The soul needs an intense, full-bodied spiritual life as much in the same way the body requires food. Each person defines beauty, spiritual life, love, pleasure, pain and all the other experiences in a way that makes sense for them. Human beings are tremendously influenced by many things in the cultural experiences. The restrictions against exposed mutual-involvements can sometimes be seen not as a restriction against involvement that withdraws the participants from gathering. Indeed, the individual may at times be obliged to open oneself up for mutual-involvements, as implied in the rule of accessibility. However, one must do this not merely on the grounds of prior relationship but on the basis of the present occasion. (Here we catch another glimmer of the trouble caused by newlyweds or those deeply engaged in courting, who, unlike persons whose relationship is more settled and seasoned, find it awkward to give up their mutual-involvement for the kind of courtesy involvement with a sequence of others that the social occasion often requires.) Thus we find a special kind of exemplary situational conduct when two persons with a long-standing, exclusive relationship manage to treat each other at a sociable gathering with courtesies owed on the basis simply of participation in the occasion; two bitter enemies show a similar regard for the occasion by being “civil.” The same type of courtesy is exhibited by a teacher who addresses her child in class as though he or she were just another student, this being describable not merely as role segregation but also as a gesture of regard for the occasion. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Interestingly enough, in the natural history of some social parties, certain forms of fleeting play involving pleasures of the flesh may be a sign that the spirit of the occasion has lifted everyone up with it, not that the party has collapsed into separate pieces. Indeed, should the interactions involving pleasures of the flesh occur between persons brought together only at and for the occasion, it may be a sign of the high degree to which participants have given themselves over to the gathering. The extreme of this, in fact—for example, the kind of interaction involving pleasures of the flesh said to occur at the annual Beaux Arts ball in Paris—can represent not a collapse of duties in regard to the situation, as might at first seem the case, but rather some kind of profane worship of them. Were husbands to engage their wives in this manner, the obligations to the occasion would indeed be threatened. In noting the rule obliging individuals to sustain an occasioned mutual-involvement, we have perhaps a better means of accounting for our response to improper involvements than for predicting actual conduct, for these situational niceties are often ill-sustained. Resistance to the spirit of an occasion, as expressed in a refusal to sustain occasioned mutual-involvements, is apparently so useful a device for conveying so many things that someone in a gathering can usually be counted on to employ it. At public dances in the chief city of Utah, for example, one could usually find a slightly resented handful of couples, solidly middle-class in social status, who withheld themselves from the plebeian pleasures sustained by second-generation crofters. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This alienation was expressed by dancing in half-time to the vigorous music and sustaining quiet engrossing talk while doing so, conduct that was obtrusively out of mood with the prevailing ethos. We see, then, that there will be ties when the success of a social occasion such as a party is expressed through the success of a social occasion such as a party is expressed through the success of the participants in finding congenial encounters in which to engross themselves. This engrossment provides proof that each person present is a desirable companion, and that each finds the social occasion significant enough to provide one with grounds for opening oneself up to others. Given these assumptions, we can understand that a person caught for too long between encounters—caught “unengaged”—may cause anxiety to oneself and the hostess, and that the latter may try to anchor one in a convenient port, which particular port being of only secondary significance. And we can also understand why an individual may feel that what one owe the gathering at large can at times override what one owes oneself and one’s fellows in an encounter, providing us with additional evidence that the individual’s engagement in a focused interaction is a fact available to all others in the situation, and hence a part of the unfocused interaction in the situation. Here we have the situational reason for one type of tact, namely, giving the appearance of being spontaneously involved in some occasioned encounter when in fact one is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Even if you are placed next to some one with whom you have had a bitter quarrel, consideration for your hostess, who would be distressed if she knew you have been put in a disagreeable places, and further consideration for the rest of the table which is otherwise “blocked,” exacts that you give no outward sign of your repugnance and that you make a pretense, at least for a little while, of talking together. At dinner once, Mrs. Winchester, finding herself next to a man she quite openly despised, said to him with apparent placidity, “I shall not talk to you—because I do not care to. But for the sake of my hostess I shall say my multiplication table. Twice one are two, twice two are four—” and she continued on through the tables, making him alternate them with her. As soon as she politely could she turned again to her other companion. Another instance of the obligation to sustain an occasioned involvement with others may be cited from Utah. At a “progressive” whist of twenty tables during a social, the deep engrossment of a member of the gentry in his particular table of whist was likely to be taken as a sign of how thoroughly he was participating in the social occasion. By getting caught up in the spirit of one of the tables, he showed regard for the room as a whole. Had he disdained to invest himself thus, and insisted on wandering from one table to another, making gracious comment to players at all the tables in turn, he might well have tendered the common folk—the crofters—less of a compliment. (And yet if an ordinary crofter became so much involved in a particular hand of whist as to delay appreciably the finishing time for his table, this disregard for the necessity of shifting tables at the end of each game was likely to be considered an affront to the whole social occasion.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

If social occasions can be assessed according to their capacity to bring all participants into one occasioned encounter or another, then we can expect that rules will be found obliging those within any encounter to admit entrants. (This corresponds to the previously discussed obligation of the individual to make oneself accessible, the difference being that while an individual may be inaccessible to others because of organic capacity, this excuse is hardly available to encounters.) There are many occasions, as on public streets, where those in an encounter need acknowledge few rights of other to enter. One the other hand, as already suggested, it I characteristic of occasions such as social parties that participants have a right not only to initiate face engagements but also to enter ones that are already in progress. Here participants, in order to demonstrate how thoroughly they have been lifted up and brought together by the party, may feel obliged to admit newcomers to their conversation easily. “Open” topics of conversation may thus be maintained in preparation for newcomers. A conversation that by its tone forbade the entrance of new members would be improper. Consequently, we can understand the strategy sometimes employed by those who would converse about intensely involving private matter in a public place: instead of huddling together in a furtive conspiratorial way, they affect a style of matter-of-fact openness. [Somebody spoke about a useless personality which she enjoyed although she knew that it was useless.] In such a case you can struggle with this personality by strengthening other personalities opposed to it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Suppose you have a certain definite feature you want to struggle with, and try to find some other feature incompatible with it and which may be useful. If in your present equipment you find nothing sufficiently strong to put against it, look in your memory. Suppose you find some feature that is incompatible with the one you want to get rid of, and that can be useful, then just replace one by the other. However, it may happen that even then they can both live happily together. One may present in the evening, the other in the morning, and they may never meet. There is only one real danger. If, for a long time, one goes on without making sufficient efforts or without doing anything seriously, then, instead of becoming one, one becomes divided into two so that all features and personalities are divided into two group—one part useful to the work and helping personal work, and another part either indifferent or even unfriendly. This is a real danger because if two parts begin to form like this, the indifference of one spoils the result of the work of the other. So it is necessary to struggle very quickly and very strongly against that, otherwise it may lead to double crystallization. “What do you mean by crystallizing?” We use the word in a particular sense. Any feature may become crystallized just as buffers crystallize. This term came from the theosophical terminology; it is sometimes a useful term. I think everybody here has heard about higher bodies, the astral, mental and causal. The idea is that man has only one physical body, and development consists in the development of higher bodies. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

So man no. 5 corresponds to the crystallization of the astral body, man no. 6 to the crystallization of the mental body, and man no. 7 to the crystallization of the causal body. However, speaking of the crystallization of features, one person may have very good and very beautiful features and yet behind them he may have one small feature of false personality which makes work very difficult for him, more difficult perhaps than it is for somebody else who has not got such brilliant features. False personality may pretend to take an interest in the work, may take things for itself and call some negative and mechanical action “self-remembering” or something of that sort. However, it cannot do any useful work; it can only spoil the work of personalities which can do some work and get some results. The system in the light of false personality is quite a different system; it becomes something that strengthens false personality and weakens the real system for you. The moment false personality takes the system to itself, it adds one word here and another word there. You cannot imagine how extraordinary some of these ideas are when they are repeated back to me. One word omitted from some formulation makes quite a different idea; and false personality is fully justified and can do what it likes and so on. The problems of inferring proper lessons (attributing credit) based on limited experience occur in almost every sphere of human activity. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Because military organizations only rarely obtain feedback from actual combat, their circumstances make adaptation especially difficult. Since credit attribution has long been so problematic in warfare, military organization have a rich history of refining various forms of simulation, including many forms of gaming and field exercises. The techniques used by the military to cope with the problems of credit attribution when feedback is scarce are therefore particularly illuminating. For these organizations the problem of determining what works well is especially vexing. Large-scale fighting is infrequent—and much work goes into keeping this true. That means that opportunities to try new weapon systems or tactical concepts, or to test officer capabilities, come rarely. Learning only from real combat experience is an unacceptably slow strategy for improvement. This is a price society happily pays for peace, but it leaves military organizations facing a difficult learning problem. Where a firm might have several different versions of a consumer product tested in the field within a few months, a military organization might not accumulate the equivalent amount of useful experience in several decades. For n extreme example, there has never been any full combat experience for our intercontinental ballistic missile hardware, operational concepts, and crews. (This field is the only branch of science where success is achieved by never having any data.) A large portion of what military organizations learn about new technology and operational concepts must come from various forms of experience. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

This experience may be war games, field exercise, small-scale engagements, mental experiments, computer models, or even imaginative reconstructions of military history. The Information Revolution is providing computer tools that dramatically expand simulation possibilities. The United States of America military now routinely employs simulated aircraft, tanks, ships, and soldiers in its investigations of combat possibilities. Mobilizations of large forces for field exercises incur substantial resource costs, and even without live ammunition, there are inevitable injuries and deaths from the risky movements of personnel and heavy equipment. Such exercises cannot be repeated many times in minor variation of multiple factors may reveal large consequences. The value of these new possibilities is also becoming evident in the business World. Although useful experience is not as scarce as in the military case, there are many situations in which exploratory trials with the real system are not possible, Major reorganizations or changes of corporate strategy are like this. They often have huge costs, and if they do not work, they risk the bankruptcy of the entire firm. In response to this need, simulation tools for business decision making are beginning to appear. Firms are arising that specialize in building such simulation models. Some are spin-offs of computer gaming companies, while others have arisen from consulting practices. There are limitations, of course. One shortcoming is that simulations often place sharp and arbitrary limits on improvisation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

While it is an extremely important source of military and business innovation, improvisation is generally not realistically supported in computer simulations, which often insist that the “players” obey rules and constraint that in real activities they might decide to violate. Although they may fall short of realism in significant ways, computer simulations provide the kind of rapidly assessed measure of success we have discussed previously. They generate only surrogate experience, but they can improve learning in an experience-poor domain if they are used wisely, with clear attention to their limitations. So far, our applications of randomized strategies have focused exclusively on games in which the players’ interests are strictly opposed. Somewhat more surprising is the possibility of finding an equilibrium with random behaviour even when the players have common interests. In this case, mixing one’s plays leads to an inferior outcome for all parties. However, just because the outcome is inferior does not mean the strategies are not an equilibrium: equilibrium is a description not a prescription. The reason for mixing one’s moves arises from a failure of coordination. This problem only arises when there is not a unique equilibrium. For example, two people disconnected during a phone call do not always know who should call back. Without the ability to communicate, the players do not know which equilibrium to expect. In a loose sense, the equilibrium with randomization is a way of playing a compromise between the coordinated equilibra. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Sarah and William are the sort of couple you read about in fiction, O. Henry’s The Gift of the Magi, to be precise. “Nobody could ever count” their love for each other, and each was willing, even eager, to make any sacrifice to get a really worthy Christmas gift for the other. Sarah would sell her hair to get Willian a chain for his heirloom watch, and William would sell the watch to buy a comb for Sarah’s beautiful hair. If they know each other well enough, they should both reorganize the possibility that each will sell his or her one treasure to buy the other a gift, and the result will be a tragic mistake. Sarah should pause and consider whether it would be better to keep her hair and await William’s gift. Likewise, William should consider not selling his watch. Of course, if they both refrain, neither gives a gift, which would be a different mistake. The couple’s strategies interact even though their interests largely coincide. For each, both kinds of mistake would be a bad outcome. For concreteness, we give this a point of score of zero. As between the two outcomes in which one gives a gift and the other receives it, suppose each thinks it better to give (2 points) than to receive (1 point). The situation in which Sarah keeps her hair and William sells his watch is  possible equilibrium; each spouses strategy is the best response to the other’s. However, the situation in which Sarah sells her hair and William keeps his watch is also an equilibrium. Is there a mutually understood convention to select one equilibrium over the other? Surprise is an important aspect of a gift; therefore they cannot communicate in advance to establish a convention. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Mixing can help preserve the surprise, although at a cost. It is easy to check that the strategies in which each chooses to give with probability 2/3 and receive with probability 1/3 also constitute an equilibrium. Supposed Sarah uses such a mixture. If William sells his watch, there is a 1/3 chance that Sarah has kept her hair (2 points) and a 2/3 chance that she has sold it (0 point). The average outcome is 2/3 point. A similar calculation shows that if William keeps his watch, the average outcome is again 2/3 point. So William has no clear reason to choose one strategy rather than another, or indeed any mix. Once again, note that the function of Sarah’s best mix is to keep William willing to mix, and vice versa. The probabilities of mistakes are quite large: 4 times in 9 the couple finds that each has sold the item for which the other has bought the gift (an in the O. Henry story), and 1 time in 9 neither gets any gift. Because of these mistakes, the average score (2/3 point for each) is worse than that of either of the two equilibra in which one gives and the other receives (2 points for the giver and 1 for the receiver). This is unlike the tennis example from the past, in which each could actually raise one’s success rate by mixing. Why the difference? Tennis is a zero-sum game, in which the players’ interests are strictly opposed. They do better when they choose the mixing probabilities independently. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

In our account of The Gift of the Magi, the couple’s interest are largely aligned. They need, therefore, to coordinate their mixing. They should toss one coin, and depending on the outcome decide who gives and who receives. The couple has a slight conflict of interest; William prefers the top left outcome, and Sarah the bottom right. Coordinated mixing can offer them a compromise, splitting the difference. When a common coin toss decides who gives and who receives, the average outcome for each becomes 1.5 points. Of course the element of surprise is lost. Major shift in demographics always cause disruptions. Even when we know they are coming, we never prepare for them. Our plans are based on expectations of what will happen. If things do not go as expected, we find that we have “malinvested.” Huston real estate was valuable and looked to become even more so when times were good for the oil business there; when the fortunes of the oil business changed, Houston real estate was found to have been overbuilt, overpriced, and many millions of dollars were lost. Lengthening life spans push people toward taking a longer-term perspective, but rapid rates of change force a shorter-term perspective in investments. Turbulence in technology and in governmental monetary policy have already shortened time horizons. Businesspeople once routinely built plants with a thirty-year useful life. Today, the rate of change is so fast, and uncertainty regarding inflation and potential changes in tax laws is too great for such investments to make sense. Faster change will shrink time horizons further. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Governments have taken on themselves the burden of looking a lifetime ahead, and the Social Security Administration is in for some rough times. When Otto von Bismarck, Germany’s Iron Chancellor, came up with the notion of a guaranteed old-age pension, it was a cynically clever and low-cost way to gain popular goodwill. So few people lived to age sixty-five that the amounts paid out in pension were a pittance. After watching the German experiment for a handful of years, other governments began following suit. None of them expected a World likes ours where a baby girl born in the United States of America today has an average life expectancy of 82 years—more than double that of Bismarck’s time—and even this estimate is based on the faulty assumption that her medical care will be no better than her great-grandmother’s was. At present, the Social Security Administration has two models: one they call “positive” and one they call “negative.” In the “positive” model, people work like slaves until old age, retire, and promptly die—presumably before they have had a chance to collect substantial social-security or medical benefits. In the “negative” model, people retire early, develop illnesses that require medical intervention, and then live a long time making doctor visits and hospital stays during those years. Plans based on these models deserve to be disturbed. A better, more realistic scenario would have people living and able to support themselves for a long time, with illnesses that can be handled easily and inexpensively. Present social-security are enough to provide a certain standard of living—food, housing, transportation, and so forth. In a future of great material wealth, these benefits will be easy to provide, and present projections of economic woe resulting from an aging population seem quaint. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

A rapidly accumulating international literature tells lurid stories about computer crime—about bank swindles, espionage, viruses sent from one computer to destroy the contents of others. Movies like WarGames have dramatized the dangers from unauthorized entry to the computer and communication systems that control nuclear weapons. According to a published report in France, the Mafia has kidnapped an IBM executive and cut off his finger because it needed his fingerprint to breach a computer security system. The U.S.A. Department of Justice has defined a dozen different methods used in computer-based criminal activity. They range from switching or altering data as they enter the computer, to putting self-concealing instructions into the software, to tapping the computers. Widely publicized cases of “computer viruses” have illustrated the potential for sabotage of military and political communications and computation. However, relatively little thought has been given so far to the ways in which similar techniques might alter political life. One day in 1986, Jennifer Kuiper, a staff aide of Congressman Ed Zschau, saw her computer screen go blank. When she got her machine up and running again, two hundred letters had disappeared. Four days later hundreds of letters and addresses disappeared from the computer of Congressman John McCain. Capitol Hill police, claiming to have eliminated the likelihood of staff error, launched criminal investigations. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

According to Zschau, himself, the founder of a computer software firm before entering politics, “Every office on Capitol Hill can be broken into in this way…It can bring the work that a member of Congress does to a complete halt.” With 250,000 word processors being used in the offices of American lawyers, it becomes feasible for a lawyer’s unscrupulous opposing counsel to glean compromising information by illegal access to his or her computer—and that this can be accomplished with inexpensive electronic equipment purchasable in the corner of Radio Shack. Politicians and officials, however, may be even more vulnerable. Thousands of computers, many of them linked in networks, are now found in congressional offices, the homes of elected officials and lobbyists, as well as on the desk tops of hundreds of thousands of civil servants who regulate everything from soybean quotas to air travel safety standards. Unauthorized and secret entry could cause endless troubles and shift power in unexpected ways. Computers also increasingly populate election campaign headquarters. Thus new, virtually undetectable games can be played in the ballot box itself. As you know, voter fraud is real. For example, an Iowa woman was arrested 12 January 2023, in Sioux City for her role in an alleged voter fraud scheme during the Iowa 2020 primary and general elections. Kim Phuong Taylor, 49, of Sioux City allegedly perpetrated a scheme to generate votes in the primary election in June 2020, when her husband was an unsuccessful candidate for Iowa’s 4^th U.S.A. Congressional District, and subsequently in 2020 general election, when her husband was a successful candidate for Woodbury County Supervisor. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Taylor allegedly submitted or caused others to submit dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot request forms, and absentee ballot containing false information. For instance, although these documents required the singer to affirm that he or she was the person named in them, Taylor singed them for voter without their permission and told other that they could sign on behalf of relatives who were not present. Taylor is charged by indictment with 26 counts of providing false information in registering and voting, three counts of fraudulent registration, and 23 count of fraudulent voting. If convicted, she faces a maximum penalty of five years in prison for each count. Secure elections are the cornerstone of a thriving republic. A key priority for any Attorney General is to investigate and prosecute the increasing allegations of voter fraud to ensure election integrity within the United States of America. In Texas, since 2005, the office of the Attorney General successfully prosecuted election fraud offense against 155 individuals, out of 534 cases suspected. The number of pending offenses against 43 defendants is 510, and currently pending prosecution. There 386 case of active election fraud investigations in Texas. Voter fraud is a reason so many people are demanding Voter ID laws are employed and enforced. However, the objection is that millions of Americans lack ID. In fact, 11 percent of U.S.A. citizens—or more than 21 million Americans—do not have government-issued photo identification. The enforcement of voter ID laws is considered to be discriminatory because obtaining an ID costs money. Even if ID is offered for free, voters must incur numerous costs (such a paying for birth certificates) to apply for a government-issued ID. The combined cost is estimated to range from $75 to $175. However, not requiring voter ID is consider a national security threat. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Life is often a struggle. The characteristics of humanistic psychology are directly related to our view of human nature. Man’s own best interests, viewed in the light of a full understanding of his nature, are the criteria for the study and application of humanistic psychology. The first thing that interests us in understanding the essential self is what makes us go. By testing and trying himself out with all the limits of the human condition, man comes to some understanding of what he can and cannot do. This enables him to arrive at some acquired pattens of thought, attitude, and action, giving him a sense of safety or security. He has learned how to stand, what falling feels like, what staying up feels like, and, in the healthy child, a preference for the feeling of staying him. Far from being forced to grow up, the child who is growing in healthy terms, who has “made it” in the sense of acquiring a homeostatic balance of needs and tension-reductions, literally jumps at the chance to move up to the next stage. Those who were kept at a level of satisfaction and need-reduction become bored, fatigued, resentful. It is part of the biological nature of the person to seek continuing growth. Homeostasis moves up, then, from the biological drive to a learned need at each level, following a pattern: discover a need, motive or deficit, find a goal or incentive that will meet the need, and enjoy the satisfying tension-reduction for a period of time. Then it is time to move on to another field, for a different “ball game,” of the same kinds of processes. There is a level of care a one is obligated to exert for an accessible encounter past civil inattention to the question of how an when one can present oneself for official participation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Even at social parties, where every encounter is supposed to be conducted in a fashion that makes it joinable by any guest, the entrant is expected to exert tact, and when cues suggest, not exercise one’s rights. When one does enter, one is expected to accept the current topic and tone, thus minimizing the disruption one causes. If a lady and gentleman are conversing together at an evening party, it would be a rudeness in another person to go up and interrupt them by introducing a new topic of observation. If you are sure that there is nothing of a particular and private interest passing between them you may join their conversation and strike into the current of their remarks; yet if you then find that they are so much engaged and entertained by the discussion that they were holding together, as to render the termination or change of its character unwelcome, you should withdraw. If, however, two persons are occupied with one another upon what you guess to be terms peculiarly delicate and particular, you should without yourself from their company. Welcome or not, the entrant today is usually expected to knock at the door of the encounter before one enters, thus giving the encounter advance warning of one’s intention and the participants a moment to straighten their house for the newcomer. One of the most interesting forms of cooperation in the maintenance of conventional closure is what might be called spacing. The term “individual distance” was introduced to describe the tendency of birds on a fence or railing to stay a particular distance from each other, the distance apparently varies with the species. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

The term “flight distance” refers to the closeness with which an individual of a given species can be approached before taking flight. However, one should give caution against cross-cultural generalization. In the U.S.A., we distribute ourselves more evenly than many other people. We have strong feelings about touching and being crowded; in a streetcar, bus, or elevator we draw ourselves in. Toward  person who relaxes and lets oneself come into full contact with others in a crowded place we usually feel reactions that could not be printed on this page. It takes years for us to train our children not to crowd in on us, and allow of to have some room to breathe. In Latin America, where touching is more common and the basic units of space seem to be smaller, the wide automobiles make in the U.S.A. pose problems. People do not even know where to sit. In America, the tendency for units of participation in the situation—either face engagements or unengaged individuals—to distribute themselves cooperatively in the available space so as physically to facilitate conventional closure. (Often this seems to involve a maximization of the sum of squares of the physical distance among the various units. Spacing will of course ensure that “talk lines” are open, that is, that persons addressing one another in an encounter will have no physical obstruction to block the free exchange of glances. A bystander finding oneself interposed in such a line (in America society, at least) is likely to offer an apology and quickly shift one’s position. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

While the phenomenon of spacing may be difficult to see because one takes it for granted, a tracing of it in reverse can be obtained by observing children and mental patients—those communication delinquents who sometimes play the game of “attack encounter.” On many wards, for example, a patient will follow a pair of talkers around the room until they have stopped moving, and then sidle right up to the edge of the encounter and lean into it. One adolescent patient I studied would intercept talk lines between two persons by waving her knitting needles in the way, or by swinging her upraised arms, or by thrusting her face into the face of one of the participants, or by sitting in his lap. Along with physical spacing, we also find control of sound so that the various units in the situation can proceed with their business at hand without being jammed out of operation. In many cases this will mean restriction on the volume of sound, although, at rare occasions like social parties, where persons may be crowded close to others not in the same encounter, a general raising of voices may be found; this allows coparticipants to hear each other, but jams the opportunities of eavesdroppers. Here, too, accurately designed delicts can be observed, as when an adolescent mental patient, in a spirit of fun, places her face up against the face of someone engaged in talk with another at a distance, and then shouts so that one can neither hear nor be heard. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

The requirement that visually open talk lines be maintained, and that sound levels not interfere with neighbouring encounters, sets a limit to the distance over which spoken encounters can ordinarily be sustained. For example, should two persons carry on a conversation from one end of a crowded streetcar to the other, all the intervening passengers would have to remain out of the line of talk and modulate their own conversation so as not to jam the one being maintained over a distance. Such a conversation would necessarily also be fully available to everyone between the two speakers, and would therefore be likely to constitute an embarrassment, even were one of the speakers the conductor. Thus, engagements that must be carried on over such a populated distance are likely to be limited to the exchange of silent gestures, for these neither interfere with other encounters nor expose what is being conveyed. As might be expected, therefore, deaf and dumb persons who board a streetcar together and find themselves seated apart need not discontinue their exchange of messages, but are able to carry on conversation as long as sight lines are clear, their “talk” neither jamming the other talkers nor being accessible to them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

While physical spacing and sound control certainly have relevance to occasions such as social parties that are carried on within a relatively small physical region, they are perhaps even more important in public streets and roads and in semipublic regions. In Western society, the development of middle-class dominance is expressed in the rise of a relatively equalitarian use of public places. Even today, however, funerals, weddings, parades, and some other ceremonials are allowed to press their spirit momentarily upon the public at large. Technical units, such as ambulances, police cars, and fire engines cut through public traffic; and guests of a city may be given a motor escort. Some of these prerogatives, however, are but small remnants of practices that were once more general, such as the entourage and train associated with “clientage,” which led a worthy to demonstrate one’s status by the cluster of dependent supporters that accompanied one through a town or a house of parliament, shouldering one’s way for one wherever one went. Nor are these rules uniform within Westerns society, as is suggested by the response of King Edward (of Britain) and his party during a 1906 visit to the Emperor of Germany: The Emperor had a standard attached to his motor and a trumpeter on the box who blew long bugle-calls at every corner. The inhabitants thus had no difficulty in making out where the Emperor was, and all the traffic cleared out of the way when they heard the trumpets blow. The King, however, detested what he called “theatrical methods” and drove about like anybody else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

There can sometimes be a kind of restructuring that can occur when a situation is transformed from one containing many encounters—a multifocused situation—to one that is exhausted by a single all-encompassing engagement. For example, at noontime on award of Central Hospital, when the attendant shouts, “Chow time!” he is addressing the whole place, and wherever the sound level of his voice reaches, the meanings of his words are meant to carry too. Similarly, at a small social party, the arrival of a couple may cause the hostess to interrupt the separateness of all the separate encounters in order to introduce the newcomers to the assembly. So also, at formal dinners, the moment the hostess indicates that the conversation will be “general,” she opens up whatever is being said to all the guests. And, of course, whenever public speeches are given, the speaker’s words, as well as the heat with which one speaks them, are meant to impinge on the situation at large. In all such cases, there is the understanding that the situation at large. In all such cases, there is the content of the words of an appropriate single speaker; one has, as we say, the floor. The transformation of a multifocused situation into one that is exhausted by one face engagement is an interesting process to consider. At social parties we can observe a singer or guitar player make an effort to incorporate more and more of the room’s population into one’s audience, until a point is reached where one’s singing officially exhausts the chamber, and the party is momentarily transformed into a performance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

At the same time, as a particular encounter comes to include a larger and larger number of persons, side involvements increasingly occur in which a subordinate byplay is sustained, sometimes furtively, its volume and character modulated to allow the main show to prevail unchallenged as the dominating one. In mental hospitals there is a special kind of “symptomatic” behaviour that takes recognition of how the situation as a whole can be “talked to.” Many patients talk to someone, present or not, in a voice loud enough for everyone in the situation to hear and be somewhat distracted. However, those on the ward implicitly distinguish this kind of impropriety from that which occurs when a patient “addresses the situation,” haranguing everyone present in a tone and direction of voice that suggest one is purposely breaching the barriers designed to render clusters of talkers and game players safe in their own focused interactions. (Interestingly, although the actual volumes of sound may be greater in the case of a patient insufficiently modulating one’s contribution to a private conversation than in the case of a patient “addressing the situation,” it is the latter that is likely to cause the greater disturbance.) Attacks on the situation should be compared with the attacks on encounters, previously mentioned, which children, mental patients, and other communication delinquents perform. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

Many middle-class parents in our society have experienced times when their children, forbidden to interrupt or even to enter a room where adults are talking, stealthily stalks the situation in self-conscious mimicry of stealthiness and stalking, resulting in much more disturbance to the gathering than one’s mere presence might entail. When it comes to constructive criticism, it is best to make a fault seem easy to correct. First off, do not start by discouraging an individual. Be honest, and see the potential they have and use those optimistic characteristics to guide them in the right direction. This will prevent an individual from feeling like a failure and give them the hope that they too can become the highest, the most exalted one. Tell your parents, child, spouse, or employer that one is stupid or dumb at a certain thing, has no gift for it, and is doing it all wrong, and you will have destroyed almost every incentive for improvement. However, when being liberal with your encouragement, making the things seem easy to do, letting the other person know that you have faith in one’s ability to do it, that one has an undeveloped flair for it—and one will practice until they are the brightest planet in the sky. Give confidence, inspire others, help one find the courage and strength that they have been endowed with. For instance, there is nothing to preparing for an exam except memory and judgement. Also, if you are going to be a successful student, you have to learn to read, and you have to actually read and gain a great understanding of the English language. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

Going to college is great, but one will not succeed unless you start reading in high school. Reading is so important. So much of education can only be mastered by reading the material. If you are not going to read your books, and be prepared for lectures, there is no point in going to school. Many young minds are bright, but they are undisciplined. And, I know you may think TV is the most important thing, but those shows will all be there later. You can even binge watch them over Summer vacation. Take the time to study and get your homework done with a military like focus. Find a quiet room, and get busy. You are a potential genius. Sometimes school systems see surgical scars on students and incorrectly assume that they are injured and cannot function at a normal level. Even if you are a few years being in your age group, find a peer who is willing to help bring you up to speed. Every time you study, you are expanding you mind. You will notice the more you do it, the more understanding of the subject you gain, and eventually it will take you less time to absorb the muscle. It is a lot like cars. They start off cold, but gradually warm up. You can never get into a car, smash on the gas and go at top speed, it will ruin the engine. However, taking breaks it also important. If you are on a long haul in your vehicle, do not just suddenly smash on the gas, that can also mess up the engine. And just like a car, you do not want to overload your brain and burn out. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

Naturally, the more you study, the more your grades will increase. No one is stupid. You notice that as early as four weeks old that many babies have the ability to form short sentences, and some even start walking at 7 months old. That is because they are smart. However, some need more practice and education to achieve these milestones, but they all get there. Also, as you learn the enrichment curriculum, you will notice that your other natural talents will develop and others will start to notice them. You can really learn and accomplish things. Do not let income/inequality be an excuse as to why you cannot succeed. I have seen poor kids grow up and become richer than students who had the World handed to them. Most cities have a public library where you can go and read books of interest. Social media is not as important as you think. So many people want to become famous for doing things that may not be in their best interest, but you can use your brain and become an auto science engineer or a tennis player. Maybe one day you will be elected in the national honour society. Once you find learning is easy, you whole life will change. Also, sometimes you make need to read a chapter in a book twice. Once to get a feel for the subject, and a second time to grasp the concepts being discussed. Eventually, reading will become easier and you will be able to read a chapter once. Also, to become an excellent writer, you need to read. Communication is so very important in any field of work you will go into. Just remember, faults are easy to correct. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

Some people wonder whether one can do anything by oneself or whether it must be done with the help of others. Testify as to why you are superior and demonstrate it through your actions. When one tells people what should be done, they usually begin to argue, and not only argue but they become negative. That is really why help cannot be given, and why it is necessary to make rule and definite demands. If all that where needed were just to show people what to do, that would be simple, but it is not always easy to explain the chief features of false personality. Sometimes it is seen clearly, at other times it is more hidden and difficult to see, and then it is only possible to think in a general way of false personality. However, there is not a single case where I showed chief feature when people did not start violent arguing. At one meeting somebody said that he was occasionally able to observe oneself in the act of considering or becoming identified. He asked whether in this way he might come to know his false personality, and by observing it to weaken it. Actually, this is the only way and is very good so long as one does not tire of tying to do it. In the beginning, many people start very eagerly but soon get tired and begin to use the word “I” indiscriminately, without asking themselves which “I,” because we have no right to use it really in ordinary conditions. Much later, after long work, we can begin to think of one of the groups of “I”s (like what has been called Deputy Steward) which develop from magnetic center as “I.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

However, in ordinary conditions when you hear yourself saying “I do not like,” you must ask yourself which of your “I”s does not like. In this way you will remind yourself about the plurality which is in all of us. If you forget about it one time it will be easier to forget it next time. There are so many good beginnings in the work and then this is forgotten and people start to slide down, and in the end all that happens is that they become more mechanical than before. When it come to attribution of credit, there can be some common mistakes made. The wrong set of factors is often made in Complex Adaptive Systems for much of the same reasons. Diagnosis of causes in complex, multicausal situations are error prone. We might take as an example the problem of examining customer complaints about product malfunction in order to discover product defects or possible design improvements. Many large consumer product companies have service desks that answer thousands of calls per week about products. They frequently have systems that generate “trouble tickets” associated with each call. It is natural to ask what can be learned from the records of all this work that would contribute to improvement of the products, but closing this loop of organizational learning has often proven quite difficult. Working with a group of such reports, an analyst searches for pattern in the way the features and structure of the product interact with the circumstances of use reported by the customers. The hallmarks of complexity are present. The analyst may develop hypotheses such as: “All these customers reported that sound quality deteriorated when they were driving on country roads. Could it be that the audio unit is disturbed by shocks spaced at a particular frequency?” #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

Many hypotheses like this one are generated, but not all will be correct. In many organizations, such hypotheses are tested by checking if they are sufficient to reproduce the problem. In a complex World, many of those tests will fail. Someone from product development (not the same division as customer service) will subject the unit to low-frequency jolts and observe that it still performs well. An interesting strategy at such a moment of impasse is to bring into the process some of the frontline customer service agents who took the original calls. They may suggest something like, “These all came in last winter. Does it only happen if the unit is cold?” Of course, this may not turn out to be the answer. However, in an organization having trouble maintaining contact patterns between two divisions, the effort to correct a misattribution provides an occasion for interaction during which other useful information may flow. It functions as an episode of triggered recombination. Product people learn of other patterns noticed in customer service. The frontline agents learn about new product ideas in development and can then be alert to relevant remarks from customers. All of this reasoning makes sense in games like football or baseball or tennis, in which the same situation arises many times in one game, and the same players confront each other from one game to the next. Then there is time and opportunity to observe any systematic behaviour, and respond to it. Correspondingly, it is important to avoid patterns that can be exploited, and stick to the best mix. However, what about games that are played just once? #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

Consider the choices of points of attack and defense in a battle. Here the situation is usually so unique that no system from your previous actions can be inferred by the other side. However, a case for random choice arises from the possibility of espionage. If you choose a definite course of action, and the enemy discovers what you are going to do, one will adapt one’s course of action to one’s maximum disadvantage. You want to surprise one; the surest way to do so is to surprise yourself. You may want to consider keeping the options open as long as possible, and at the last moment choose between them by an unpredictable and therefore espionage-proof device. The relative proportions of the device should also be such that if the enemy discovered them, one would not be able to turn the knowledge to one’s advantage. However, that is just the best mix calculated in the description above. Finally, a warning. Even when you are using your best mix, there will be occasions when you have a poor outcome. Even if Paris Hilton is unpredictable, sometimes Britney Spears will still guess right and knock the ball out of the park. In football, in the third down and a yard to go, a run up the middle is the percentage play; but it is important to throw an occasional bomb to keep the defense honest. When such a pass succeeds, fans and sportscasters will marvel at the cunning choice of play, and say the coach is a genius. When it fails, the coach will come in for a lot of criticism: how could one gamble on a pass instead of going for the percentage play? #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

The time to justify the coach’s strategy is before using it on any particular occasion. The coach should publicize the fact that mixing is vital; the run up the middle remains such a good percentage play precisely because some defensive resources must be diverted to guard against the occasional costly bomb. However, we suspect that even if the coach shouts this message in all newspapers and television channels before the game, and then uses a bomb in such a situation and it fails, one will come in for just as much criticism as if one had not tried to educate the public in the elements of game theory. Another game we want to consider is politics. Of course, sports can be just as important and as serious as decisions made in Congress. An unnoticed “first” in politics was marked in 1989. That was the year John Sununu moved into the White House as its chief of staff, making him in all likelihood the World’s most highly placed “computernik.” In a World bristling with microchips, he was the first computer-literate person ever to occupy one of the pinnacles of political power. A mechanical engineer by training, Sununu had done doctoral work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was known as a whiz who could spot and correct programming errors and question the mathematical model underlying an environmental impact statement. Whatever one may think of his political views, Sununu undeniably understood the power-potential of computerized information. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Before arriving in Washington, Sununu had served as governor of New Hampshire. When Sununu installed an electronic fiscal and financial control system for the state, members of the legislature demanded access to the data stored in the IBM mainframe. Sununu sidetracked their proposals declaring, “They’ll get what we think they need.” According to Time magazine, Sununu “seemed to be trying to shift the balance of political power” by “holding the state’s computerized financial data close to his chest.” In the end, the governor was forced to give one legislative official a password providing access to some (but not all) of the disputed data. Similarly, though a state court had held that citizens had a right to see and copy public documents, Sununu insisted that this did not apply to computerized data. Sununu, as governor, fully understood the power of knowledge about knowledge. Sununu’s action in New Hampshire was hardly subtle. Stamping something confidential or withholding access is an age-old tactic. New, more potent tools—many of them computer-based—are now available to those who wish to control data, information, and knowledge. In fact, we are witnessing a shift to a higher—and less visible—level of power struggle that reflects the rising level of abstraction and complexity in society generally as the super-symbolic economy spreads. Take, for example, computers. We now use computers to build computers. We are also developing CASE—computer-assisted software engineering. This is based on what might be termed “meta-software”—software designed to produce software. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

One can imagine a future in which CASE is used to produce the meta-software, itself, in a kind of infinite regress, as the process moves to higher and higher levels of abstraction. Similarly, the early 1980s, “spreadsheet software” spread rapidly through the business World. These computer programs permitted hundreds of thousands of users to put numbers into columns and rows, as in a ledger book, and to manipulate them easily. Because they could automatically show how a change in one number or variable would affect all the others, they accustomed a whole generation of users to think in terms of “what if” scenarios. What would happen if we raised the price of a product by 2 percent? What if interest rates fell by half a point? What if we could get the new product to market a month sooner? However, spreadsheets, like traditional ledgers, were two-dimensional, flat as a chessboard. In 1989, Lotus Development Corporation, the main spreadsheet supplier, introduced its 1-2-3 Release 3.0. This program can be used to create three-dimensional spreadsheets—the accounting equivalent of moving chess pieces up and down as well as backward and forward on the conventional board. It permits users to simulate change in a business or a process in far more complex and revealing ways. It leads users to ask much smarter what-if questions at a much higher level. The new system of wealth creation requires a symbol-drenched work force. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Constant exposure to the data deluge—to media, computers, paperwork, fax machines, telephones, movies, posters, advertisements, memos, bills, invoiced, and a thousand other symbolic stimuli, with millions spending their time attending meetings, presenting ideas, persuading, negotiating, and otherwise exchanging images—makes for an increasingly “info-savvy” population. Just as Eskimos develop high sensitivity to differences in the properties of snow, and farmers can almost intuitively sense weather and soil changes, mind-workers become attuned to this informational environment. This rising sophistication compels those in power to seek new, higher-level instruments of persuasion and/or social control. Satellites, videocassettes, narrow-casting, niche-identification, cluster-targeting, extra-intelligent networks, instant polling, simulation, mathematical modeling, and other such technologies are becoming a taken-for-granted part of the political environment in the affluent nations. And along with these come new ways of manipulating computerized information that make all the conventional info-tactics of the politician or bureaucrat look crude and klutzy by comparison. Along with changes in the general population, therefore, fed by the shift to the new wealth-creation system, comes a parallel upgrading of the tools of manipulation used by politicians and government officialdom to hold on to their power. That is what meta-tactics are all about. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Nonetheless, even wealth and leisure cause problems. Lester Millbrath, professor of sociology and political science, observes, “Nanotechnologies will create the problem of how to meaningfully and sustainably occupy the time of people who need not perform much work in order to have a sufficiency of life’s goods. Our society has never faced this problem before, and it is not clear what social restructuring will be required to have a good society in those circumstances. We face much deep social learning.” The World has had little experience with what anthropologists’ call “abundance economies.” The Native American tribes of the pacific Northwest were one of those rarities. Their civilization was built upon an ample supply of goods, inexhaustible, and obtained without excessive expenditure of labour. The Kwakiutls became famous for the “potlaches”: contests in which they sought to shame their rivals by heaping more gifts upon them than they could ever return. The potlatches would often be a year in preparation, lasts for days, and occasionally involved destruction of entire buildings. It was certainly a colourful form of keeping up with the Winchesters. What will motivate us, once we have achieved an abundance economy? What will we regard as worthwhile goals to pursue? #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Will part of the economy of abundance motive of to gain increased knowledge, new art, improved philosophy, eliminate human and planetary ills? Will we find ourselves creating a better, wiser World, or sunk in boredom and jaded now that we have all and want nothing? If boredom gets out of hand, the lively spectacle of wealthy doners seeking to outdo each other to endow the arts, assist the poor, and do other good deeds for the sake of prestige would be welcome. What will happen as life spans continue to lengthen and the time needed to make a living decreases? Even today, there are people who, when confronted with the prospect of significantly longer life span, exclaim that they could not imagine what they would do with all that time. This response can be hard to understand, when it would take a thousand years to walk all the World’s roads, more thousands of years to read all the World’s books, and another ten thousand years to have dinner conversation with each of the World’s people—but tastes differ, and even a few decades of bad television might make anyone long for the peace of the grave. However, perhaps more people will start hibernating. We all could use more sleep. Then wake up to a beautiful World, well rested and ready to enjoy their pleasures of life. Confusing? Of course! Like most truths, when we try to apply them to specific situations in our individual lives, we run the risk of failure. However, let that bit of wisdom sink in: You cannot intentionally set out to create or capture your own personal significance—not as a goal in itself. Human beings strive perpetually toward ultimate humanness, which itself may be anyway a different kind of Becoming and growing. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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An individual has to compete with millions of others, and since there are so many of them, one solitary individual often feels that one just does not make much difference! There is a feeling that individually and as a people we are fighting a losing battle to maintain our own uniqueness and that there appears to be no end in sight. When a face engagement exhausts the situation—all persons present being accredited participants in the encounter—the problem of maintaining orderly activity will be largely internal to the encounter: the allocation of talking time (if the engagement is a spoken one); the maintenance of something innocuous to talk or act upon (this being describable as the problem of “safe supplies”); the inhibition of hostility; and so forth. When there are persons present who are not participants in the engagement, we know that inevitably they will be in a position to learn something about the encounter as a whole is conducted. When a face engagement must be carried on in a situation containing bystanders, I will refer to it as accessible. Whenever a face engagement is accessible to nonparticipants there is a fully shared and unshared participation. All persons in the gathering at large will be immersed in a common pool of unfocused interaction, each person, by one’s mere presence, manner, and appearance, transmitting some information about oneself to everyone in the situation, and each person present receiving like information from all the others present, at least in so far as one is willing to make use of one’s receiving opportunities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

It is this possibility of widely available communication, and the regulations arising to control this communication, that transforms a mere physical region into the locus of a sociologically relevant entity, the situation. However, above and beyond this fully common participation, the ratified members of a particular engagement will in addition be participating in interaction of the focused kind, where a message conveyed by one person is meant to make a specific contribution to a matter at hand, and is usually addressed to a particular recipient, while the other members of the encounter, and only these others, are meant to receive it too. Thus, there will be a fully shared basis of unfocused interaction underlying one or more partially shared bases of focused interaction. The difference between participation in the unfocused interaction in the situation at large and participation in the focused interaction in a face engagement is easy to sense but difficult to follow out in detail. Questions such as choice of participants for the encounter or sound level of voices have relevance for the situation as a while, because anyone in the situation will be (and will be considered to be) in a position to witness these aspects of the face engagement, which are the unfocused part of the communication flowing from it. However, the specific meanings of particular statements appropriately conveyed within a face engagement will not be available to the situation at large, although, if a special effort at secrecy be made, this furtiveness, as a general aspect of what is going on, may in fact become quite widely perceivable and an important item in the unfocused interaction that is occurring. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

That part of the communication occurring in a face engagement that could not be conveyed through mediating channels is situational; but this situational aspect of the encounter becomes part of the unfocused communication in the situation at large only when some of the grosser improprieties, such as shouting, whispering, and broad physical gestures, occur. In considering accessible engagements, it is convenient to take a vantage point within such an encounter, and to describe the issues from this point of view. The persons present in the gathering at large can then be divided up into participants and bystanders, depending on whether or not they are official members of the engagement in question; and the issues to be considered can be divided up into obligations owned the encounter and obligations owed the gathering at large (and behind the gathering, the social occasion of which is an expression). In order for the engagement to maintain its boundaries and integrity, and to avoid being engulfed by the gathering, both participant and bystander will have to regulate their conduct appropriately. And yet even while cooperating to maintain the privacy of the given encounter, both participant and bystander will be obligated to protect the gathering at large, demonstrating that in certain ways all those within the situation stand together, undivided by their differentiating participation. Man is man because he is capable of reflective thought. Among the animal kingdom man alone has yet been able to demonstrate that he can cognitively consider his own existence, his own ending, his own limitations, and his own strengths. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Perhaps the limitations of man’s communicative abilities keep him from knowing any more than he does about the talents of other members of the animal kingdom; nevertheless, what he is sure of is that man can perform these and other, higher acts. With man being so superior, why is it that when we are trying to change people, we do not use meat, instead of a whip? Why do we not use praise instead of condemnation? Let us praise even the slightest improvement. That inspires the other person to keep on improving. Praise is like sunlight to the warm human spirit; we cannot flower and grow without it. And yet, while most of us are only too ready to apply to others the cold wind of criticism, we are somehow reluctant to give our fellow the warm sunshine of praise. When you have a hard day or make a mistake, you might feel discouraged or bad about yourself. However, anyone can look back on their own lives and see where a few words of praise have sharply changed their future. If something goes wrong and you are feeling bad, try writing yourself an encouraging note! What happened: I did not do well on a test. Encouraging words: I can keep trying and learning. I will not give up. Keep trying. Keep loving. Keep trusting. Keep believing. Keep growing. History is replete with striking illustrations of the sheer witchery of praise. For example, many years ago a boy of ten was working in a factory in Naples. He longed to be a singer, but his first teacher discouraged him. “You can’t sing,” he said. “You haven’t any voice at all. It sounds like the wind in the shutters.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

However, his mother, a poor peasant woman, put her arms about him and praised him and told him she knew he could sing, she could already see an improvement, and she went barefoot in order to save money to pay for his music lessons. That peasant mother’s praise and encouragement changed that boy’s life. His name was Enrico Caruso, and he became the greatest and most famous opera singer of his age. Many of you may not know this, but a lot of you and your parents are successful because your grandparents and great grandparents did things like go without shoes and worked hard so they could ensure their descendants would not have to miss a meal or go without a roof over their heads. So be proud of who you are and be thankful that someone had the opportunity to help you succeed. And next time you think about blowing money, even say, $30, think about how many hours it took you to make that money, and perhaps save it or put it in a Roth IRA so you have more money for retirement, or for your child’s college fund. You do not want your offspring to grow up and know the pangs of hunger. The praise, the recognition that one receives through an accomplishment can change one’s whole life. For if one does not get encouragement, one might spend one’s life never knowing what he or she could have accomplished. Use praise instead of criticism. When criticism is minimized and praise emphasized, the good things people do will be reinforced and the poorer things will atrophy for lack of attention. Many people who are praised for the good things they do end up going out of their way to do things right. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

And even better, when praise is specific, it comes across as sincere—not something the other person may be saying just to make one feel good. Remember, we all crave appreciation and recognition, and will do almost anything to get it. However, nobody wants insincerity. Nobody wants flattery. If you and I will inspire the people with whom we come in contact to a realization of the hidden treasures they possess, we can do far more than change people. We can literally transform them. Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake. We are making use of only a small part of our physical and mental resources. Stating the thing broadly, the human individual thus lives far within one’s limits. One possesses powers of various sorts which one habitually fails to use. Everyone possess powers of various sorts which one habitually fails to use; and one of these powers you are probably not using to the fullest extent is your magic ability to praise people and inspire them with a realization of their latent possibilities. Abilities wither under criticism; they blossom under encouragement. To become a more effective leader of people, be hearty and sincere in your approbation and lavish in your praise. Promoting a sense of individual worth is basic to effective psychotherapy and counseling, to effective public education, to marriages, and other love relationships, and certainly to child-rearing. People who are accepted and loved and treated as worthwhile have a greater tendency to develop more fully in their selfhood, to engage themselves more fully in their tasks and chores, and, if production is any kind of measure, to turn out more of whatever we might like from them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

“Is a bored man free from identification?” Boredom is identification with oneself, with false personality, with something in oneself. Identification is an almost permanent state for us. It is the chief manifestation of false personality, and because of this we cannot get out of the false personality. You must be able to see this state apart from yourself, separated from yourself, and that can only be done by trying to become more conscious, trying to remember yourself, trying to be aware of yourself. Only when you become more aware of yourself are you able to struggle with manifestations like identification and lying, and with false personality itself. All work has to be on false personality. If you do any other work and leave this, it is useless work and you will fail very soon. As with negative emotions, lying and all imagination, false personality cannot exist without identification. You must understand that false personality is a combination of all lies, features and “I”s which can never be useful in any sense or in any way, either in life or in the work—like negative emotions. “If false personality entirely based on negative emotions?” There are many things besides negative emotions in false personality. For instance, in false personality there are always bad mental habits—wrong thinking. False personality, or parts of false personality, is always based on wrong thinking. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

At the same time, if you were to take negative emotions away from false personality it would collapse; it could not exist without them. “So all negative emotions spring from false personality?” Yes certainly. How could it be otherwise? False personality is to speak a special organ for negative emotions, producing negative emotions. You remember that I said that there is no real center for negative emotions. False personality acts as a center for negative emotions. “How can one deal with the conceit of false personality?” You must know all its features first and then you must think rightly. When you think rightly you will find ways to deal with it. You must not justify it; it lives on justification, even glorification of all its features. At almost every moment of out life, even in quiet moments, we are always justifying it, considering it legitimate and finding all possible excuses for it. This is what is meant by wrong thinking. So first of all you must know false personality, and then you must think rightly about it. You must know what it is—place it so to speak—this is the first step. And, as I have said, you must realize that all identification, all considering, all lies to oneself, all weaknesses, all personality. In addition, all forms of self-will belong to false personality, so sooner or later you have to sacrifice them. “Did you say that all our likes and dislikes are in false personality?” Most of them are. And even those which did not belong to it originally, which have real roots, all pass through false personality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

[Somebody asked if one had to know the whole of false personality in order to struggle against it because it seemed to one that one could only know little bits of it.] One most know it. It is like a special breed of bird. If you do not know it you cannot speak about it. If you have seen it you can speak about it. To see only bits, as you say, is quite enough. Every small part of it is the same colour. If you see this bird once, you will always know it. It sings in a special way; it walks in a special way. Humans are capable of understanding many of the things that happen to us, and unable to comprehend many others though we can still experience them. The lacks of comprehension are due partly to our attitudes or mind-sets, which limit our understanding to things that our word symbols can define or point toward. Partly the limitations are due to a lack of development of our fullest functioning. As self-aware beings, able to look objectively at our own experiences, we find ourselves confused and anxious at times, overjoyed and ecstatic at others. We can search for many things: happiness, wisdom, perfection, enlightenment, identity, meaning. We can be effective in dealing wholly with the life we live, and we can attain some measures of significance. In the “search for significance,” it is often a struggle, for life certainly is not a bed of roses. So, just being alive is a blessing, but also a “struggle” and full of ordinary everyday risks. However, to seek the difficult, to search for the challenging, to demonstrate human effectiveness, in short, to be significant, is the biggest struggle of all. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

One of the first strategic lessons in tennis is not to commit to a direction until the last possible fraction of a second. Otherwise, the opponent can exploit your guess and hit the ball the other way. However, even when one cannot observe the opponent’s move, there is a great advantage to predicting it. If the server always aims to the receiver’s backhand, the receiver will prepare his or her grip and start to move toward that side in anticipation, and consequently will be more effective in the return of serve. The server, therefore, attempts to be unpredictable in order to prevent the receiver from successfully second-guessing one’s aim. Conversely, the receiver must not exclusively favour one side or the other in making one’s initial move. Unlike matching fingers, players should not equate unpredictability with even odds. Players can improve their performance by systematically favouring one side, although in an unpredictable way. For correctness, let us think of a pair of players with particular skills. The receiver’s forehand is somewhat stronger. If one anticipates correctly, one’s forehand return will be successful 90 percent of the time, while an anticipated backhand return will be successfully only 60 percent of the time. Of course, the returner fares worse if one starts to move to one side and the service goes to the other. If one goes to the backhand side while the service is to one’s forehand, one can shift and return successfully only 30 percent of the time. The other way around, one’s chances are 20 percent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

The server wants to keep the successful return percentage as low as possible; the returner has exactly the opposite interest. Before the match, the two players choose their game plans. What is the best strategy for each side? If the server always aims one’s serves toward the forehand, the receiver will anticipate the move to one’s forehand and successfully return the serves 90 percent of the time. If the server always aims one’s serves to the backhand, the receiver will anticipate the move toward one’s backhand and will return 60 percent of the serves successfully. Only by mixing one’s aim can the server reduce the receiver’s effectiveness. One keeps the receiver guessing and therefore unable to take full advantage of anticipating the correct position. Suppose the server tosses an imaginary coin just before each serve, and aims to the forehand or backhand according to whether the coin shows heads or tails. Now look what happens when the receiver moves to the forehand position. This guess will be correct only half the time. When correct, the forehand return is successful 90 percent of the time, and when the move to the forehead is an incorrect guess, the receiver’s successful return tale falls to 20 percent. One’s overall success rate is (1/2)90% + (1/2)20% = 55%. By a similar argument, a move toward the backhand leads to successful returns (1/2)60% + (1/2)30% = 45% of the time. Given the 50:50 mixing rule of the server, the receiver chooses the options best from one’s perspective. One should move toward one’s forehand, and the percentage of successful returns will be 55 percent. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

For the server, this is already an improvement over the outcome when one aims one’s serve the same way all the time. For comparison, the receiver’s success rate is 90 percent or 60 percent if the server aims exclusively toward the forehand or backhand serves, respectively. Predicting business success is a lot like the example of the tennis match. All messages move through channels. However, some channels are more equal than others. All executives know that the “routing slip” which determines who gets to see a memo is a tool of power. Keeping someone “out of the loop” is a way of clipping one’s wings. Sometimes the person kept out of the loop is the person on top. When John H. Kelly was the U.S.A. ambassador in Beirut, he sent messages direct to the White House National Security Council, using the facilities of the CIA, rather than through the normal State Department chain of command. This meant he was end-running his own boss, Secretary of State George P. Shultz. Kelly, while in Washington, also met numerous times with Oliver North and other NSC officials in connection with their plan to trade arms to Iran in return for hostages—a plan Shultz had advised against. Shultz was so furious when he learned about the Beirut incident that he blasted Kelly publicly, and formally prohibited State Department personnel from communicating outside departmental channels without express instructions from either oneself of from the President. It is unlikely, however, that any such order will ever wipe out the practice- Back-channels are too useful to power-shifters. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

One hearing of this case, Congressman Lee Hamilton, chairman of the House Intelligence committee, blurted, “I don’t think I have ever heard of that happening before—totally bypassing an American Secretary of State.” Irritation may have fogged his memory. A precisely parallel case of back-channeling took place when the American ambassador to Pakistan communicated secretly with the White House National Security Council, again bypassing a Secretary of State. In this earlier case, the back channel was set up by Henry Kissinger, then serving as head of the NSC. Kissinger used it in arranging President Nixon’s secret mission to China, which resulted in restoring relations between the two countries. Kissinger was an enthusiastic back-channeler, eager to keep information out of the official bureaucratic system and in his own hands. Claiming he had the President’s approval, he once invited William J. Porter, the U.S.A. ambassador to South Korea, to communicate directly with him without going through Porter’s boss, William Rogers, then Secretary of State. Porter’s diary notes his reaction: “Here’s the Nixon-Kissinger secret diplomatic service shaping up, secret codes and all…If the President agreed to create a super-net of ambassadors under his security adviser without the knowledge of the Secretary of State something new was happening in American history…I concluded that I was just a country boy and I would keep my head down.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

When the SALT treaty was being negotiated with the Soviets, the America team in Geneva was headed by Gerard C. Smith. However, Kissinger and the Pentagon’s Joint Chiefs of Staff set up a private channel so that certain staff people could communicate with the directly without Smith’s knowledge. Kissinger also maintained a back-channel to Moscow, again bypassing the State Department, sending messages to the Politburo through Anatoli Dobrynin, rather than through the appropriate State Department specialists or their counterparts in the Soviet Foreign Ministry. Only a few people in Moscow—in the Politburo, the secretariat, and the Soviet diplomatic corps—were ever aware that messages were being passed back and forth this way. The most celebrated—and perhaps most fateful—use of the Back-Channel Tactic helped prevent World War III. This occurred during the Cuban missile standoff. Formal messages ricocheted back and forth like a tennis match between President Kennedy and Soviet leader Khrushchev while the World held its breath. Russian missiles in Cuba were pointed at American soil. Kennedy orders a naval blockade. It was at that moment of high tension that Khrushchev sent Aleksandr Fomin, his KGB chief in Washington, to call on an American newsman, John Scali, whom Fomin had earlier met. On the furth day of the crisis, with danger escalating by the moment, Fomin asked Scali whether he thought the United States of America would agree not to invade Cuba if Soviets pulled out their missiles and bombers. That message, relayed by the journalist to the White Hose, proved to be a key turning point in the crisis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

However, even such uses of Back-Channel Tactic are simple by comparison with the more sophisticated method that might be called the Double-Channel Tactic—the sending of alternative or contradictory messages through two different channels to test reactions or to sow confusion and conflict among the recipients. Twice during negotiations over the antiballistic missile system, Kissinger and Soviet Foreign Minister Alexei Gromyko each relied on a back-channel to bypass their own normal chain of command. During these talks, in May 1971 and April 1972, Kissinger had reason to suspect that the Russians were using the Double-Channel Tactic against him. Years later Arkady Shevchenko, former Gromyko assistant defected to the United States of America and wrote in his autobiography that Kissinger’s suspicion had been unwarranted. It was not a deliberate ploy but confusion, arising because one of the Soviets had been “operating on outdated instructions from Moscow, knowing no better.” Whether or not this is correct is irrelevant here. What is clear is that Back- and Double-channeling are much-used techniques to shift power. There is also a dazzling variety of games played at the receiving end of the communication process. The most familiar of these is the Access Tactic—meaning the attempt to control access to one’s superior, and thereby to control the information one receives. Top executives and lowly secretaries alike know this game well. Access conflicts are so common they hardly merit further comment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

Then there is the Need-to-Know Tactic, much favoured by intelligence agencies, terrorists, and underground political movements, by means of which data, information, and knowledge are compartmentalized and carefully kept away from all but specified receivers with a validated “need to know.” The exact converse of this is the Need-Not-to-Know Tactic. A former Cabinet Secretary in the White House explains it this way: “Should I, as a White House official, know something? Does knowing it mean I have to take action? Cn the person telling me then go to someone else and say, ‘I’ve already discussed this with the White House’? That could put me in a pissing contest between two other players I don’t know anything about and have nothing to do with…There was a lot I didn’t want to know about.” The Need-Not-to-Know Tactic is also used by subordinate to protect a superior, leaving the leader in a position to claim ignorance if things go sour. During the Irangate investigation a joke that went the rounds in Washington made the point. QUESTION: How many White House aides does it take to screw in  light bulb? ANSWER: None. They like to keep Reagan in the dark. By the same token, there is also a Forced-to-know Tactic, more popularly knowns as the CYA, or “cover your assets,” memo. Here the power player makes sure that another player has been notified of something, so that if things fall apart, a recipient can share the blame. Variations are numerous, but for every game played with sources, channels, and receivers, there is a multitude of ploys and stratagems directed at the message itself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

Credit attribution, though difficult and necessarily imperfect, can nonetheless be designed to help harness complexity. As we have already discussed, context preservation could be advantageous if the cause of apparent success is not fully understood. This indicates a general problem. Since Complex Adaptive Systems are inherently difficult to understand or predict, it follows that attribution of credit in selection will often be difficult and prone to mistakes. If it were feasible, the best response would be not to make mistakes in credit attribution. Because such mistakes can be very costly, vast bodies of academic knowledge and expensive social apparatus have been created to reduce them. Systems of logic, methods of statistics, and philosophies of science are all aimed at improving the extent to which our conclusions follow from our premises and evidence. There re public debates, professional review boards, and courts of law. All contribute to limiting the mistakes in attribution of credit that may drive selection processes. Where these tools for improving inference are cost-effective, we certainly believe they should be used, and we applaud the work that maintains and extends them. However, despite all the effort put into these valuable resources, totally accurate attribution of credit is often infeasible. Factors that make it easy to learn appropriate lessons from the experience accumulated in making a series of choices: clear rewards for the appropriate choices, repeated opportunities for observation or for practice, small deliberation costs at each choice so that frequent choices are easier, good feedback on the results of choices, unchanging circumstances that keep inferences valid, and a simple context that can be effectively analyzed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

As you know, changing causes problems. Molecular manufacturing offers the possibility of drastic change, a change in the means of production more fundamental than the introduction of industry, or of agriculture. Our economic and social structures have evolved around assumptions that will no longer be valid. How will we handle the changes in the way we work and live? Nanotechnology will have wide-ranging impact in many areas, including economic, industrial, and social patterns. What do historical patterns in similar circumstances tell us about the future? Any powerful technology with broad applications revolutionizes lives, and nanotechnology will be no exception. Depending on one’s point of view, this may sound exciting or it may sound disturbing, but it most certainly does not sound comfortable. In comparison to many projections of the twenty-first century, though, nanotechnology may lead to comparatively comfortable change. The changes most often projected—for a future not including nanotechnology—have been ecological disaster, resource shortages, economic collapses, and a slide back into misery. The rise of nanotechnology will offer an alternative—green wealth—but that alternative will bring great changes from the patterns of recent decades. Times of rapid technological change are disconcerting. For most of humanity’s existence, people lived in a stable pattern. They learned to live as their parents had lived—by hunting and gathering, later by farming—and changes were small and gradual. A knowledge of the past was a reliable guide to the future. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

Sudden changes, when they did occur, were apt to be ruinous: invasions of natural disasters. These sudden changes were fought or repaired or survived as best one could. Making major changes by choice was rare, and radical innovations were generally or the worse: the old ways at least ensured the ancestors’ survival, the new might not. This made cultures conservative. It is only natural that there be efforts to resist change, but before undertaking such an effort, it makes sense to examine the record of what works and what does not. The only examples of successful change fighters have been communities that have created and maintained barricades to isolate themselves from the outside World socially, culturally, and technologically. For the two centuries before 1854, Japan turned its back on the outside World, following a deliberate policy of seclusion. The leaders of Albania restricted contacts for many years; only recently have they started to open up. Isolation attempts have worked better on a smaller scale, when participation is voluntary rather than decreed by government. Today, within the Hawaiian island chain, the tiny private owned island of Niihau, sixteen miles long and six miles wide, is deliberately kept as a preserve of the nineteenth-century Hawaiian lifestyle. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

Over two hundred full-blooded Hawaiians there speak the Hawaiian language and use no telephones, plumbing, television, and no electricity (except in school). The Amish Pennsylvania have no surrounding ocean to help maintain their isolation, but rely instead on tight social, religious, and technological rules aimed at keeping external technology and culture out, and themselves grouped in; those who leave the fold are excluded. Rumspringa is a bad idea because you are letting teenagers go out into the English World alone and there are many evils out there that they are unaware of. And people can see they are different—innocent and pure—and will prey on them. On a national scale, attempts to take only one part of the package—whether social or technological—have not done well at all. For decades, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc nations welcomed Western Technology but attempted tight restrictions on the passage of people, ideas, and goods. Yet illegal music, thoughts, literature, and other knowledge still crept in—as they do into the Islamic countries. Fighting technological change in society at large has had little success, where that change gave some large group what it wanted. The most famous fighters of technological change—the Luddites—were unsuccessful. They smashed “automated” textile machinery that was replacing old hand looms during the early industrial revolution in England, but people wanted affordable clothing, and smashing equipment in one place just moved the business elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

Change has sometimes been postponed, as when a later group, under the banner of “Captain Swing,” smashed hundreds of threshing machines in a wide area of southern England in 1830. They succeeded keeping the old, labour-intensive ways of harvesting for over a generation. In previous centuries, when the World was less tightly connected by international trade, communications and transportation, delays of years and even decades could be enforced through violence or legal maneuvers such as tariffs, trade barriers, regulations, or outright banning. Attempting to stop or postpone change is less successful today, when technology moves internationally almost as easily as people do—and human travel is so easy that 25 million people cross the Atlantic each year. Change fighters find that the problems they create mount with time. Products made using the old, high-cost techniques are uncompetitive. There is no way to bring back the “old jobs”; they no longer make sense. However, the old habits die hard, and these same responses to the prospect of technological change continue today—ignoring it, denying it, and opposing it. Societies that have fought change, as Britain did, have fallen behind in a cloud of coal smoke. Why did the Luddites respond violently? Perhaps their response can be attributed to three factors: First, the change in their lives was sudden and radical; second, it affected a large group of people at one time, in one area; and third, in a World unprepared for rapid technological change, there was no safety net to be unemployed. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

While local economies might have been able to absorb a trickle of hungry laid-off workers, they lacked the size and diversity needed to offer other employment options quickly to large numbers of unemployed. In the twenty-first century, however, societies have of necessity become somewhat better adapted to change. This has been a matter of necessity, because sluggish communities soon fall behind. In the ancient days of peasant stability, there was no need for institutions like Consumer Reports to study and rate new products, or regulators like the Environmental Protection Agency to watch over new hazards. We developed the needs, and we developed the institutions. These mechanisms represent important adaptations, not so much to the technologies of the twenty-first century, but to the increasing change in technology during the twenty-first century. There is great room for improvement, but they can perhaps provide a basis for adapting to the next century as well. Even with the best of institutions to cushion shocks and discourage abuse, there will be problems. They very act of solving problems of production—of increasing wealth—will created problems of economic change. Perhaps Darwin was right to emphasize the importance played in nature by competition. Darwin told us that those species survived best which could adapt to their environment, and he let loose a phrase which he later regretted: “the survival of the fittest,” and when applied to social interactions of man—this philosophy is already seen to be true. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

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Let’s imagine a day in the life at your #PlumasRanch home at #CresleighMeadows Residence 2…https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/quick-move-homesite-48/

The sun shines in the windows while you tidy up the living room, then lights up your lunch meal prep at the spacious island. 😎

Finally, you enjoy a great night’s sleep in the cozy bedroom. This could be your life, too; picture yourself at #CresleighHomes!