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One Who Treads Softly Goes Far

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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I Next Encountered Him at the Hilton’s Party

Man’s age-old dilemma in the face of death is the meaning of the thing that is paramount of importance; what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignificance. If such astonishment as this can seize Eternal Spirits: or have ye chaos in this place after the toil of battle to repose your wearied virtue, for the ease you find to slumber here, as in the vales of Heaven? Or in this abject posture have ye sworn to adore the conqueror? who now beholds Cherub and Seraph rolling in the flood with scattered arms and ensigns, till anon his swift pursuers from Heaven’s gates discern the advantage, and descending tread us down thus drooping, or with linked thunderbolts transfix us to the bottom of this gulf. Awake, arise, or be forever fallen. They heard, and were abashed, and up they sprung upon the wing, as when men wont to watch on duty, sleeping found by whom they dread, rouse and bestir themselves ere well awake. Nor did they not perceive the evil plight in which they were, or the fierce pains not feel; yet to their general’s voice they soon obeyed innumerable. As when the potent rod of Amram’s son in Egypt’s evil day waved round the coast, up called a pitchy cloud of locusts, warping on the eastern wind, that over the realm of impious Pharaoh hung like night, and darkened all the land of the Nile so numberless were those bad angels seen hovering on wing under the cope of hell twixt upper, nether, and surrounding fires; till, as a signal given, the uplifted spear of their great Sultan waving to direct their course, in even balance down they light on the firm brimstone, and fill all the plain; a multitude, like which the populous North poured never from her frozen loins, to pass Rhene or the Danaw, when her barbarous sons came like a deluge on the South, and spread beneath Gibraltar to the Libyan sands. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

Forthwith from every squadron and each band the heads and leaders thither haste where stood their great commander; godlike shapes and forms excelling human, princely dignities, and powers that erst in Heaven sat on thrones; though of their names Heavenly records now be no memorial, blotted out and razed by their rebellion, from the Books of Life. Nor had they yet among the sons of Eve got them new names, till wandering over the Earth, through God’s high sufferance for the trial of man, by falsities and lies the greatest part of mankind they corrupted to forsake God their Creator, and the invisible glory of hum that made them, to transform oft to the image of a brute, adored with gay religions full of pomp and gold, and devils to adore for deities. This is all the result of the denial of death and an unwillingness to heed to their general’s voice. Humans have such a desire to live, a burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because they have lived that they only come to worship silver and gold, and as a result they will suffer and die and be removed from the Books of life. When two persons are mutually present and hence engaged together in some degree of unfocused interaction, the mutual proffering of civil inattention—a significant form of unfocused interaction—is not the only way they can relate to one another. They can proceed from there to engage one another in focused interaction, the unit of which is referred to as a face engagement or encounter. The term “encounter,” which is much the easier of the two to use, has some common-sense connotations that ought here to be ruled out. First, the term is sometimes used to refer to mediated, as well as to direct, contact between two persons, as when persons have correspondence with each other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Secondly, the term is sometimes used with an implication of there having been difficulty or trouble during the interactions, as in the phrase “a run-in.” Finally, the term is sometimes used to cover occasions which bring two persons into easy access to each other, regardless of how many times they may come together in a joint conversation during this time, as in the phrase, “I next encountered him at the Hilton’s party.” Face engagements comprise all those instances of two or more participants in a situation joining each other openly in maintaining a single focus of cognitive and visual attention—what is sensed as a single focus of cognitive and visual attention—what is sensed as a mutual activity, entailing preferential communication rights. As a simple example—and one of the most common—when persons are present together in the same situation they may engage each other in a talk. This accreditation for mutual activity is one of the broadest of all statuses. Even persons of extremely disparate social positions can find themselves in circumstances where it is fitting to impute it to one another. Ordinarily the status does not have a “latent phase” but obliges the incumbents to be engaged at that very moment in exercising their status. Mutual activities and the face engagements in which they are embedded comprise instances of small talk, commensalism, pleasures of the flesh, gaming, formal discussion, and personal servicing (treating, selling, waitressing, and so forth). In some cases, as with sociable chats, the coming together does not seem to have a ready instrumental rationale. In other cases, as when a teacher pauses at a pupil’s desk to help him for a moment with a problem he is involved in, and will be involved in after she moves on, the encounter is clearly a setting for a mutual instrumental activity, and this joint work is merely a phase of what is primarily an individual task. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

It should be noted that while many face engagements seem to be made up largely of the exchange of verbal statements, so that conversational encounters can in fact be used as the model, there are still other kinds of encounters where no word is spoken. This becomes very apparent, of course, in the study of engagements among children who have not yet mastered talk, and where, incidentally, it is possible to see the gradual transformation of a mere physical contacting of see the gradual transformation of a mere physical contacting of another into an act that establishes the social relationship of jointly accrediting a face-to-face encounter. Among adults, too, however, nonverbal encounters can be observed: the significant acts exchanged can be gestures or even, as in board and card games, moves. Also, there are certain close comings-together over work tasks which give rise to a single focus of visual and cognitive attention and to intimately coordinated contributions, the order and kind of contribution being determined by shared appreciation of what the task-at-the-moment requires as the next act. Here, while no word of direction or sociability may be spoken, it will be understood that lack of attention or coordinated response constitutes a breach in the mutual commitment of the participants. Where there are only two participants in a situation, an encounter, if there is to be one, will exhaust the situation, giving us a fully-focused gathering. With more than two participants, there may be persons officially present in the situation who are officially excluded from the encounter and not themselves so engaged. These unengaged (an “unengaged” participant may of course be involved in a task or other main focus of attention and hence not be “disengaged” in the situation.) participants change the gathering into a partly-focused one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

If more than three persons are present, there may be more than one encounter carried on in the same situation—a multifocused gathering. I will use the term participation unit to refer both to encounters and to unengaged participants; the term bystander will be used to refer to any individual present who is not a ratified member of the particular encounter in question, whether or not one is currently a member of some other encounter. In our society, face engagements seem to share a complex of properties, so that this class of social unit can be defined analytically, as well as by example. An encounter is initiated by someone making an opening move, typically by means of a special expression of the eyes but sometimes by a statement or a special tone of voice at the beginning of a statement. When the individual is socially subordinated to the one to whom one is about to initiate an encounter overture, he may be required to use a minimal sign so that the superior can easily continue to overlook it, or can respond to it at one’s own convenience. For instance, the habits of a good secretary, includes waiting to be recognized when one has stepped in to speak to you, before interrupting whatever you are doing. In such cases the fiction is maintained that the superordinate alone can initiate an engagement. The classic case here is the mythical butler who coughs discreetly so that one’s master will take note of one’s presence and allow to deliver a message. The engagement proper begins when this overture is acknowledged by the other, who signals back with one’s eyes, voice, or stance that one has placed oneself at the disposal of the other for purpose of a mutual eye-to-eye activity—even if only to ask the initiator to postpone one’s request for an audience. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

There is a tendency for the initial move and the responding “clearance” sign to be exchanged almost simultaneously, with all participants employing both signs, perhaps in order to prevent an initiator from placing oneself in a position of being denied by others. Glances, in particular, make possible this effective simultaneity. In fact, when eyes are joined, the initiator’s first glance can be sufficiently tentative and ambiguous to allow one to act as if no initiation has been intended, if it appears that one’s overture is not desired. Eye-to-eye looks, then, play a special role in the communication life of the community, ritually establishing an avowed openness to verbal statements and a rightfully heightened mutual relevance of acts. Of the special sense-organs, the eye has a uniquely sociological function. The union and interaction of individuals is based upon mutual glance. This is perhaps the most direct and purest reciprocity which exists anywhere. This highest psychic reaction, however, in which the glances of eye to eye unite men, crystallizes into no objective structure; the unity which momentarily arises between two persons is present in the occasion and is dissolved in the function. So tenacious and subtle is this union that it can only be maintained by the shortest and straightest line between the eyes, and the smallest deviation from it, the slightest glance side, completely destroys the unique character of this union. No objective trace of this relationship is left behind, as is universally found, directly or indirectly, in all other types of associations between men, as, for example, in interchange of words. The interaction of eyes and eye dies in the moment in which directness of the function is lost. However, the totality of social relations of human beings, their self-assertion and self-abnegation, their intimacies, and estrangements, would be changed in unpredictable ways if there occurred no glance of eye to eye. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

This mutual glance between persons, in distinction from the simple sight or observation of the other, signifies a wholly new and unique union between them. There is a whole vocabulary of glances. It is understandable, then, that an individual who feels one has cause to be alienated from those around one will express this through some “abnormality of gaze,” especially averting of the eyes. And it is understandable, too, that an individual who wants to control others’ access to one and the information one receives may avoid looking toward the person who is seeking one out. A waitress, for example, may prevent one’s initiating an customer from “catching here eye” to prevent one’s initiating an order. Similarly, if a pedestrian wants to ensure a particular allocation of the street relative to a fellow pedestrian, or if a motorist wants to ensure priority of one’s line of proposed action over that of a fellow motorist or pedestrian, one strategy is to avoid meeting the other’s eyes and thus avoid cooperative claims. However, sometimes the captain feels out of sorts, or in ill-humour, or is pleased to be somewhat capricious, or has a fancy to show a touch of one’s omnipotent supremacy; or, peradventure, it has so happened that the first lieutenant has, in some way, piqued or offended one, and one is not unwilling to show a slight specimen of one’s dominion over one, even before the eyes of all hands; at all events, only by some one of these suppositions can the singular circumstance be accounted for, that frequently Captain Claret would pertinaciously promenade up and down the poop, purposely averting one’s eyes from the first lieutenant, who would stand below in the most awkward suspense, waiting the first wink from one’s superior’s eye. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

“Now I have him!” he must have said to himself, as the captain would turn toward him in his walk; “now’s my time!” and up would go his hand to his cap; but, alas! the captain was off again; and the men at the guns would cast sly winks at each other as the embarrassed lieutenant would bite his lips with suppressed vexation. Upon some occasions this scene would be repeated several times, till at last Captain Claret, thinking that in the eyes of all hands his dignity must by this time be pretty well blostered, would stalk toward his subordinate, looking him full in the eyes; whereupon up goes his hand to the cap front, and the captain, nodding his acceptance of the report, descends from his perch to the quarter-deck. As these various examples suggest, mutual glances ordinarily must be withheld if an encounter is to be avoided, for eye contact opens one up for face engagement. There is a relationship between the use of eye-to-eye glances as a means of communicating a request for initiation of an encounter, and other communication practices. The more clearly individuals are obliged to refrain from staring directly at others, the more effectively will they be able to attach special significance to a stare, in this case, a request for an encounter. The rule of civil inattention thus makes possible, and “fits” with, the clearance function given to looks into others’ eyes. The rule similarly makes possible the giving of a special function to “prolonged” holding of a stranger’s glance, as when unacquainted persons who had arranged to meet each other manage to discover one another in this way. (It is said by homosexuals that if another catches and holds the glance, one needs know nothing more about him to know that he is one of them.) And that is who I met my first girlfriend. She was attractive and I was looking at her and we both held the glance, and so I had to find out who she was and ask her out. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

Self-remembering and its effect upon memory allows one to become faced with an entirely new problem which science and philosophy has not, so far, come across. The problem consists in directing attention on oneself without weakening or obliterating the attention directed on something else. Moreover this “something else” could as well be within one as outside one. The very first attempts shows one its possibility. At the same time, one will see two things clearly. In the first place, one will see that self-remembering resulting from this method has nothing in common with “self-feeling,” or “self-analysis.” It was a new and very interesting state with a strangely familiar flavour. And secondly I realized that moments of self-remembering do occur in life, although rarely. Only the deliberate production of these moments created the sensation of novelty. Actually I had been familiar with them from early childhood. They came either in new and unexpected surroundings, in a new place, among new people while traveling, for instance, when suddenly one looks about one and says: How strange! I and in this place; or in very emotional moments, in moments of danger, in moments when it is necessary to keep one’s head, when one hears one’s own voice and sees and observes oneself from outside. I saw quite clearly that my first recollections of life, in my own case very clearly ones, were moments of self-remembering. This last realization revealed much else to me. That is, I saw that I really only remember those moments of the past in which I remembered myself. Of the others I know only that they took place. I am not able wholly to revive them, to experience them again. However, the moment when I had remembered myself wee alive and were in no way different from the present. I was still afraid to comes to conclusions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

However, I already saw that stood upon the threshold of a very great discovery. I had always been astonished at the weakness and the insufficiency of our memory. So many things disappear. For some reason or other the chief absurdity of life for me consisted in this. Why experience so much in order to forget it afterwards? Besides there was something degraded in this. A man feels something which seems to him very big, he thinks he will never forget it; one or two years pass by—and nothing remains of it. It now became clear to me why this was so and why it could not be otherwise. If our memory really keeps alive only moments of self-remembering, it is clear why our memory is so poor. Sometimes self-remembering was not successful; at other times it was accompanied by curious observations. I was once walking along the Liteiny towards the Nevsky, and it spite of all my efforts I was unable to keep my attention on self-remembering. The noise, movement, everything distracted me. Every minute I lost the thread of attention, found it again, and then lost it again. At last I felt a kind of ridiculous irritation with myself and I turned into the street on the left having firmly decided to keep my attention on the fact that I would remember myself at least for some time, at any rate until I reached the following street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya a without losing the thread of attention except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned towards the Nevsky realizing that, in quiet streets, it was easier for me not to lose the line of thought and wishing therefore to test myself in more noisy street. I reached the Nadejdinskaya without losing the thread of attention except, perhaps, for short moments. Then I again turned toward the Nevsky realizing that, in quiet streets, it was easier for me not to lose the line thought and wishing therefore to test myself in more noisy streets. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

I reached the Nevsky still remembering myself, and was already beginning to experience the strange emotional state of inner peace and confidence which comes after great efforts of this kind. Just round the corner on the Nevsky was a tobacconist’s shop where they made my cigarettes. Still remembering myself I thought I would call there and order some cigarettes. Two hours later I woke up in the Tavricheskaya, that is, far away. I was going by izvostchik to the printers. The sensation of awakening was extraordinarily vivid. I can almost say that I came to. I remembered everything at once. How I had been walking along the Nadejdinskaya, how I had been remembering myself, how I had thought about cigarettes, and how at this thought I seemed all at once to fall and disappear into a deep sleep. At the same time, while immersed in this sleep, I had continued to perform consistent and expedient actions. I left the tobacconist, called at my flat in the Liteiny, telephoned to the printers. I wrote two letters. Then again I went out of the house. I walked on the left side of the Nevsky up to the Gostinoy Dvor intending to go to the Offitzerskaya. Then I had changed my mind as it was getting late. I had taken an izovstchik and was driving to the Kavalergardskaya to my printers. And on the way while driving along the Tavricheskaya I began to feel a strange uneasiness, as though I had forgotten something. –And suddenly I remembered that I had forgotten to remember myself. If your temper is aroused and you tell them a thing or two, you will have a fine time unloading your feelings. However, what about the other person? Will he or she share your pleasure? Will your belligerent tones, your hostile attitude, make it easy for one to agree with you? If a person’s heart is rankling with discord and ill feeling toward you, you cannot win one to your way of thinking with all the logic in the World. Scolding parents and domineering bosses and husbands and nagging wives ought to realize that people do not want to change their minds. They cannot be forced or driven to agree with you or me. However, they may possibly be led to, if we are gentle and friendly, ever so gentle and every so friendly. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

It is an old and true maxim that a diamond ring catches more women than a gallon of rudeness. So with me, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein a diamond ring that catches his heart; which, say what you will, is the great high road to his reason. Business executives have learned that it pays to be friendly to strikers. Ask them to peacefully come back to work. Friendly approaches help and can make you famous. However, the state of the World is that most people do not have family values and do not care about their reputations. Many companies think that are too big to fail. That what they have to offer is too good to resist. Therefore, threatening to tarnish their reputation may do nothing at all, until they go bankrupt. Therefore, begin in a friendly way. Reputation effect is a two-edged sword for commitment. Sometimes destroying your reputation can create the possibility for a commitment. Destroying your reputation commits you not to take actions in the future that you can predict will not be in your best interest. The question of whether to negotiate with hijackers helps illustrate the point. Before any particular hijacking has occurred, the government might decide to deter hijackings by threatening never to negotiate. However, the hijackers predict that after the commandeer the jet, the government will find it impossible to enforce a no-negotiation posture. How can a government deny itself the ability to negotiate with hijackers? To destroy the credibility of its promises. Imagine that after reaching a negotiated settlement, the government breaks its commitment and attacks the hijackers. This destroys any reputation the government has for trustworthy treatment of hijackers. It loses the ability to make a credible promise, and irreversibly denies itself the temptation to respond to a hijacker’s threat. This destruction of the credibility of a promise makes credible the threat never to negotiate. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

Congress has a similar problem of maintaining consistency over time when it comes to tax amnesty programs. Such programs allow those who owe back taxes to pay up without penalty. This appears to be a costless way of raising more revenue. All those who have second thoughts about having cheated on their taxes give the government money owed. In fact, if it could be credibly established that there would never be another amnesty, then Congress could raise additional tax revenues at no cost. However, if amnesty was such a good idea once, why not try it again in a few years? Nothing prevents Congress from offering an amnesty on a regular basis. Then a problem arises. Cheating becomes more attractive, since there is the possibility of getting amnesty in the future. Congress must find a way to prevent itself from ever repeating the amnesty program. The government should offer a tax amnesty, then back out on its promise and prosecute those who turn themselves in. This would raise even more revenue than a simple amnesty. And once the government cheats on its amnesty, who would believe the government were it to try again? By destroying its credibility, the government can make a credible commitment not to offer an amnesty again. You will probably think this is an absurd idea, and with good reason. First, it will not work against strategically aware taxpayers. They will expect the government to default on its promise, so they will not participate in the amnesty at all. Secondly, and more importantly, catching tax cheaters is not the only game in town. Any benefits from double-cross tax cheaters will be more than offset by the harm to the government’s reputation in other areas. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

One of the most impressive examples of how to build a reputation belongs to the Mayflower Furniture Company. On a large billboard located along the Massachusetts Turnpike, they proudly advertise that they have gone 160 years with out a sale. (Are they still waiting for their first customer?) This unconditional commitment to everyday low prices brings in a steady stream of customers. A sale might temporarily raise profits, but it would be another 160 years before they could repeat such a cleaver advertisement. Next year, we expect the sigh will read 161 years. The reputation becomes self-perpetuating as it becomes more valuable. (Sadly, we must report that the Mayflower Furniture Company recently had its first sale, a going out of business sale.) In all these instances, the player cultivates a reputation with the direct and conscious aim of creating credibility for his future unconditional commitments, threats, and promises. However, reputation can also arise for nonstrategic reasons and yet be just as powerful in achieving credibility. The feeling of pride in not breaking one’s word is an example. The weak bonds of words can be strengthened in two ways: a fear of the consequences of breaking one’s word; or a glory, or pride, in not breaking it. Such pride is often instilled in people’s value system through education or general social conditioning. It may even have the implicit social aim of improving the credibility of our manifold daily relationships. Yet we are not told to take pride in being honourable because it will being us strategic advantage by making our threats and promises credible; we are told that honour is a good thing in itself. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

Someone who has a reputation for being crazy can make successful threats that would be incredible coming from a saner and cooler person. In this way, apparent irrationality can become good strategic rationality. One can even cultivate such a reputation. A seeming madman, therefore, may be a superior strategist, because his threats are more readily believed. Could Colonel Ghadafi and Ayatollah have understood this principle better than the cool, rational leaders of Western nations trying to deal with them? We do not know, but we are willing to bet that your child who is too irrational to be deterred by your threats of punishment is a better instinctive game-player than you are. When forming boundaries, consider first how internal activation can form patterns such as the patches and stripes of animal hides. Examining this very simple case will reveal a striking general principle. How do pigmen end up concentrated in one area of skin and absent nearby? What controls the size of the patches to that a Holstein cow looks so different from a Dalmatian dog? And why does neither form stripes like a zebra? There is a long history of work on how these patterns are created. An overarching insight extracted by researchers goes under the acronym LALI, for “local activation, long-range inhibition.” In the vast majority of cases of patterns on animals hides, a pigment (or other pattern substance) that has been deposited in an area makes it more likely that another, similar deposit will occur nearby, and less likely that a similar deposit will occur farther away. The details of how these two influences spread can account for the sizes and shapes of patches, but the basic principle holds across many different patterns. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

The combined effect of local activation and long-range inhibition is especially powerful. Nearby areas will have many pigment deposits and, in consequence, areas farther away will have strong pressures to be clear. Together these two pressures lead to the formation of shar boundaries for the patches. The principle is not confined to the skins of animals. After all, they are just one kind of space. Local activation together with long-range inhibition will work to establish patchy ethic neighbourhoods in residential areas of cities, or splinter groups on a political left wing, as well as spots on Dalmatians’ backs. It is plausible to suppose that members of an ethnic group may like to live near others with similar cultural backgrounds. So a local cluster of ethnically similar individuals will be attractive, leading to more individuals moving in nearby, which will enlarge the cluster. This corresponds to local activation. It is also easy to suppose that neighbouring areas may become resistant as they perceive the rapid growth of a group whose culture they do not share. If the neighbouring area makes it harder for members of the ethnic group to move in, this will act like long-range inhabitation. The result will be the kind of sharp boundaries of ethnic neighbourhoods that are so striking in cities like New York and Midtown Sacramento. The story can be told again, with the underling space being neither a skin nor a city but a political spectrum with concentrations of ideologically like-minded individuals who attract those who share their views and oppose the “heresies” of those who do not. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

Again, skin provides easy examples and may be a natural place to start in practice when it comes to rebuilding tissues. People often want hair where they have bar skin, and bare skin where they have hair. Cell-herding machines could move or destroy hair-follicles cells to eliminated an unwanted hair, or grow more of the needed cells and arrange them into a working follicle where hair is desired. By adjusting the size of the follicle and the properties of some of the cells, hairs could be made coarser, or finer, or straighter, or curlier. All these changes would involve no pain, toxic chemicals, or stench. Cell-herding devices could move down into the living layers of skin, removing unwanted cells, stimulating the growth of new cells, narrowing unnaturally prominent blood vessels, insuring good circulation by guiding the growth of any needed normal blood vessels, and moving cells and fibers around so as to eliminate even deep wrinkles. At the opposite end of the spectrum, cell herding will revolutionize treatment of life-threatening conditions. For example, the most common cause of heart disease is a reduced or interrupted supply of blood to the heart muscle. In pumping oxygenated blood to the rest of the body, the heart diverts a portion for its own use through the coronary arteries. When these blood vessels become constricted, we speak of coronary-artery disease. When they are blocked, causing heart muscle tissue to die, we speak of someone “having a coronary,” another term for heart attack. Devices working in the bloodstream could nibble away at atherosclerotic deposits, widening the affected blood vessels. Cell-herding devices could restore artery walls and artery linings to health, by ensuring that the right cells and supporting structures are in the right places. This would prevent most heart attacks. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

However, what is a heart attack has already destroyed muscle tissues, leaving the patient with scarred, damaged, and poorly functioning heart? Once again, cell-herding devices could accomplish repairs, working their way into the scar tissues and removing it bit by bit, replacing it with fresh muscle fiber. If need be, this new fiber can be grown by applying a series of internal molecular stimuli to selected heart muscle cells to “remind” them of the instructions for growth that they used decades earlier during embryonic development. Cell-herding capabilities should also be able to deal with the various forms of arthritis. Where this is due to attacks from the body’s own immune system, the cells producing the damaging antibodies can be identified and eliminated. Then a cell-herding system would work inside the joint where it would remove diseased tissues, calcified spurs, and so forth, then rework patterns of cells and intercellular material to form a healthy, smoothly working, and pain-free joint. Clearly, learning to repair hearts and learning to repair joints will have some basic technologies in common, but much of the research and development will have to be devoted to specific tissues and specific circumstances. A similar process—but again, specially adapted to the circumstances at hand—could be used to strengthen and reshape bone, correcting osteoporosis. In dentistry, this shot of process could be used to fill cavities, not with amalgam, but with natural dentin and enamel. Reversing the ravages of periodontal disease will be someday be straightforward, with nanomedical devices to clean pockets, join tissues, and guide regrowth. Even missing teeth could be regrown, with enough control over cell behaviour. In any system, democratic or not, there needs to be some congruence between the way a people make wealth and the way they govern themselves. If the political and economic systems are wildly dissimilar, one will eventually destroy the other. Only twice before in history have we humans invented a wholly novel way of creating wealth. Each time we invented new forms of government to do with it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

The spread of agriculture wiped out tribal groupings, hunting bands, and other social and political arrangements, replacing them with city-states, dynastic kingdoms, and feudal empires. The industrial revolution, in turn, wiped out many of these. With mass production, mass consumption, and mass media there arose in many countries a counterpart system: “mass democracy.” Mass democracy, however, met bitter resistance. The old forces of feudal agrarianism—the landed gentry, the hierarchical church, and their intellectual and cultural apologists—resisted, co-opted, and battled the rising industrialism and the mass democracy it often brought with it. Indeed, in all smokestack societies the central political struggle has not been, as many imagine, between left and right. It has been between admirers of First Wave agrarianism and “traditionalism” on the one side and the forces of Second Wave industrialism or “modernism” on the other. Such power struggles are frequently fought under other banners—nationalism, for example, or religion, or civil rights. They run through family life, gender relations, schools, the professions, the arts, as well as politics. Today that historic conflict, still raging, is being overshadowed by a new one—the struggle of a Third Wave, postmodern civilization against both modernism and traditionalism. And if it is true that a new knowledge-based economy is superseding smokestack production, then we should expect a historic struggle to remake our political institutions, bringing them into congruence with the revolutionary post-mass-production economy. All the industrial societies already face convergent crises—crises in all their most basic systems: urban systems, health systems, welfare systems, transport systems, ecological systems. Smokestack politicians continue to respond to these crises one at a time, with variations of old approaches. However, they may be insoluble given existing institutions, designed for the mass society. In addition, the rising economy hurls totally new problems and crises at us that shatter the conventional assumptions and alliances of the mass democratic era. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

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There are So Many Degrees of Consciousness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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