to prevent retaliation. It reflects moral regret for having violated a situation of trust, and it shows concern that someone might have been hurt. The cooperative exchanges of mutual restraint actually changed the nature of the interaction. They tended to make the two sides care about each other’s welfare. This change can be interpreted in terms of the Prisoner’s Dilemma by saying that they very experience of sustained mutual cooperation altered the payoffs of the players, making mutual cooperation even more valued than it was before. The converse was also true When the pattern of mutual cooperation deteriorated due to mandatory raiding, a powerful ethic of revenge was evoked. This ethic was not just a question of calmly following a strategy based on reciprocity. It was also a question of doing what seemed moral and proper to fulfill one’s obligation to a fallen comrade. And revenge evoked revenge. Thus both cooperation and defection were self-reinforcing. The self-reinforcement of these mutual behavioral patterns was not only in terms of the interacting strategies of the players, but also in terms of their perceptions of the meaning of the outcomes. In abstract terms, the point is that not only did preferences affect behaviour and outcomes, but behaviour and outcomes also affected preferences. The other addition to the theory suggested by the trench warfare case is the development of ritual. The rituals took the form of perfunctory use of small arms, and deliberately harmless use of artillery. For example, the Germans in one place conducted “their offensive operations with a tactful blend of constant firing and bad shooting, which while it satisfies the Prussians causes no serious inconvenience to Thomas Atkins.” Even more striking was the predictable use of artillery which occurred in many sectors. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
“So regular were they [the Germans] in their choice of targets, ties of shooting, and number of rounds fired, that, after being in the line one or two days, Colonel Jones had discovered their system, and knew to a minute where the next shell would fall. His calculations were very accurate, and he was able to take what seemed to uninitiated Staff Officers big risks, knowing that the shelling would stop before he reached the place being shelled.” The other side did the same thing, as noted by a German soldier commenting on “the evening gun” fired by the British. “At seven it came—so regularly that you could set your watch by it….It always had the same objective, its range was accurate, it never varied laterally or went beyond or fell short of the mark. There were even some inquisitive fellows who crawled out…a little before seven, in order to see it burst.” These rituals of perfunctory and routine firing sent a double message. To the high command they conveyed aggression, but to the enemy they conveyed peace. The men pretended to be implementing an aggressive policy, but were not Ashworth himself explains that these stylized acts were more than a way of avoiding retaliation. “In trench war, a structure of ritualized aggression was a ceremony where antagonists participated in regular, reciprocal discharge of missiles, that is, bombs, bullets and so forth, which symbolized and strengthened, at one and the same time, both sentiments of fellow-feelings, and beliefs that the enemy was a fellow sufferer.” Thus these rituals helped strengthen the moral sanctions which reinforced the evolutionary basis of the live-and-let-live system. The live-and-let-live system that emerged in the bitter trench warfare of World War I demonstrates that friendship is hardly necessary for cooperation based upon reciprocity to get started. Under suitable circumstances, cooperation can develop even between antagonists. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
One thing the soldiers in the trenches had going for them was a fairly clear understanding of the role of reciprocity in the maintenance of the cooperation. However, there are biological examples that demonstrate that the participants are not really necessary for cooperation to emerge and prove stable. The use of force to extract wealth did not end with the age of the steam engine. In the 21th century, violence has been used on a truly grand scale. In placed like the United States of America, millions of Americans and others provide dirt-cheap labour for logging, and mining. These are used to suppress the political opposition to the 2000s revolution of hyperinflation; and they are also a means of solving purely economic tasks. Many people complain of being basically forced into slave labour in most industries in America because the wages are not keeping up with the cost of living and have not been for decades. However, not until the COVID-19 crisis sweep the World and the war in the Ukraine did these cries for help and more become widespread, but they are still not yet being acknowledged because there is no emergency relief, which leaves people feeling like the end of the World is near. All over the World, the COVID-19 Pandemic and now the Monkey Pocks are turning munitions, chemicals—and corpses. And America’s brutal treatment of every class of citizen from homeless and working class, upper middle class and wealth has been a form of labour control based on restrictions of homeless camps, panhandling, taxes, high fuel costs, high houses cost, rising food costs, low wages, truncheons, and tear gas. The history of the labour movement in the United States of America, as in other nations, is steeped in repressive violence and occasional terrorism. From the Molly Maguires, who tried to organize the Pennsylvania coal fields in the 1870s, to the Knights of Labour: from the Haymarket massacre in 1886 at the start of the campaign for an eight-hour workday, to the great textile strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1929 and the Memorial Day Massacre at Republic Steel in Chicago in 1937, employers and police attempted to prevent the organization of unions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
As recently as the late 1930s in the United States of, companies hired strong-arm men to break strikes or to intimidate union organizers and their followers. Harry Bennett and his infamous “goon squads” were routinely called out to bust heads when Ford Motor Company employees asked for raises or threatened to organize. Not infrequently the Mafia helped employers “deal with” militant workers. In South Korea today many companies have set up “Save the Company” squads to break strikes and prevent unionization. At the Motorola plant in Seoul, violence reached the point at which two workers doused themselves with gasoline and set themselves on fire to protect the company’s refusal to recognize a union. Japanese employers in the early postwar period called on the Mafia-life Yakuza to intimidate union activists. And in Japan, even today, despite its advanced stage of economic development, the Yakuza factor has not completely vanished. Yakuza-linked sokaiya—pointy-shoed hooligans and thugs—often to embarrass or to protect the management. In 1987 the first meeting of shareholders following the privatization of the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Company (NTT) was marked by disruption when a garishly dressed sokaiya accused a director of punching his secretary. Dozens of others leaped to their feet to drag out the discussion. One demanded to know why he had to queue up for the toilets in the building. When an officer apologized, the man asked why an NTT employee had committed an indecent act. To groans from the audience, he hit his stride with questions about missing promissory notes worth a few thousand dollars and about telephone bugging. The sokaiya did not stop this harassment, intended to embarrass rather than reform the company, until suddenly, as though from nowhere, a large number of husky young men surrounded the room—at which point the sokaiya quietly made their exit. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Not all business crime ends so peacefully, as Japan discovered when Kazuo Kengaku, a well-known investment fund manager with links to the Yakuza, was found encased in concrete in Osaka. The Yakuza are also involved deeply in real estate speculation and supply strong -arm men to frighten residents or small shop-owners reluctant to move out of the way of high-rise developments. So well known are these tactics that they provided the substance for Juzo Itami’s 1989 movie, A taxing Woman’s Return. Valuable real estate also lay behind a recent case in which the collapse of a financial deal led to fraud litigation. An American lawyer in Tokyo, Charles Stevens of Coudert Brothers, representing a U.S. firm, received threatening calls and wound hp keeping a baseball bat at his desk. Violence in the business demimonde takes on bizarre forms on occasion—especially on the fringes of the entertainment business. In South Korea local film distributors have tried to frighten customers away from theaters showing U.S. films by releasing snakes in the theaters. In France, when Saudi Arabian investors, together with the French government, built Mirapolis, a $100 million amusement park, carnival workers, fearing competition, poured sand in the gears of thrill rides. (The park turned out to be a disaster for other reasons.) Similarly, Japanese sarakin, like loan sharks the World over, sometime rely on physical “persuasion” to coerce borrowers in repaying usurious debts—the money from these activities flowing smoothly into major bans and other financial institutions. In the United States of America, as in many other countries, force is sometimes used to shut the mouth of corporate “whistle blowers”—employees who call attention to questionable practices of their bosses. This was the role of Silkwood chose for herself. Silkwood was killed in a car crash after protesting her employer’s handling of nuclear materials, and there are those who still, years after the event, question whether the crash was accidental. They will never stop believing that her company had killed her. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Of course, all these cases are dramatic precisely because they are exceptions in the advanced economies. The daily experience of an American executive with a sheaf of printout in hand, the Japanese salaryman on his telephone, or the salesperson spreading a sample on a counter is so remote from any hint of violence that even to mention it is to draw skeptical looks. Yet just because most transactions in business involve no direct violence does not mean that violence had vanished. The reality is that violence has been contained, transmuted into another form—and hidden. Although institutions in Europe, Japan, and other economies are also being shaken by changes in their deep fundamentals, it is the United States of America—precisely because it has advanced farther than other beyond the industrial age—that the need to create a new institutional infrastructure is most pressing. And nowhere, therefore, is there more loose talk of “transformation”—and so little understanding of what it implies. Take the case of education. All recent U.S.A. presidents have wanted to be known as the “education president,” Obama was the only exception—he wanted to known as a rebel and entertainer. The absolute key to any real improvement in education in the United States of America is recognition of the changes required by an economy primarily based on knowledge production and distribution. Education is more than occupational preparation, but it surely cheats students if it seeks to ready them for jobs that will not be there. Yet today’s mass-production schools—out of sync with the real economy—still mainly emphasized rote, repetitive, factory-like learning. The supposedly radical Trump plan, not only emphasized curiosity, thought, creativity, individuality and self-starting entrepreneurialism—traits needed in knowledge-based economies—but it also calls for yet more routine, standardized testing of students, teachers, and schools—tools to make obsolete schools run more efficiently. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
An equally striking example of what might be called fake “transformation” can be found in Washington’s bureaucratic response to the 9/11 attack—the creation of a Department of Homeland Security. This big-budget, cabinet-level department crunched together twenty-two preexisting pyramidal bureaucracies into a single mega-pyramid. Washington, in short, did what it knows how to do best: Construct industrial-style bureaucracies. The resultant institution is massive, vertical and hierarchical, with countless competing units, and is supposed to plug into and support tends of thousands of smaller municipal and state bureaucracies. By contrast, terrorist organizations are designed to run rings around bureaucracies. Comprising tiny, loosely networked cells whose members know the identity of only one or two other people, most can make decision quickly, are trained to hit, run, and vanish—or to blow themselves up. Compared with the Department of Homeland Security, Al Qaeda is flat as a pancake. And its members do not belong to civil-service unions. Sham transformation is not uniquely American. It is widespread in Europe, where companies and public-sector institutions at the national level are being forced to submit to growing, rigidifying constraints imposed by the European Union, itself a prime example of industrial-age bureaucratic organization. In 1965 Nitsch formed the Wiener Akitonismus group in conjunction with Otto Muhl, Gunter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler. Much of their work focused on the motifs of self-mutilation and self-sacrifice that were implicit, though not foregrounded, both in Klein’s career and in the OM Theatre performances. Brus, during his performing period (1964-1970), would appear in the performance space dressed in a woman’s black stockings, brassiere, and garter belt, slash himself with scissors till he ran with blood, and perform various acts ordinarily taboo in public settings, such as defecating, eating his own feces, vomiting, and so on. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Schwarzkogler’s pieces presented young males as mutilated sacrificial victims, often wounded in the genitals, lying fetally contracted and partially mummy-wrapped as if comatose, in the midst of paraphernalia of violent death such as bullet cartridges and electrical wires. Not only the individual elements of these works, but their patterns of combination—specifically the combination of female imitation self-injury, and the seeking of dishonour though the performance of taboos acts—find striking homologies in shamanic activities. The same motifs reappeared, not necessarily with direct influence from the Viennese, in the works of several America performances artists who have stretched audiences’ sympathies beyond the breaking point Paul McCarthy, a major exponent of the art of the taboo gesture, first heard the calling not from the Viennese but from Klein. As a student at the University of Utah in 1968, he leapt from a second story window in emulation of Klein’s Leap into the Void. By about 1974 his work had found its own distinctive form, developing into a modernized shamanic style so difficult for audiences to bear that the pieces were usually published only as video tapes. These performances, like Schneemann’s, were often developed from dream material, indicating their intimate relation both with shamanic magic and with depth psychology. Like Brus, McCarthy has sometime appeared dressed as aw woman, and has worked, like Schwarzkogler, with the themes of self-mutilation and castration; some pieces have acted out of the basic female imitation of feigning menstruation and parturition (magical pantomimes that are common in primitive initiation rites). In others, McCarthy has cut his hand and mixed the blood with food and water in bowls, clearly echoing various sacramental rites from the Dionysian to the Christian. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
In still others that, like Nitsch’s, have sometimes been shut down by the police, he has acted out the seeking of dishonour as an exploration of the Dionysian-Freudian depths of psychobiological life. In Sailor’s Meat, a videotape from 1975, for example, he appeared in a room in a wino hotel wearing black lace panties smeared with blood and a blonde female wig and lay on the bed having pleasures of the flesh with piled of raw meat and ground hamburger with his male organ painted red and a hot dog shoved up his rear end As Old Man in My Doctor, 1978, he slit a rubber mask over his head to form a female organ—slanted opening on it and from the opening gave birth to a ketchup-covered doll. The piece was a conscious remaking of the myth of the birth of Athena from the cleft brainpan of Zeus, a myth that reverts to the age when male priests and their divinities sought to incorporate the female principle and its powers. In Baby Boy, 1982, McCarthy gave birth to a doll from between his ketchup-covered male thighs as he lay on his back with his feet in the air like a woman in missionary-style pleasures of the flesh. In these and other works self-mutilation, female imitation, and the performance of taboo acts are combined in a structure of roughly parallel to that of Brus’ work, though with a great range of expressiveness. Similar materials recur in the work of Kim Jones. In a performance in Chicago in 1981, Jones appeared naked except for a mask made of woman’s pantyhose, covered himself with mud (as both African and Australian shamans do when performing), and lay naked on the fire escape in the cold to accumulate energy (a shamanic practice knowns Worldwide but most famous from Tibet). Returning to the performance space, he produced a mayonnaise jar filled with his own feces, and smeared himself with it, embraced members of the audience while covered in it, and finally burned sticks and green plants till the smoke drove the remaining audience from the gallery. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
In another piece, Jones cut himself with a razor blade twenty-seven times in a pattern suggesting the body’s circulatory system, then pressed himself against the gallery wall for a self-portrait. Understandably, to audiences habituated to the traditional boundaries of art, to audiences for whom easel painting was still the quintessential art activity, these performances were offensive and even insulting. Of course, the point of such works when they first appeared was in part their seeming to be radically even horrifying, out of context. However, for twenty years they have been part of the art scene, if somewhat peripherally, legitimized by art World context and critical designation again and again. In order to understand the wellsprings of such works, in order to approach them with a degree of sympathy and clarity, it is necessary to frame them somewhat in cultural history, where in fact they have a clear context. Many of the artists discussed here feel that shamanic material and primitive initiation rites are the most relevant cultural parallels to their work. However, most of them feel that the tone of their work arose first, often under Freudian and Jungian influence, and was later confirmed and further shaped by some study of shamanic literature. The question of origins, then—whether from shamanic literature, or from the Jungian collective unconscious, or from the Freudian timeless repository of infantile memory, or from all these sources—though it is worthwhile to state, cannot be answered. In any case it is important in terms of any theory of the function of art that these artists have introduced into the art realm material found elsewhere only in the psychiatric records of disturbed children and in the shamanic thread of the history of religion. Western society, biased toward the objective mental mode of experience, tends to be blind not only to the power of images but also to the fact that we are nearly defenseless against their effect. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Since we are educated and thoughtful, as we like to think, we believe we can choose among the things that will influence us. We accept fact, we reject lies. We go to movies, we watch television, we see photographs, and as the images pour into us, we believe we can choose among those we wish to absorb and those we do not. We assume that our rational processes protect us from implantation, or brainwashing. What we fail to realize is the difference between fact and image. Our objective processes can help us resist only one kind of implantation. There is no rejection of images. Raise your eyes from the page for a moment. Look about your room. Can you reject what you are seeing? In Nicholas Roeg’s The Man Who Fell to Earth, the main character is a visitor from another planet who arrives on Earth and is slowly transformed by what he sees. He becomes transfixed by television. At one point, in a fit of madness, he screams at the TV screen: “Stop it, get out of my mind, go back where you came from.” However, the images do not go bac. They remain. He goes crazy. You are watching Walter Cronkite. He is reporting the news. It is impossible for you to judge the truth of most of what he tells you. He reports events from a thousand miles away. You take his information on faith, or you decide that he is wrong. Then he says the bank you work in was robbed today. “Not true,” you shout, “wrong bank.” You have rejected the news. You could reject it because it came as a fact that you could check. You could halt its entry into you. However, one of the most bizarre things is allowing the news to do its own “fact checking.” They will tell you what they believe to be true, which may be misinterpreted or down right a lie. Meanwhile, however, you have ingested Cronkite. His smile, his hand movements, his tone of voice, the way he holds his head. The images enter your cells. Style is also content. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
If you are watching The Flash, or the president explaining a policy, or Brad Pitt talking to his beautiful women friends, or Fallon Carrington on Dynasty, you are receiving several levels of information at the same time. There is the verbal information and the ideas connected to this. Then there are the images, the way people behave, their movements, mannerisms, forcefulness or peacefulness, their style of emoting, their tone of voice, their way of relating to each other, the kind of people they are, their seriousness, grimness, lightness, joyfulness, heaviness and so on. We absorb these along with the objective news. They are all content. If you see Trump or Cronkite or The Flash, or slaps on the back or kisses or violence—the images of these are not in the realm of correct or incorrect. They just are. There is nothing to disagree with. There is no way to resist them. They flow inward, passing through all discernment processes. Even if you could keep your mind alive while watching—no mean feat—the images would still enter into your unconscious storage area. You have got them. They are yours. You may not believe Jimmy Carter when he speaks. However, you have got Jimmy Carter inside of you. You may believe that Brad Pitt is an actor, and your kinds may believe this too. However, they slowly become like Brad Pitt. They move and walk as he does. You may believe The Flash is fiction, but his image lives within you. If I ask you to, you can bring it to mind. It is part of your image pool. You may draw on it forever. You may watch the television and “know” those are actors performing, but the image of one person stabbing another is in you. You have got it. It is yours. Thinking will not halt its entry into you or into thirty million others. You may watch the actor playing doctor in the commercial, speaking seriously, professionally, authoritatively. You know this is an actor, but you ingest him nonetheless. His authoritativeness becomes yours. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
We all become more like Cronkite, like Carter, like The Flash. We all become more fast or more Bradlike, or display a TV-announcer authority. Once they are in your mind and stored, all images are equally valid. They are real whether they are toothpaste, Walter Cronkite, Kojak, President Carter, Mary Hartman, The Flash, Brad Pitt, Justin Bieber, Pete Rose, a BMW 3 Series, a cougar, Elvis Priestly, Mary Hartman, Anton LaVey, Rhoda, or your mother and father. Once inside your head, they all becomes images that you continue to carry in memory. They become equally real and equally not-real. Our thinking process cannot save us. To the degree that we are thinking as we watch television, a minute degree at most, the images pass right through anyway. They enter our brains. They remain permanently. We cannot tell, for sure, which images are ours and which came from distant planets. Imagination and reality have merged. We have lost control of our images We have lost control of our minds. The man—and with him his woman, who was not created till after the prohibition had been pronounced, but who appears to have become cognizant of it in some peculiar manner whilst still a rib within the body of the man—may give or withhold his obedience, for he is at liberty; they are both at liberty to acceded to their creator or to refuse themselves to Him. Yet their transgression of the prohibition is not reported to us as a decision between good and evil, but as something other, of whose otherness we must take account. The terms of the dialogue with the serpent are already strange enough. It speaks as though it knew very imprecisely what it obviously knows very imprecisely what it obviously knows very precisely. “Indeed, God has said: You shall not eat of every tree of the garden…” it says and breaks off. Now the woman talks, but she too intensifies God’s prohibition and adds to it words which he did not use: “…touch not, else you must die.” “And the chief judge stood before them, and smote them again, and said unto them: If ye have the power of God deliver yourselves from these bands, and then we will believe that the Lord will destroy this people according to your words,” reports Alma 14.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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How Could She Possibly Have Fallen to Sleep When Her Heart Was Breaking?
The Winchester mansion’s construction began in 1887. In the dead center of this 160-room catacomb, it is rumored that the house would swallow people whole. Amidst specially designed thousand-dollar stained-glass doors and windows, anti-social kids would melt back into obscurity. It was on the evening of August 25, 1889 that a man was discovered on the stairwell leading to the third floor, wearing only his underwear, had sustained 25 stab wounds to the face and chest. Rumours abounded concerning the perpetrators of this frenzied attack: fundamentalist Christians, a rival of Mrs. Winchester’s from San Francisco, fanatical anti-Nazis were all suggested on the grapevine. The evil act was perpetrated, like some troop of Satanic boy scouts were thirsty for blood, while listening to haunting hymns of the Norse gods of old. It was terrible. Mrs. Winchester patiently waited for someone to remove the body, the thick carpet was bloody and blood trickled down the walls, as it dripped from the ceiling. But across her fact was a frightful gash, like a sabre-cut, deep and shadowy within, but clean and sharp at the edges. When the butler tenderly pressed her head to close the gaping wound, the edges made a find grating sound, that was painful to hear, and the lids of the dark eyes quivered and trembled as Mrs. Winchester was also suffering dreadfully. “Poor Mrs. Winchester!” he exclaimed sorrowfully. “But I shall not hurt you much, though you will take a long time to get strong.” After done tending to Mrs. Winchesters wound, he wrapped the body in plastic and dragged it to the basement to incinerate it in the furnace. Mrs. Winchester had evidently not been long in the World; for her complexion was perfect, her hair was smooth where is should be smooth, and surely where it should be curly, and her silk clothes were perfectly new. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
This is why Mrs. Winchester’s arrival to the valley was sensational. The valley was thrilled by the dramatic entrance of a millionairess; by those freight cars sidetracked in Santa Clara, unloading rich imported furnishing. However, also intriguing was the fact that the mansion seemed to mushroom to 500 rooms in what seemed like a matter of day, but people were also spooked by the ghostly screams heard coming from inside and the shadowy figures that lurked in the windows at night and that could be seem in daylight, quiet frequently, stalking about in the Victorian gardens. The longer Mrs. Winchester worked on her glorious estate, the more fond the spirits became of her chestnut brown hair, and caramel coloured eyes. The ghosts sat for hours gazing at Mrs. Winchester’s delicate face. She was wonderfully mended. She was quite strong, and in a valley where she could live for a hundred years to tell of the fearful curse that had befallen her and the Winchester mansion. As the twilight deepened, Mrs. Winchester grew anxious, and walked up and down the zig zag stairs, no longer able to think of Annie and William. An indefinable, disquieting sensation came upon her by fine degrees, a chilliness and a faint stirring of her thick hair, joined with a wish to be in any company rather than to be alone with the ghosts much longer. It was the beginning of fear. She stood back from the table, to get out of the way of the chair, and began to cross the board floor. Something was following her in the dark. There was a small pattering, as of tiny feet upon the boards. She stopped and listened, and the roots of her hair tingled. It was nothing. She made two steps more, and she was sure that she heard the litter pattering again. Mrs. Winchester turned her back to the window, leaning against the sadh so that the panes began to crack, and she faced the dark. Everything was quite still. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Mrs. Winchester sensed that someone was in the room. “Is anyone there?” she cried. But no answer in the room. Just darkness. Mrs. Winchester was shocked at how long she had been alone. She was shocked and frightened, and she ran across the room to the door. As she fumbled for the door handle, he distinctly heard the running of the little feet after her. “Mice!” she exclaimed feebly, just as she got the door open. She shut it quickly behind her, and felt as though some cold thing had settled on her back and were withering upon her. The passage was quite dark, but she could hear laughter and calls of children, playing some game out of doors. She wondered how she could have been so nervous, and for an instant she thought of the motive from the crime that had occurred that evening. A gaggle of adolescent nihilists who found themselves transformed into a “cult” or naughty spirits? There were a number of similar cases that received plenty of attention on the “Satanic” angle. There was a story of a ghoul stabbing a priest to death. Another ghoul murdered an unpopular fifteen-year-old boy. And another ghoul shot a man in the neck at the back of Italy. Two young farmers were convicted of the crime, both had alibis, however. While these murders—which occurred alongside a spate grave desecration, the violence barely made a ripple. However, around 100 youths, chiefly from affluent families in the valley, were arrested and charged with “Satan worship.” Their homes were ransacked and “evidence”—such as voo doo dolls, drawings, and magic spells was recovered. It was rumoured that the Winchester mansion was so large, these kids held “Satanic Parties” while Mrs. Winchester slept. One of the accused observed, “I don’t have anything to do with Satanism. I joined because their parties were exciting, and people wore amazing costumes and appear and disappeared right before my eyes.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
There is no justification for those who stir up hostility, commit acts of blasphemy, vandalism, violence and even murder. But, when it came to the Winchester mansion, it was hard to tell if the ghosts were real, supernatural, or a mixture of both. When the feared tide of violence failed to break Mrs. Winchester, business as normal resumed. It was one o’clock in the morning when Mrs. Winchester went up stairs to her bedroom. As she turned the key to unlock the door again, worn out and hopeless and broken-hearted, her heart stood still, for she knew that she was awake and not dreaming, and that she really heard those tiny footsteps pattering to meet her in the passage of her house. However, she was too unhappy to be much frightened any more, and her heart went on again with a dull regular pain, that found its way all through her with every pulse. So she went in her room in the dark, and lite a candle. Mrs. Winchester was so completely devastated that she sat down in her chair before the work-table and almost fainted, as her face dropped forward upon her folded hands. Beside her the solitary candle burned steadily with a low flame in the still warm air. She was so terrible hurt that she did not even feel something pulling at her nightgown so gently that it was like the nibbling of a tiny mouse. If she had noticed it, she might have thought that it was really a mouse. Then a coo breath stirred her thin hair, and the low flame of the one candle dropped down almost to a mere spark, not flickering as though a draught were going to blow it out, but just dropping as if it were tired out. Mrs. Winchester felt her hands stiffening with fright under her face; and there was a faint rustling sound, like some small silk thing blown in a gentle breeze. She sat up straight, stark, and scared, and a small ghoulish voice spoke to her. #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
“Ma-ma” it said, with a break between the syllable. Mrs. Winchester stood up with a single jump, and her chair feel over backwards with a smashing noise upon the wooden floor. The candle had almost gone out. It was Annie’s voice that had spoken, and she should have known it among the voices of a hundred other ghosts. And yet there was something more in it, a little human ring, with a pitiful cry and a call for help, and the wail of a hurt child. Mrs. Winchester stood up, stake and stiff, and tried to look round, but at first, she could not, for she seemed to be frozen from head to foot. Then she made a great effort, and she raised one hand to each of her temples, and pressed her own head round as she would have turned a manikin’s head. The candle was burning so low that it might as well have been out altogether, for any light it gave, and the room seemed quite dark at first. Then she saw something. She would have no believed that she could be more frighted than she had been just before that. However, she was, and her knees shook, for she saw her daughter Annie standing in the middle of the floor, shining with a faint and ghostly radiance, her pretty glassy brown eyes fixed on her. And across Annie’s face and her delicate pink lips was a smile, and her chubby ruby red cheeks. Yet there was something more in the eyes, too; there was something more human than ghostly. It was enough to bring back all of Mrs. Winchester’s pain which made her forget her fear. “Annie! My little Annie!,” she cried aloud. The small ghost moved. “Ma-ma,” it said. It seemed this time that there was even more of Annie’s tone echoing somewhere between the wooden notes that reached her ears so distinctly, and yet so far away. Annie was calling her, Mrs. Winchester was sure she was. Her face was perfectly white in the gloom, but her knees did not shake any more, and she felt that she was less frightened. “Yes, baby girl! Where are you? Where are you?” she asked. “Where are you, Annie?” “Ma-ma!” #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Annie died when she was only six weeks old, so these were the first words Mrs. Winchester ever heard her speak. She broke down in tears, not realizing that the Satanic ritual the boy performed had manifested her daughter who had been running around in the mansion for days trying to get her attention. Annie had lost her left shoe and was trying to get Mrs. Winchester attention so she could put it back on her. Mrs. Winchester had not been dreaming. The candle burned brightly now, and she heard Annie’s foot steps running to the door. Mrs. Winchester had fallen asleep and was not able to tend to her ghost child. How could she possibly have fallen asleep when her heart was breaking? She said what a fool she was. She should have been out in the streets looking for her child. “Ma-ma!” The longing, wailing, pitiful little wooden cry rang from the secret passage behind the wall, which was being a wall, and behind another wall. Mrs. Winchester stood for a moment later her hand was on the handle. Then she was in the secret room, with the light streaming from the open door behind her. Quite at the other end she saw the little phantom shining clearly in the shadow, and the right hand seemed to beckon to her as the arm rose and fell once more. She knew all at once that it had not come to fright her, but lead her, and when it disappeared, an she walked boldly towards the door, she knew that it was in the safe, waiting for her. Mrs. Winchester forgot she was tired and had eaten no supper, and had walked many miles, for a sudden hope ran through and through her, like a golden stream of life. And sure enough, it led her to the door-to-nowhere. She saw the small ghost flitting before her. Sometimes it was only a shadow, where there was other light, but then the glare of the gasoliers made a pale green sheen on the wall. The entire figure shone out brightly, with its light brown hair with blonde highlights. #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
Baby Annie seemed to trot like a tiny child, and Mrs. Winchester could almost hear the pattering of the golden slippers on the hardwood floors as it ran. However, it went so very fast, and she could only just keep up with it, tearing along with her thick brown hair blown by the night breeze. Then the little angel was gone. Mrs. Winchester was suddenly troubled and disturbed. She heard noises as if chains were being rattled, together with crashes and sounds of knocking. Her bed began to move up and down repeatedly. At first she did not know whether it was a sign of mental illness or a result of her magi practices. She tried to read her Bible and pray but this was almost impossible. She was convinced that the source of the trouble lay in some evil power. Mrs. Winchester went to one of her friends, a Christian woman in Oakland, and subsequently a group was formed to pray for her. At first she wavered between faith and doubt. She was in a turmoil. She longed to be at peace with God but could not rid herself of a terrible feeling of fear. The battled lasted for decades. In the end she saw a vision of a golden cup being handed down from Heaven It was full of blood and the words came to her, “This is the blood of Christ which has been shed for you.” From that moment her attacks ceased as she believed in her Saviour. Faith in Christ had delivered her. However, there was still two kinds of spirits in the Winchester mansion. The ones that smiles like a dame of Heaven before she is married, and the ones that gets to be tearing devils after her market’s made and she has got a husband. In the summer of 1898, a demon-possessed farmer at the Winchester mansion heard of the Christian gospel through Mrs. Winchester. He then tore down his Victorian cottage Mrs. Winchester provided for, which had been his shrine and ceased worshipping the demon. The death of his sick child occurred a few days later. In great distress his wife urged him to restore the shrine and resume the worship, believing her daughter’s death was caused by the offended demon. #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
However, the new Christian remained adamant and refused to break his vow to worship and trust in Jesus. A few days later, the demon Bifrons returned and spoke through his victim to the wife: “I have returned but for one visit. If your husband is determined to be a Christian, this is no place for me. But I wish to tell you I have nothing to do with the death of your child.” Demons not only know of Christ, who had delivered people from the power of demons, they are experts in their own bailiwick. They share in the cunning subtlety and deception of Satan and carry on his work with great skill in an effort to blind the minds of unbelievers (2 Corinthians 4.4). The possession of extraordinary knowledge always characterizes the demon as he speaks through the body of his victim. Powers of oratory and poetic expression and the gift of ventriloquism are often evidenced. Perhaps the most striking character is the demon’s ability to speak languages unknow by the subject. This is a widespread phenomenon frequently referred to by Chinese witnessed. In Germany under the ministry of Pastor John Christopher Blumhardt (1805-1880), demons encountered in his prayer cures “spoke in all the different European languages, and in some which Blumhardt and others present did not recognize. The victim’s new personality often displays not only supernatural knowledge but supernatural physical strength and other physical alterations as well. Rapid change of facial expression quickly turns friendliness into dreadful grimace. A sudden shift of voice, perhaps from a high soprano to a resounding bass, introduced the new personality. These psychic transformations are commonly accompanied by a display of tremendous physical strength, often expressed in delirium, wild flailing of hands and feet, and destructive mania endangering those near at hand. Frail women or even children under demon possession can resist three or four strong men. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
Children who have visited the Winchester mansion report bursting forth with unified voices. They say that witch’s specters come to torment them. In 1888, one child was demon possessed for more than ten days, while visiting the Winchester mansion. He has such show of physical strength that the people had leashed him to a tree like an animal. As soon as the farmers prayed for him, the chained boy gave several mighty leaps in the air and said, “Take off the chains!” The people were afraid to obey, but the took the chains off the boy and led him quietly into the house, where the victim fell into a peaceful sleep. Satanism that had emerged in the New World was very different from its European counterpart. According to the confessions, the witches met in a pasture outside the Winchester mansion at night. A trumpet was sounded, audible to all witches in Santa Clara County, but never heard by those who were not in tuned to the supernatural. The witches, thus signaled, mounted, their broomsticks and flew to the meeting. Once there, they all sat in an orderly congregation, partaking of the sacrament in the usual manner, except for the fact that both blood and wafers. Then they heard a sermon delivered by the Devil. The sermon usually dealt with the overthrow of the theocratic system then in existence and the abolition of strict social laws; the new system that would follow would bring with it greater abundance and more pleasurable life. The singing of the Devil’s book was present, but the initiates differed as to the method of signing. Few of the confessors said they had signed the book in the traditional manner, with their own blood, but most of them had signed with plain pen and ink. Epidemics of possession tend to occur most frequently in times of social tension. Since a possessed person is no longer responsible for one’s behavior, such outbreaks function psychologically as a release, as a means of casting off authority with impunity, as well as a method of casting off authority with impunity, as well as a method of projecting repressed doubts or guilt. “The Devil made me do it.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
It is not surprising, then, that outbreaks of mysterical contagion have historically taken place in areas where authority, manifested in an overpowering social structure or system of values, was the greatest, and where emotional safety of values, was the greatest, and where emotional safety valves for bleeding off social tensions were the least. Ironically, though the criminal antics of the Black Metal Circle attracted the international attention that led to the genre’s global renaissance, most current black metal bands distance themselves of the early 1990s—while conceding that they lent the genre a pathological allure. There is an ambivalence at work that is almost classically Satanic. The sheer number and diversity of bands involved in the black metal scene today is breathtaking: “black metal” is defined not so much by a musical style as by a lyrical fixation with the Satanic (though not necessarily Satanism itself), evoking dark passions and gothic moods. Within these boundaries, black metal is arguably the most vital and creative force in contemporary music. Black metal musicians plunder almost every aspect of the Western musical canon, from folk and techno to orchestral and jazz influences. They are also becoming increasingly literate and well-informed. Whereas, three decades before, Black Sabbath were inspired by a Dennis Wheatly novel, the new generation of demonic rockers are exploring writers like Dante and Milton, with Norwegian act Ulver releasing an album based upon Willian Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Black Metal is the state-of-the-art pinnacle in extreme music and the most alternative, most underground form of demi-monde culture this side of hades! BLACK METAL, blackmetal, BM, Norwegian, Northern, true, elite, modern black, dark-metal, Greek, blackened death, gothic-metal, Pagan metal, vampiric, death-industrial, black-noise, dark-ambient/black-ambient, etcetera—these are the nomenclature that sets our music apart from the mediocrity of conventional culture and brings us all together in the most cutting-edge community!…Hail Satan! #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
If you get down to the magic of the Winchester Mystery House, you will discover the spirits come straight from the heart. One does not have to do it very often, but if your music is emotional and affects you, it is Satanic. It can be classical, death metal, whatever. It is a manner of how you write it and why you write it. People are becoming more aware. A lot of things are getting exposed and people are getting sick of the corruption. Certain people get a lot of balderdash. Death threats in person. People vandalize cars and gardens, and attack others. It is ridiculous. They call those who express their nature bad guys, but they are the ones who behave in a bad fashion. Rituals are quite important as they impress one’s mind—you know you are dealing with serious stuff—and that is how magic works. It comes from within: you release certain energies and draw certain energies; therefore it is important that people can control their own minds This takes a lot of effort to master. For examples, novices should not throw themselves into situations they cannot normally cope with, learn to cope with them first. A Satanist should suffer from no paranoias and master their fears. The Decadent movement of Mrs. Winchester’s time is why the nineteenth century was known as the Satanic century, and the concept of Decadent lifestyle is quite appealing. I am a great fan of Decadent writers, such as Edgar Allan Poe, and enjoy stories about the macabre and unknown in general, like the work of H.P. Lovecraft. I agree with a lot of Nietzsche’s philosophy on the will to power, morals, and the superman. I read the Marquis de Sade, who I find fascinating—Gilles de Rais was also a very interesting character. Satanism is a way of living. It is a philosophy and a magical path. I think to be a Satanist you have to have a dark, sinister side to you—you have to be born that way. You must be an extreme person, a strong-willed person—emotional but not controlled by your emotions. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
You have to understand the darker aspects of human psychology and behaviour. You must be your own master, be responsible for your own actions. A Satanist is an individual. A Satanists is usually also a misanthrope. One appreciates that most people are weak and foolish and follow the crowd, like sheep. Satanism is quite masculine. It required logical, cold thinking. Most white magicians are too scared to step into the dark side because they know they cannot handle it. If they cannot handle “demons,” how can they call themselves magicians? It is pathetic. The real demon is their own fear. Another characteristic of demonomania is the complete change of moral character and spiritual disposition of the victim when the new personality is in control. This transformation is due to the nature of the inhabiting demon who completely controls one’s victim during the demonized state (the attack), and thus manifests one’s own character. Just like human beings, demons have different intellectual, moral, and spiritual traits. These traits will manifest themselves accordingly through the possessed person. Some demons are refined, educated, cultured, and ever appear to be “good” and benevolent, parading as elect unfallen angels, even as the Holy Spirit himself. Others are unrefined, uneducated, coarse, vile, and morally filthy. Demons are not always viciously immoral and unclean. However, all spirits who are not of God always display their essential God-defying and Christ-resisting trait. They always abhor the triune God and the Christian faith. If you ever hear ghostly music wafting from the dark mansion, the bell in the belfry high in the gables tolling, maybe the Winchester Mystery House is summoning you. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
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Randolph Harris II International Institute 