The World population in 1950 was 2.5 billion, in 2022, it is 8 billion. The American population in 1950 was 151, 325, 798, in 2022 332,403,650. With this rapid expansion in humanaity, it is also important to consider their strain on the natural environment and promote birth control in the developed and undeveloped World. The mental health industry is overloaded, and many people are showing sighs of mental disorder, not only due to rising cost, but also because the planet is over populated. In diagnosing mental disorder and following its hospital course, psychiatrists typically cite aspects of the patient’s behaviour that are “inappropriate in the situation.” Since this special kind of misconduct is believed to provide one obvious sign of “mental sickness,” psychiatrists have given much time to these improprieties, developing the orientation and observational skills needed to study them, describe them in detail, seeking to understand their meaning for the patient, and obtaining a mandate to discuss them in the academic press—a mandate required because many of these delicts are petty, embarrassing, or messy. We sociologists should be grateful for this harvest, all the more so because it has been brought in by delicate hands. We can express our gratitude by trying to appropriate the yield for our own market, offering in exchange some observations about social situations that we appropriated long ago from anthropology. By and large, the psychiatric study of situational improprieties has led to studying the offender rather than the rules and social circles that are offended. Through such studies, however, psychiatrists have inadvertently made us more aware of an important area of social life—that of behaviour in public and semipublic places. Although this area has not been recognized as a special domain for sociological inquiry, it perhaps should be, for rules of conduct in streets, parks, restaurants, theaters, shops, dance floors, meeting halls, and other gathering places of any community tell us a great deal about its most diffuse forms of social organization. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

Sociology does not provide a ready framework that can order these data, let alone show comparisons and continuities with behaviour in private gathering places such as offices, factory floors, living rooms, and kitchens. To be sure, one part of “collective behaviour”—riots, crowds, panics—has been established as something to study. However, the remaining part of the area, the study of ordinary human traffic and the patterning of ordinary social contacts, has been little considered. It is well recognized, for instance, that mobs can suddenly emerge from the peaceful flow of human traffic, if conditions are right. Yet, little concern seems to have been given to the question of what structure this peaceful intercourse possesses when mob formation is not an issue. Some data have been drawn from a study of a mental hospital (hereafter called Central Hospital), some from a study of a Shetland Island community (hereafter called Shetland Isle), some from manuals of etiquette, and some from a file where I keep quotations that have struck me as interesting. The issue with disapproved behaviour is the strength of approval for upholding. Some approved acts receive applause upon performance, as when heroism or very great skill is displayed, and sometime so do bad actions. Furthermore, some acts pass quite unnoticed and do not constitute a felt event, as when an American high-school girl refrains from wearing nylon hose with her saddle shoes but wears bobby socks instead. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

A second variable has to do with the consequence of failing to uphold the rule. At one extreme are acts, neither demanded nor expected, that are rarely performed. At the other extreme are mandatory acts such as the paying of fines, where failure to comply may lead to jail. Between these extremes are “tolerated” acts, which are specifically noted with only an inhibited frown, constituting offenses that the offended person, given the setting, is obligated to let pass. In can be seen, then, how much mischief may be done by equating two situations because the same act is “approved” in each, since approval itself can mean significantly different things.  In the social sciences, when it comes to the “closed natural system,” such a system of concrete behaviour involves a differentiation of activities whose integration, one with another, allows for the emergence of over-all functions maintained through an equilibrium of interaction of the component activities. Presumably, the equilibrium can be different kinds—self-corrective, moving, and the like. A social order may be defined as the consequence of any set of moral norms that regulates the way in which persons pursue objectives. The set of norms does not specify the objectives the participants are to seek, nor the pattern formed by and through the coordination or integration of these ends, but merely the modes of seeking them. Traffic rules and the consequent traffic order provide an obvious example. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Any social system or any game may be viewed quite properly as an instance of social order, although the perspective of social order does not allow us to get at what is characteristically systemic about systems or what is gamelike about games. There appear to be many types of social order, of which the legal order and the economic order are important examples. Within each such order, mere behaviour is transformed into a corresponding type of conduct. Particular in accordance with the regulations of more than one of these orders. The most important type of regulation is the kind that governs a person’s handling of one’s self and others by virtue of one’s immediate physical presence among them in what is called face-to-face or immediate interaction. The term “public” is of extreme importance. The norms supporting public order, as public order is traditionally defined, regulate not only immediate interaction but also matters that need not entail immediate contact between persons: for example, during medieval times, the obligation (often ill sustained) to keep one’s pigs out of the streets, even though there was much available there for pigs to eat, and the obligation to extinguish lights and fires by a given hour least the town be endangered by fire. Nowadays, householder is obligated to maintain one’s walks and roads in good repair and to keep one’s town land free of noxious refuse. In addition, public order traditionally refers more to the regulation of immediate inter-acquainted than it does to interaction occurring in private walled-in places where only families meet. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

Traditionally, “public places” refer to any regions in a community freely accessible to members of that community; “private places” refer to soundproof regions where only members or invitees gather—the traditional concern for the public order beginning only at the point where a private gathering begins to obtrude upon the neighbours. Behaviour plays a role in the physical traffic among people. Although it may be felt that this involves conduct of little weight, a matter merely of etiquette and manners, it is implied that for though generosity, loyalty, and moral courage are without doubt nobler and more praiseworthy qualities than charm and courtesy, nevertheless polite habits and a correct manner of speech and behaviour may benefit those who possess them no less than a noble spirit and a stout heart benefits others. For since each one of us is daily obliged to meet other people and converse with them, we need to use our manners many times each day. However, justice, fortitude, and the other virtues of the higher and nobler sort are needed less frequently. We are not required to practice generosity or mercy at all hours, nor could any man do so very often. Similarly, those who are endowed with courage and strength are seldom called upon to show their valour by their deeds. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

There are many social settings that persons of certain status are forbidden to enter. Here an effort to prevent penetration of ego-boundaries, contamination by undesirables, and physical assault seems to be involved. Rules of trespass, for example, prevent unauthorized individuals from entering a private dwelling place at any time, and a semiprivate one during off hours. Less familiar are the many rulings that restrict the right to be present in open, unwalled public places: in nineteenth-century London, for example, the exclusion of common people from riding promenades such as Rotten Row; in Islamic cities built on quartier basis, the restriction of persons to their own neighbourhood after dark; the temporary prohibitions, during periods of martial law, upon being about after dark; evening curfews making it illegal for youths below a certain age to be about without the company of an adult; boarding-school rulings about late-hour presence on town streets; military rulings placing certain areas out of bounds or off limits for categories of personnel; informal police rulings requiring night-tomes racial segregation on public streets in designated areas of the city. Where these rules or exclusion exist, it is plain that the individual’s mere presence, regardless of one’s conduct while present, communicates either that one possesses the entrance qualifications or that one is behaving improperly. Here we find one motive for either wanting to enter a particular place or wanting not to be seen in it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

In many social situations certain categories of persons may not be authorized to be present, and that should they be present, this in itself will constitute an improper act. Common sense, however, also has something to say about those who are authorized to be present. The rule of behaviour that seems to be common to all situations and exclusive to them is the rule obliging participants to “fit in.” The words one applies to a child on one’s first trip to a restaurant presumably hold for everyone all the time: the individual must be “good” and not cause a scene or a disturbance; one must not attract undue attention to oneself, either by thrusting one’s self on the assembled company or by attempting to withdraw too much from their presence. One must keep within the spirit or ethos of the situation; one must not be de trop or out of place. Occasions may even arise when the individual will be called upon to act as if one fitted into the situation when in fact one and some of the others present know this is not the case; out of regard for harmony in the scene one is required to compromise and endanger oneself further by putting on an air of one who belongs when it can be shown that one does not. If you should happen to be paying an evening visit at a house, where, unknown to you, there is a small party assembled, you should enter and present yourself precisely as you would have done had you been invited. To retire precipitately with an apology for the intrusion would create a scene, and be extremely awkward. Go in, therefor, converse with ease for a few moments, and then retire. Take care to let it be known the next day, in such a way as that the family shall hear of it, that you were not aware that there was company there. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

No doubt different social groupsings vary in the explicitness with which their members think in such terms, as well as in the phrases selected for doing so, but all groupings presumably have some concern for “fitting in.” The notion of “fitting in” relates to another bit of common sense: what is proper in one situation may certainly not be proper in another. The underlying general sentiment possessed by the individual—where in fact one has one—may have to give way to the requirements of the situation. This theme appears in social science literature in the form of “situational determinism,” for example, in race relations studies, where it is pointed out that castelike taboos in one sphere of life can exist alongside equalitarianism in other spheres, although the same set of persons is involved. However, here surely is the beginning of inquiry, not the end. Although an individual may conduct oneself in a particular way solely because of the felt pressure of propriety, this merely tells us about one possible motive for conforming. We still do not know why this particular form of conduct is the one here approved—namely, how the riling arose historically, and what its current social function is. To approach these issues, it is necessary to turn to a more roundabout analysis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

We must ask ourselves what our chances actually are. We must discover in ourselves functions and manifestations which we can, to a certain extent, control, and we must exercise this control, trying to increase it as much as possible. For instance, we have a certain control over our movements, and in many schools, particularly in the East, work on oneself begins with acquiring as full a control over movements as possible. However, this needs special training, very much time, and the study of very elaborate exercises. Under the conditions of modern life we have more control over our thoughts, and in connection with this there is a special method by which we may work on the development of our consciousness using that instrument which is most obedient to our will; that is, our mind, or the intellectual center. You must try to remember that we have no control over our consciousness. When I have said that we can become more conscious, or that a man can be made conscious for a moment simply by asking him if he is conscious our not, I used the word “conscious” or “consciousness” in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means “consciousness” in a relative sense. There are so many degrees of consciousness and every higher degree means “consciousness” in relation to a lower degree. However, if we have no control over consciousness itself, we have a certain control over our thinking about consciousness, and we can construct our thinking in such a way as to bring consciousness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

By giving our thoughts the direction which they would have in a moment of consciousness, we can, in this way, induce consciousness. Now try to formulate what you noticed when you tried to observe yourself. You noticed three things. First that you do not remember yourself; that is, that you are not aware of yourself at the time when you try to observe yourself. Second, that observation is made difficult by the incessant stream of thoughts, images, echoes of conversation, fragments of emotions, flowing through your mind and very often distracting your attention from observation. And third, that the moment you start self-observation something in you starts imagination, and self-observation, if you really try it, is a constant struggle with imagination. If one realized that all the difficulties in the work depend on the fact that one cannot remember oneself, one already knows what one must do. One must try to remember oneself. In order to do this one must struggle with mechanical thoughts, and one must struggle with imagination. If one does this conscientiously and persistently one will see results in a comparatively short time. However, one must not think that it is easy or that one can master this practice immediately. Self-remembering, as it is called, is a very difficult thing to learn to practice. It must not be based on an expectation of results, otherwise one can identify with one’s efforts. It must be based on the realization of the fact that we do not remember ourselves, and that at the same time we can remember ourselves if we try sufficiently hard and in the right way. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

We cannot become conscious at will, at the moment when we want to, because we have no command over states of consciousness. However, we can remember ourselves for a short time at will, because we have a certain command over our thoughts. And if we start remembering ourselves, by the special construction of our thoughts—that is, by the realization that we do not remember ourselves, that nobody remembers oneself, and by realizing all that this means—this will bring us to consciousness. You must remember that we have found the weak spot in the walls of our mechanicalness. This is the knowledge that we do not remember ourselves; and the realization that we can try to remember ourselves. Up to this moment our task has only been self-study. Now, with the understanding of the necessity for actual chance in ourselves, work begins. Later on you will learn that the practice of self-remembering, connected with self-observation and with the struggle against imagination, has not only a psychological meaning, but it also changes the subtlest part of our metabolism and produces definite chemical, or perhaps it is better to say alchemical, effects in our body. So today from psychology we have come to alchemy; tht is, to the idea of the transformation of coarse elements into finer ones. It will be objected that this idea—history as comparative history—is too abstract for students to grasp. However, that is one of the several reasons why comparative history should be taught. To know oneself is to know one’s history. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

To teach the past simply as a chronicle of indisputable, fragmented, and concrete events is to replicate the bias of Technopoly, which largely denies our youth access to concepts and theories, and to provide them only with a stream of meaningless events. That is why the controversies that develop around what events ought to be included in the “history” curriculum have a somewhat hollow ring to them. Some people urge, for example, that the Holocaust, or Stalin’s bloodbaths, or the trail of Indian tears be taught in school. Although our students should know about such things, we must still address the question, “What is it that we want them to ‘know’ about these events? Are they to be explained as the “maniac” theory of history? Are they to be understood as illustrations of the “banality of evil” or the “law of survival”? Are they manifestations of the universal force of economic greed? Are they examples of the workings of human nature? Whatever events may be included in the study of the past, the worst thing we can do is to present them devoid of the coherence that a theory or theories can provide—that is to say, s meaningless. This, we can be sure, Technopoly does daily. The history teacher must go far beyond the “event” level into the realm of concepts, theories, hypotheses, comparisons, deductions, evaluations. The idea is to raise the level of abstraction at which “history” is taught. This idea would apply to all subjects, including science. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

From the point of view of the ascent of humanity, the scientific enterprise is one of our most glorious achievements. On humanity’s Judgement Day we can be expected to speak almost at once of our science. I have already stressed the importance of teaching the history of science in every science course, but this is no more important than teaching its “philosophy.” I mention this with some sense of despair. More than half of the high schools in the United States of America do not even offer one course in physics. And at a rough guess, I would estimate that in 90 percent of the schools chemistry is still taught as if students were being trained to be druggists. To suggest, therefore, tht science is an exercise in human imagination, that is something quite different from technology, that there are “philosophies” of science, and that all of this ought to form part of a scientific education, is to step out of the mainstream. However, I believe it nonetheless. Would it be an exaggeration to say not one student in fifty knows what “induction” means? Or knows what a scientific theory is? Or a scientific model? Or knows what are the optimum conditions of a valid scientific experiment? Or has ever considered the question of what scientific truth is? The Identity of Man Bronowski says the following: “This is the paradox of imagination in science, that it has for its aim the impoverishment of imagination. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

“By that outrageous phrase, I mean that the highest flight of scientific imagination is to weed out the proliferation of new ideas. In science, the grand view is miserly view, and a rich model of the Universe is one which is as poor as possible in hypotheses.” Is there one student in a hundred who can make any sense out of this statement? Though the phrase “impoverishment of imagination” may be outrageous, there is nothing startling or even unusual about the idea contained in this quotation. Every practicing scientists understands what Bronowski is saying. Yet it is kept a secret from out students. It should be revealed. In addition to having each science course include a serious historical dimension, I would propose that every school—elementary through college—offer and require a course in the philosophy of science. Such a course should consider the language of science. Such a course should consider the language of science, the nature of scientific proof, the source of scientific hypotheses, the role of imagination, the conditions of experimentation, and especially the vale of error and disproof. Many people still believe that what makes a statement scientific is that it can be verified. In fact, exactly the opposite is the case: What separates scientific statements from nonscientific statements is that the former can be subjected to the test of falsifiability. What makes science possible is not our ability to recognize “truth” but our ability to recognize falsehood. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

What such a course would try to get at the notion that science is not pharmacy or technology or magic tricks but a special way of employing human intelligence. It would be important for student to learn that one becomes scientific not by donning a white coat (which is what television teaches) but by practicing a set of canons of thought, many of which have to do with the disciplined use of language. Science involves a method of employing language that is accessible to everyone. The ascent of humanity has rested largely on that. Not all games have dominant strategies, even for one player. In fact, dominance is the exception rather than the rule. Although the presence of a dominant strategy leads to very simple rules for action, these rules are inapplicable to many actual games. Other principles must then be brought into action. Just as a dominant strategy is uniformly better than every other strategy, a dominated strategy is uniformly worse than some other strategy. Just as you choose your dominant strategy if you have one, and can be sure that your rival will choose his if he has one, you should avoid your dominated strategies if you have any, and can be sure that your rival will avoid his, if he has any. If you have just two alternative strategies, and one of them is dominated, then the other must be dominant. Therefore examples of avoiding dominated strategies that are genuinely different from those choosing dominant strategies must be based on games in which at least one side has at least three strategies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

Today, as the super-symbolic economy develops, a new work regimen is once more supplanting an old one. In our remaining smokestack factories and offices, conditions today are still largely the same as they were decades ago. Around the World, and especially in the newly industrializing nations, hundreds of millions of workers are still chained to a Second Wave industrial discipline. And today, too, exactly as in the past, we still see employers underestimating the revolution taking place around them. They introduce computers and other advances, Third Wave technologies—but attempt to retain yesterday’s Second Wave work rules and power relationships. Trying to turn their employees into “electronic proles,” as George Orwell might have put it, they count keystrokes, monitor breaks, and listen on employee phone calls. They attempt to control the most minute details of the work process. These methods, characteristic of industrial work, are especially prevalent in the processing of insurance claim forms and routine data entry in other business. However, they can also be applied to higher-level work. According to a report by the U.S.A. Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, they are “increasingly being directed to more skilled technical, professional and managerial positions. The jobs of commodities broker, computer programmer and bank loan officer could lend themselves to monitoring. How long such methods will pay off, however, remains doubtful, for the work rules of the past contradict the new possibilities brought by advanced technology. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Wherever we see radical new technology and on an old work system, it is likely that the technology is misapplied and its real advantages wasted. History has shown repeatedly that truly advanced technologies require truly advanced work methods and organization. Employers today who still think they need electronic proles resemble those reactionary ironmasters and textile-mill owners who thought they could run the new stream-drive factories with methods designed for ox power. They either quickly corrected their mistake or were driven out of business by smarter competitors who learned out to reorganize the work process itself, matching the work regimen to the most advanced technologies of the time. Today in thousands of workplaces, from auto plants to offices, the smart companies are experimenting with, or actually exploiting, the new regimen. Its key characteristic is a changed attitude toward both knowledge and power. Today’s World economy is economically unrecognizable. Global output soared from $1.37 trillion in 1960 to $85.24 trillion U.S. dollars in 2019. And America’s role in the international money economy has changed dramatically. As Europe, China, and other regions have recovered over the years, they have become powerful competitors. As a result, the United States of America, instead of turning out 30 percent of the global output in the early 1950s, has seen its share drop to 21.5 percent. America commands far less of the global economy than it once did. The United States of America has been in relative decline for half century. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

Yet, if we look in absolute terms, we find a very different picture. From the 1960s, America’s absolute wealth—admittedly measures in conventional and inadequate economic metrics—has soared. The roughly $1.37 trillion it produced in 1960 (in adjusted dollars) had ballooned $13.8 trillion in 2022. Through figures on the contribution of knowledge-based technologies, processes, organization and culture are “soft” and controversial, the United States of America could not have sustained its competitive position in the World—militarily as well as economically—if it had remained solely an industrial power. Now would it face the backlash and incomprehension that confronts it today. By increasing the role of knowledge in business and the economy, the United States of America is simultaneously underlining the importance of culture and, implicitly, calling attention to the fact that some cultures are more conducive to productivity than others. And that takes us to a related accusation against the United States of America—globalization brings different cultures into closer and sometimes hostile contact. Moreover, people everywhere are complaining about homogenization—that everywhere one goes one sees that same Wal-Marts, the same McDonald’ses, the same Hollywood films and so on. Is this just American forcing its way down everyone’s throat, as its critics insist? Or is something else happening here? #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

The answer, as we have seen, is that there are two Americas. It is yesterday’s mass-production America, not tomorrow’s de-massified America, that we see reflected in the drive toward homogeneity. Mass production, as we have noted, provides economies of scale to those who make or sell the same one-size-fits-all product over and over again, with as little change as possible. The reason is that altering a traditional assembly-line product is inordinately expensive. Thousands of workers may be forced to stand around and wait as the line is retooled—while the clock ticks and overhead costs continue to pile up. By contrast, to chance a product on a “smart” assembly line may require little more than a few new lines of software code. All the workers may have to do is push a button. The result has been to make variety economical, as seen in the tremendous diversity of brands, types, models, sizes and materials on store shelves. In short, as the costs of customization decline toward zero, and as people become more individuated, the drive toward uniformity will be replaced by its opposite—increasing diversity. Because waves of change overlap and, even in the United States of America, the revolutionary wealthy system is not yet fully developed, the United States of America still exports and advertises mass products and services. However, increasingly it is shifting to mass customization on its way to fully de-massified output designed for increasingly individual customers. Once upon a time a coffee shop offered only one or two choices. Starbucks outlets may look homogeneous, but they now provide customizers with dozens of possible blends and varieties. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Nike allows online customers to design their own sneakers, choosing among thousands of colour combination and adding their name or other words to the design. Enjoy M&Ms? You can now go online and put a short phrase on one side of your candy’s shell. Even the staid U.S.A. Post Office has experimented with allowing customers to put their own choice of a picture on the stamps they purchase—their baby’s face, for example. All these are halting steps toward truly personalized production—the opposite of the homogenization offered by industrial-era companies. A particularly interesting case is that of Spider-Man. When the America comic book based on that superhero was licensed for publication in India, the central characters and their backgrounds were altered to accommodate the religious sensitivities of Indian audiences. The hero was renamed so that Peter Parker the New York become Pavire Prabhkar of Mumbai. However, the more important change lay in the explanation of how Pavitr supposedly got his superhuman powers. While in the American version Peter’s capacities are enhanced by radio-active means, in India he is super-empowered by religious means. The hero gets his power from a yogi who performs a ritual on him…and the villain is a demon from the Hindu pantheon of gods. In short, cultural homogenization is the message of a fast-fading, mass production in America. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

Heterogeneity, de-massification and personalization are the messages of a fast-rising new America that both needs and breeds diversity. And not just in goods and comic books. Third Wave media also improve access to an endless diversity of ideas, values, lifestyles and points of view, including every conceivable political ideology and cultural variant. That is why China, for example, despites its twin-track strategy, is still censoring and manipulating what most of its citizens can receive on the Internet. The serious question today is not how much homogeneity the United States of America suppress. The United States of America may currently be the World’s sole superpower. However, it faces constraints and complexities no previous superpower confronted—or imagined. Acting in its own perceived—and often mis perceived—self-interest, the United States of America has, with the rise of revolutionary wealth, helped form a new, multi-level global order very different from the one its last-generation leaders anticipated. Start with the World’s new, unseen and unprecedented game of games. The future of revolutionary wealth in our pockets and on the planet will be determined not just by the interplay of markets. Who gets what and who makes what have never, except occasionally in theory, been determined by markets alone. Wealth everywhere is shaped by power, culture, politics and the state. At the World level in recent centuries, nations have been the primary actors, but that may change. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Near the surface of the Earth, there is as much room underground as there is above it. This is usually ignored, because the room is full of dirt, rock, pressurized water, and the like. Digging is expensive. Digging long, deep tunnels is even more expensive. This expense, however, is mostly in the cost of equipment, materials, and energy. Tunneling machines are in wide use today, and molecular manufacturing can make them more efficient and less expensive. The energy to operate them will be no great problem, and smart materials can line tunnels as fast as they are dug, with little or no labour. Nanotechnology will open the lower frontier. With a little care, the environmental impact of a deep tunnel can be trivial. Instead of a solid rock far below the surface, there is rock with a sealed tunnel running through it. Nothing nearby need be disturbed. Tunnels avoid both the aesthetic impact of a sky full of noisy aircraft and the environmental impact of paving strips of landscape.  This will make them less expensive than roads, and they can, if desired, be more common than roads in the developed World today. They will even permit faster transportation. Japan and Germy are actively developing magnetic trains, like those in the Desert Rose scenario. These avoid the limitations of steel wheels on steel rails by using magnetic forces to “fly” the train along a special track. Magnetic forces to “fly” the train along a special track. Magnetic trains can reach aircraft speeds at ground level. On long runs through evacuated tunnels, they can reach spacecraft speeds, traveling global substantial acceleration).  Systems like this can give “taking the subway” a new meaning. Local transformation would be at fast automotive speeds, but long-distance transportation would be faster than the Concorde. With superconducting electrical systems, fast subways would be more energy-efficient than today’s slow mass transit. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21

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Closely related to the problem of exploitation and use, even though even more complicated, is the problem of authority in the twenty-first century man. Authority refers to an interpersonal relation in which one person looks upon another as someone superior to one. When we consider time, the difference is again either between the instinctive and the intellectual centers or between the moving and the intellectual. However, we are so accustomed to these phenomena that we rarely think how strange and incomprehensible they are. Of course, for a man who have never thought about himself and never tried to study himself, there is nothing strange in this or in any thing else. However, in reality, from the point of view of ordinary physiology, these phenomena look almost miraculous. A physiologist knows how many complicated processes must be gone through between swallowing cranberry juice or a glass of water and feeling its effects. Every substance entering the body by the way of mouth has to be analyzed, tried in several different ways, and only then accepted or rejected. And all this happens in one second or less. It is a miracle, and at the same time it is not. For, it we know the difference in the speed of centers and remember that the instinctive center, which has to do this work, has 30,000 times more time than the intellectual center by which we measure our ordinary time, we can understand how it may happen. It means that the instinctive center has not one second, but about eight hours of its own time for this work, and in eight hours this work can certainly be done in an ordinary laboratory without any unnecessary haste. So our idea of the extraordinary speed of this work is purely an illusion which we have because we think that our ordinary time, or the time of the intellectual center, is the only time which exists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

Therefore, time has a sense of authority. Now, we must try to understand another characteristic of centers in which will later give us very good material for self-observation and for work upon ourselves. It is supposed that each center is divided into two parts, positive and negative. This division is particularly clear in the intellectual center and in the instinctive center. All the work of the intellectual center is divided into two parts: affirmation and negation; yes and no. In every moment of out thinking, either one outweighs the other or they come to a moment of equal strength in indecision. The negative part of the intellectual center is as useful as the positive part, and any diminishing of the strength of the one in relation to the other results in mental disorders. In the work of the instinctive center the division is also quite clear, and both parts, positive and negative, or pleasant and unpleasant, are equally necessary for a right orientation in life. Pleasant sensations of taste, smell, touch, temperature, warmth, coolness, fresh air-all indicate conditions which are beneficial for life; and unpleasant sensations of bad taste, bad smell, unpleasant touch, feeling of oppressive heat or extreme cold, all indicate conditions which can be harmful to life. It may definitely be said that no true orientation in life is possible without both pleasant and unpleasant sensations. They are the real guidance of all animal life on the Earth and any defect in them results in a lack of orientation and a consequent danger of illness and death. Think how quickly a man would poison himself if he lost all sense of taste and smell, or if, in some unnatural way, he conquered in himself a natural disgust of unpleasant sensations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

In the moving center the division into two parts, positive and negative, has only a logical meaning; that is, movement as opposed to rest. It has no meaning for practical observation. In the emotional center, at a first glance, the division is quite simple and obvious. If we take pleasant emotions such as joy, sympathy, affection, self-confidence, as belonging to the positive part, and unpleasant emotions such as boredom, irritation, jealousy, envy, fear, as belonging to the negative part, things will look very simple; but in reality they are much more complicated. To begin with, in the emotional center there is no natural negative part. The greater part of negative emotions are artificial; they do not belong to the emotional center proper and are based on instinctive emotions which are quite unrelated to them but which are transformed by imagination and identification. This is the real meaning of the theory of James and Lange, at one time very well known. They insisted that all emotions were really sensations of changes in inner organs and tissues, changes which took place before sensations, and were the actual cause of sensations. That really meant that external events and inner realizations did not produce emotions. External events and inner realizations produced inner reflexes which produced sensations; and these were interpreted as emotions. At the same time, positive emotions such as “love,” “hope,” “faith,” in the sense in which they are usually understood—that is, as permanent emotions—are impossible for a man in the ordinary states of consciousness. They require higher states of consciousness; they require inner unity, self-consciousness, permanent “I,” and will. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Positive emotions are emotions which cannot become negative. However, all our pleasant emotions such as joy, sympathy, affection, self-confidence, can, at any moment, turn into boredom, irritation, envy, fear, and so on. Love can turn into jealousy or fear to lose what one loves, or into anger and hatred; hope can turn into daydreaming and the expectation of the impossible things, and faith can turn into superstition and a weak acceptance of comforting nonsense. Even a purely intellectual emotion—the desire for knowledge—or an aesthetic emotion—that is, a feeling of beauty or harmony—if it becomes mixed with identification, immediately unites with emotions of a negative kind such as self-pride, vanity, selfishness, conceit, and so on. So we can say without any possibility of mistake that we can have no positive emotions. At the same time, in actual fact, we have no negative emotions which exist without imagination and identification. Of course it cannot be denied that besides the many and varied kinds of physical suffering which belong to the instinctive center, man has many kinds of mental suffering which belong to the emotional center. He has many sorrows, griefs, fears, apprehensions, and so on which cannot be avoided and are as closely connected with man’s life as illness, pain, and death. However, these mental sufferings are very different from negative emotions which are based on imagination and identification. These emotions are a terrible phenomenon. They occupy an enormous place in our life. Of many people it is possible to say that all their lives are regulated and controlled, and in the end ruined, by negative emotion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Negative emotions do not help out orientation, they do not give us any knowledge, they do not guide us in any sensible manner. On the contrary, they spoil all our pleasures, they make life a burden to us, and they very effectively prevent our possible development because there is nothing more mechanical in our life than negative emotions. Negative emotions can never come under our control. People who think they can control their negative emotions and manifest them when they want to, simply deceive themselves. Negative emotions depend on identification; if identification is destroyed in some particular case, they disappear. The strangest and most fantastic fact about negative emotions is that people actually worship them. I think that, for an ordinary mechanical man, the most difficult thing to realize is that hos own and other people’s negative emotions have no value whatever and do not contain anything noble, anything beautiful, or anything strong. In reality negative emotions contain nothing but weakness and very often the beginning of hysteria, insanity, or crime. The only good thing about them is that, being quite useless and artificially created by imagination and identification, they can be destroyed without any loss. And this is the only chance of escape that man has. If negative emotions were useful or necessary for any, even the smallest, purpose, and if they were a function of a really existing part of the emotional center, man would have no chance because no inner development is possible so long as man keeps his negative emotions. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In life we need to have great control of our emotions. When people are angry, they may not realize how unlike themselves they are being. The goal, therefore, is to prevent from becoming easy by using strategies. The general principle for sequential-moves in life is that each individual should figure out the other individuals’ future responses, and use them in calculating one’s own best current move. So important is this idea that it is worth codifying into a basic rule of strategic behaviour. Look ahead and reason back. Anticipate where your initial decisions will ultimately lead, and use this information to calculate your best choice. In the Charlie Brown story, this was easy to do for anyone (except Charlie Brown). He had just two alternatives, and one of them led to Lucky’s decision between two possible actions. Most strategic situations involve a longer-sequence of decisions with several alternatives at each, and mere verbal reasoning cannot keep track of them. Successful application of visual aid can be helpful in coming up with a plan. For instance, travelers from Princeton to New York have several choices. The first decision point involves selecting the mode f travel: bus, train, or car. Those who drive then have to choose among the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, the Holland Tunnel, the Lincoln Tunnel, and the George Washington Bridge. Rail commuters must decide whether to switch to the PATH train Newark or continue to Penn Station. Once in New York, rail and bus commuters must choose among going by foot, subway (local express), bus, or taxi to get to their final destination. The best choice depends on many factors, including price, speed, expected congestion, the final destination in New York, and one’s aversion to breathing the air on the Jersey Turnpike. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Drawing a road map would help. One which describes one’s options at each junction, looks like a tree with its successively emerging branches—hence the term “decision tree.” The right way to use such a map or a tree is not to take the route whose first branch looks best and then “cross the Verrazano Bridge when you get to it.” Instead, you anticipate the future decision and use them to make your earlier choices. For example, if you are commuting to the World Trade Center, the PATH train would be superior to driving because it offers a direct connection from Newark. We can use just such a tree to depict the choices in a life strategy, but one new element enters the picture. Life has many people and variables. At various branching points along the tree, it may be the turn of different players to make the decision. A person making a choice at an earlier point must look ahead, not just to one’s own future choices, but to those of others. One must forecast what the others will do, by putting oneself figuratively in their shoes, and thinking as they would think. General Electric (GE) makes electricity-distribution equipment in Salisbury, North Carolina. The plant is a model that GE wants to replicate at three hundred other factory locations. In the past, if a piece of equipment malfunctioned, a machine operator like Bob Hedenskog would have had to report it to his foreman and wait for help. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Today Hedenskog makes the necessary decisions himself. He telephones a GE engineer in Plainville, Connecticut, for advice and takes responsibility for repair. On his own initiative he has ordered $40,000 worth of replacement parts, which he anticipated his machinery would need. He is part of a group of about seventy-five employees who, through committees of their own, make production, scheduling, and even some hiring decisions. Together they have cut worker-hours per unit of production by two thirds, and have slashed the time to customer delivery by 90 percent. Some workers quit when this system was introduced, explaining that they did not want to carry the additional responsibility it entailed. However, employee turnover has fallen from 15 percent in the first year of the new system’s operation to 6 percent four years later. Similar stories are flowing in from all parts of the high-tech World. Ford Australia recently built its EA Falcon with an innovative work system that, contradicts the traditional Western way of assuring quality—namely, that management check the output of workers who are following engineers’ minutely detailed instructions. Ford concluded that detecting defects first and correcting them later was not working. Only by allowing workers more discretion—no longer preprogramming their every move—could the goal of zero defects be approached. And this means recognizing the power of the operators right down to the shop floor level. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

At the Mazda Motor Manufacturing factory Huntsville, Alabama, ordinary plant workers get three weeks of training, including session on psychology. A small group of new hires are given six minutes to dream up twenty-five ideas on how to improve the common garden-variety bathtub, and then get only two minutes to come up with thirty more suggestions. Mazda is trying to loosen people up and unblock them. After the initial three weeks, workers spend additional weeks on more job-specific training. Mazda estimates it spends $15,000 to hire and train the average employee. These increasingly commonplace accounts underscore the historic shift currently taking place from “manufacture” to “mentifacture”—the progressive replacement of muscle by mind in the wealth creation process. However, by giving employees more say-so over the details of their work is only the tip of a more significant iceberg. To put this power shift into perspective, it is helpful to read the early history of the industrial revolution in England and Western Europe, and the complaints made by the earliest employers about the fecklessness, unreliability, drunkenness, and ignorance of the agrarian people from whom the early factor work force was drawn. Every society imposes it own distinct work discipline or “regimen.” Workers are supposed to obey certain rules, often unspoken. Their performance on the job is monitored, policed, and a structure of power is in place to enforce the rules. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

If First Wave or agricultural societies, most peasants toiled endlessly, yet barely survived. This agrarian work force, organized into family production teams, followed a regimen set by the rhythms of season, sunrise, and sunset. If a peasant was absent or lazy, his own relatives disciplined him. They might ostracize him, beat him, or cut his food rations. The family itself was the dominant institution in society, and, exceptions aside, it imposed the work regimen. Its dominance over the individual family member was reinforced by social pressures from the villagers. Local elites might hold the power of life and death over the peasanty. Tradition might restrict social, pleasures of the flesh, and religions behaviour. The less affluent often suffered the cruelest hunger and poverty. And yet in their daily work lives they seemed less minutely restricted than those in the small but growing industrial labour force. The agrarian work regimen had lasted for millennia, and until only a century or two ago, the vast majority of human beings knew no other and assumed it to be the only logical and enteral way of organizing work. Even the most positive aspects of one’s work situation do not alter the fact that one’s work is alienated and only to a limited extent a meaningful expression of one’s energy and reason; furthermore, the trend for increasing automatization of industrial work diminishes this latter factor rapidly. Eventually, one is under the influence of our whole cultural apparatus, the advertisements, movies, television, newspapers, just as everybody else, and can hardly escape being driven into conformity, although perhaps more slowly than other sectors of the population. What holds true for the industrial worker holds true also for the farmer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

We describe a complex system, whether adaptive or not, as a population of agents. The agents are instances of various possible types. And the population has mechanisms that create, destroy, and transform the agents. Death is the most obvious transforming mechanism, destroying agents and possibly destroying a type if all its instances die, as happened to the dinosaurs. Birth creates new agents. Death and birth processes apply not only to biological entities but also to organizational entities such as companies and political units. In the simplest case, copying can be understood as the most primitive birth process. When it functions without error, the result is an increase in the frequency of one of the population types, whether the population is virus particles or documents. Copying is seldom perfect, however, although in the realm of digital technology it can now come very close. In the genetic case, mutation is a copying error that serves as an important source of variety. It can function to create new types, as well as to alter the relative frequencies of existing types. It is striking that many kinds of Complex Adaptive Systems have mechanism that function similarly to genetic mutation. For example, temperature in systems in which the elements have energy levels, such as the annealing of metals, also functions to “mutate” arrangements of atoms into new configurations. Process errors in factories and laboratories can have this same impact of creating new types. The ink-jet principle was accidentally discovered when a research laboratory syringe malfunctioned. There are many other processes that introduce “noise” into operations of copying or re-creation, thereby producing variants that are sometimes highly novel. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

These mechanisms tend to have certain properties in common. They introduce variation into a system from uncontrolled forces external to the system, such as radiation, external heat, or disruptions of quality control. As a result of the uncorrelated, exogeneous source of variation in types, most of the variants introduced into orderly systems by such processes are deleterious—with occasional small improvements and a sprinkling of very rare spectacular advances. Exploring for new possibilities by nearly random variation can therefore be expensive. In fact, random variation is even slower than enumerating all the possibilities, since random generation will add duplication. With ransom variation, you examine each piece in the haystack and put it back if not the needle, possibly to draw it again later. By contrast, there are a number of other mechanisms that produce new types or change in type frequencies in a more targeted, less random, fashion. They tend to be endogenous, triggered by events internal to the system in which they operate. In particular, selection creates copies of some agents or strategies from a population an eliminates copies of others. Simple selection has an important effect. Over time, it reduces the variety of types in a finite system, although in the beginning it may increase the relative frequency of some rare types. Neither copying nor deletion generates novel types (except through errors in copying). So when a personal computer manufacturer offers two models of its product, and consumers buy one enthusiastically, many new copies of the preferred design will be made. This is a kind of selection process. It will gradually result in the copies of the other design being a rare type in the product population, even though most of them may continue to function. If consumers abandon the machines of the less preferred design, their actions function like death in biological populations, reducing even further the relative frequency of that type. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

When an athlete decides to greet fellow players with a “high five” instead of a traditional handshake, the choice of behaviour is a form of selection, in this case selection by imitation. The agent replaces a current strategy with a new one copied from the actions of another agent—perhaps an athlete who is highly admired. No new agents are created, but one changes type. A succession of similar decision will transform the culture of greeting in the athlete population. In selection mechanism there are criteria at work in determining what types are copied and what types are replaced. Consumers evaluate one version of a product as being more desirable than another version. Athlete do the same for greeting gestures. Such evaluations require some kind of attribution of credit, either explicit (“the product is highly rated by a consumer magazine”) or implicit (popular athletes use the new greeting). We will devote more attention to the attribution of credit later on, but now is a good time to point out the relationship between the attribution of credit and the level of variety. If the selection among types favours more common types, then a type with a slightly frequent edge can grow quickly to become predominant in the population. The convention examples of this dynamic are the competition between the DVD and the BlueRay systems, and the competition between the QWERTY and Dvorak keyboard arrangements. Economists often refer to the benefits that accrue to an individual user from the sheer numbers of other users as network externalities. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

These examples illustrate their force in both accelerating convergence and reducing variety. When the type that is “in the lead” is best, and conditions are not changing, rapid convergence on standard is desirable. The convergence on a single type of video image player, or keyboard can unleash considerable benefits, especially where there are strong economies of scale. There can be more movies on video and more new computers introduced as a result. However, as we pointed out earlier, in changing conditions, or when types so far available are not the best possible, the loss of variety can become a serious problem. Intensive development of the possibilities inherent in BlueRay and Dvorak typing does not occur. New video player formats or keyboard layouts do not survive in the marketplace, even if they might be superior alternatives. In the industrial past, Britain, with an empire “on which the sun never set,” might buy cotton at depressed prices from one of its backward agrarian colonies—Egypt, say. It could ship the cotton to factories in Leeds or Lancaster, turn the cotton into clothes, then send these higher-value-added goods right back and sell them to Egyptians at artificially high process. The resultant “superporifts” were returned to England, where they helped finance additional factories. Britain’s great navy, troops and administrators protected its colonial markets from munity within and competition without. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Of course, this caricatures a far more complex process. However, a key to the imperial game was to keep the advanced technology of the time—textile factories, for example—in Leeds or Lancaster. Today, by contrast, as advanced economies become more knowledge-based, factories count for less. What increasingly matters is the knowledge on which they depend. Knowledge, however, does not stay put, as the growing Worldwide theft of intellectual property shows. And America, at least for now, is losing the fight to protect it. Nor is all economically valuable knowledge technological. Thus Alain Minc, the controversial former chairman of Le Monde, tears apart the view that the United States of America is anything like the Rome or Great Britain of the past. It is not an imperial power but, as he puts it, the first “World country.” And the mission of its universities, unlike that of Oxford and Cambridge, is not to train a national elite. It is, in his words, to transmit knowledge that would mode “the future leaders of the World.” Writing shortly before the post-9/11 tightening of U.S.A. immigration controls, Mnic points out that in the previous fifty years the number of foreign students in the United States of America multiplied seventeen times. He might have added that an increasing percentage of these now return home armed with the latest scientific and technological knowledge in fields as advanced as large-scale network integration, nanotechnology and genetics—not exactly what imperialists and neocolonialists were known for in the past. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Worldwide food production has been outpacing population growth, yet hunger continues. In recent years, famine has often had political roots, as in Ethiopia where the rulers aim to starve opponents into submission. Such problems are beyond a simple technological solution. To avoid getting headaches, we will also ignore the politics of farm price-support programs, which raise food prices while people are going hungry. All we can suggest here is a way to provide fresh food at lower cost with reduced environmental impact. For decades, futurists have predicted the coming of synthetic foods. Some sort of molecular-manufacturing process makes such things with lose costs, but to some they prefer natural grown food and produce. Most agriculture today is inefficient—an environmental disaster. Modern agriculture is famed for wasting water and polluting it with synthetic fertilizers, and for spreading herbicides and pesticides over the landscape. Yet the greatest environmental impact of agriculture is its sheer consumption of land. The prairies of the West disappeared under the plow, and the plowed lands are becoming subdivision for housing. Around the World, this trend continues. The technology of the ax, the fire, and the plow is chiefly responsible for the destruction of rain forests today. A growing population will tend to turn every productive ecosystem into some sort of farmland or grazing land, if we let it. No technological fix can solve the long-term problem of population growth. Nonetheless, we can roll back the problem of loss of land, yet increase food supplies. One approach is intensive greenhouse agriculture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Every kind of plant has its optimum growing conditions, and those conditions are far different from those found in most farmland during most of the year. Plants growing outdoors face insect pests, unless doused with pesticide, and low levels of nutrient, unless doused with fertilizer. In greenhouses patrolled by “nanoflyswatters” able to eliminate invading insects, plants would be protected from pests and could be provided with nutrients without contaminating the groundwater or runoff. Most plants prefer higher humidity than most climates provide. Most plants prefer higher, more uniform temperatures than typically found outdoors. What is more, plants thrive in high levels of carbon dioxide. Only greenhouses can provide pest protection, ample nutrients, humidity, warmth, and carbon dioxide all together and without reengineering the Earth. Taken together, these factors make a huge difference in agricultural productivity. Experiments with intensive greenhouse agriculture, performed by the Environmental Research Lab in Arizona, show that an area of 250 square meters—about the size of a tennis court—can raise enough food for one person, year in and year out. With molecular manufacturing to make inexpensive, reliable equipment, the intensive labour of intensive agriculture can be automated. With technology like the deployable “tents” and smart materials we have described, greenhouse construction can be inexpensive. Following the standard argument, with equipment costs, labour costs, materials costs, and so forth all expected to be low, greenhouse-grown food can be inexpensive. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

What does this mean for the environment? It means that the human race could feed itself with ordinary, naturally grown, pesticide-free foods while returning more than 90 percent of today’s agricultural land to wilds. With a generous five-hundred square meters per person, the U.S of A population would require only 3 percent of present U.S.A. farm acreage, freeing 97 percent for other uses, or for a gradual return to wilderness. When farmers are able to grow high-quality foodstuffs inexpensively, in fraction of the room that they require today, they will find more demand for their land to be tended as a park or wilderness than a cornfield. Farm journals can be expected to carry articles advising on techniques for rapid and aesthetic restoration of forest and grassland, and on how best to accommodate the desires of the discriminating nature lover and conservationist. Even “unpopular” land will tend to become popular with people seeking solitude. The economics of assembler-based manufacturing will remove the incentive to make greenhouses that are poor quality, unattractive, and boxy; the only reason to build that way today is the high cost of building anything at all. And while today’s greenhouses suffer from viral and fungal infestations, these could be eradicated from plants in the same way they would be from the human body.  A problem faced by today’s greenhouses—overheating—could be dealt with by using heat exchangers, thereby conserving the carefully balanced inside atmosphere. Finally, if it should turn out that a little bit of bad weather improves the taste of tomatoes, that, too, could be provided, since there would be no reason to be fanatical about sheer efficiency. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

In consideration of the disintegrative power of Technopoly, perhaps the most important contribution schools can make to the education of our youth is to give them a sense of coherence in their studies, a sense of purpose, meaning, and interconnectedness in what they learn. Modern secular education is failing not because it does not teach who Sarah L. Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, and a thousand other people are but because it has no moral, social, or intellectual center. There is no set of ideas or attitudes that permeates all parts of the curriculum. The curriculum is not, in fact, a “course of study” at all but a meaningless hodgepodge of subjects. It does not even put forward a clear vision of what constitutes an educated person, unless it is a person who possesses “skills.” In other words, a technocrat’s ideal—a person with no commitment and no point of view but with plenty of marketable skills. Of course, we must not overestimate the capability of schools to provide coherence in the face of a culture in which almost all coherence seems to have disappeared. In our technicalized, present-centered information environment, it is not easy to locate a rationale for education, let alone impart one convincingly. It is obvious, for example, that the schools cannot restore religion to the center of the life of learning. With the exception of a few people, perhaps, no one would take seriously the idea that learning is for the greater glory of God. It is equally obvious that the knowledge explosion has blown apart the feasibility of such limited but coordinated curriculums as, for example, a Great Books program. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Some people would have us stress love of country as a unifying principle in education. Experience has shown, however, that this invariably translates into love of government, and in practice becomes indistinguishable from what still is at the center of Russian and Chinese education. Some would put forward “emotional health” as the core of the curriculum. I refer here to a point of view something called Rogerian, sometimes Maslovian, which values above all else the development of one’s emotional life through the quest for one’s “real self.” Such an idea, of course, renders a curriculum irrelevant, since only “self-knowledge”—id est, one’s feelings—is considered worthwhile. Carl Rogers himself once wrote that anything that can be taught is probably either trivial or harmful, thus making any discussion of the schools unncecessary. However, beyond this, the culture is already so heavy with the burden of the glorification of “self” that it would be redundant to have the schools stress it, even if it were possible. However, it is humanity’s destiny to possession an ability to discovery of knowledge. Moreover, the arts and humanities must be part of our unending quest to gain a unified understanding of nature and our place in it. Thus, to chart the ascent of man called “the ascent of humanity,” we must join art and science. However, we must also join the past and the present, for ascent of humanity is above all a continuous story. It is, in fact, a story of creation, although not quite the one that the fundamentalists fight so fiercely to defend. It is the story of humanity’s creativeness in trying to conquer loneliness, ignorance, and disorder. And it certainly includes the development of various religious systems as a means of giving order and meaning to existence. In this context, it is inspiring to note that the Biblical version of creation, to the astonishment of everyone except possibly the fundamentalists, has turned out to be a near-perfect blend of artistic imagination and scientific intuition: the Big Bang theory of the creation of the Universe, now widely accepted by cosmologists, confirms in essential details what the Bible proposes as having been the case “in the beginning.” #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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If you listen, you can hear the sound of the Kingdom of God in the air as no generation has ever before. Economic differences, however, are not as important as they may seem. The “good time” of society’s upper strata is the fun model for those not yet able to pay for it while earnestly hoping for that happy eventuality—and the “good time” of the less affluent strata is increasingly more surrounded around family and home entertainment. There can sometimes be differing costs from the affluent, but the quality may be very similar. Variation provides the raw material for adaption. However, for an agent or population to take advantage of what has already been learned, some limits have to be placed on the amount of variety in the system. This leads us to consider, what is the right balance between variety and uniformity. When considering the workings of major mechanisms that affect balance, we treat Complex Adaptive System as a population of agents, and we begin by assuming that the agents are not all the same. Indeed, the variety within a population is a central requirement for adaptation. The surprising dynamics that occur in complex systems are often consequences of such variety, as when a long-reigning political coalition collapses with the arrival of what seemed to be a minor new participant. And the novelty or innovation that we may want to encourage will often stem for such variety, as when ideas about unmet customer needs and ideas about new technical possibilities come together in the conception of the new product. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

It is often tempting to assume that the agents of a system are basically all the same—all the birds in a flock, all the employees of a particular company, all the citizens of a foreign town. Such assumptions simplify subsequent analysis. So we mass-produce kitchen tables on the implicit assumption that the population of buyers are all about the same height. Manufacturers know this makes some problems for people who are actually very tall or very short, but ignoring those issues allows the manufacturers to attain production efficiencies without fears of incompatibility with standard chairs. If there are some resulting difficulties for end users, the seriously affected individuals can respond to them with custom modifications. Similarly, if an average family in a community has two children, it can be convenient for some analyses—say, of projected demand for schooling—to make forecasts by assuming that all families are the same. For many purpose, however, such an assumption would be a mistake. What if families of different ethnicity had different sizes? Then a change in neighbourhood ethnicity could change school demand even though the number of household remained constant. The designer of a new product, such as a video recorder or a bicycle, seeks a resign that most customers will use in conventional ways that will engender no usual problems. However, to design the product, its packing, and its instructions as though all its buyers will use it identically is generally not the best strategy. Designers need to anticipate multiple categories of use and then either target the new product to a single category or design it to meet multiple requirements. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The Complex Adaptive Systems approach, with its premise that agents are diverse, is well suited to design projects such as the video recorder and the bicycle. It builds in the default assumption that there is a variety within a population that could matter. Simplifications still can be made, of course. However, the issue of variation is at the forefront of the analysis rather than in the background. The actions available to policy maker and designers who want to shape the behaviour of a Complex Adaptive System often work not just by accommodating variety; they can also work by actually increasing (or decreasing) the variety of agents in the population, or the variety of product design ideas under discussion, or the ethnic variety of housing purchasers. Variety turns up repeatedly in complex systems as a crucial factor in their development. However, the situation is not always so simple as saying that homogeneity is bad and variety is good. In an ever-changing World, agents that are not currently best may be a resource for the future. Parts of them may be crucial at a later time. For example, monoculture takes a great risk by eliminating the genetic variety in a crop. Without genetic variety, the introduction of a new parasite can wreak havoc. Even if the environment is unchanging, if the vest agents in the population up to this moment are far from the best possible, variation in agents may be valuable. In both these cases when the World is changing or the current agents are far from the best possible, variety can have value, and homogeneity may be a hinderance. A designer or policy maker confronting a Complex Adaptive System should therefore ask a central question: What is the right balance for uniformity? #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Focusing on variety in this way requires additional assistance to clear thought. Real families in a community or real product users can present wildly varying blends of characteristics. Some of these matter and some do not. Which characteristics matter is partly a function of what goals are being pursed. The variable heights of video recorder buyers are presumably not consequential. However, height could matter for a bicycle. Variation in ethnicity of buyers may not matter much for the design of a bicycle, but it may matter for the written instructions on how to program a new video recorder if variation in ethnicity entail differences in languages. When variety is significant, we need to be able to talk about subpopulations. We need to analyze their differences without losing track of the possibility that there are many other differences we are temporarily ignoring. Some of the potential buyers of our new video recorder may only want to play movies with it, while others might only want to record daytime shows for evening viewing. Some might be native speakers of Japanese. Some might know English as a second language. A type is a category of agents within the larger population who share some detectable combination of features. The notion of type facilitates the analysis of variety that our framework so often requires. Commonly, we distinguish types by some aspects of the agents’ properties or behaviours that are observable, either by other agents in the population or by outside analysts. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Examples of types: tall, average, or short customers for a consumer product; individuals who have not been infected by a particular virus, who have the symptoms of the disease, or who have recovered and are immune; molecules with a shape that matches a receptor on the surface of a group of biological cells, and molecules lacking that shape; viewers of a cable weather channel who are “forecast drop-ins,” “general-weather-interested,” or “storm obsessed”; invasive computer programs that are classified as “viruses,” “Trojans,” “droppers,” or “worms.” It is possible that some computer viruses may even be naturally manifested in outer space because of interferences from the electromagnetic field. Many type distinctions are endogenous—actively developed and used within the population by member agents themselves. In our disease example above, the general public may detect two types, the symptomatic and asymptomatic. Using these types, an individual agent may gain tremendously because its action can be conditional. Contacts with those who are obviously symptomatic can be avoided, significantly reducing the chances of acquiring the infection. However, notice that this works only if the individual can use symptoms to pick out those to be avoided while interacting with the rest. Rarely can a person make such discriminations perfectly. The symptoms a person can detect are, after all, only approximate indicators for the actual condition of other individuals. (Some with the flu may be trying valiantly to get through the day without appearing sick.) So the concept of detectably symptomatic individuals induces types in the population that are correlated with benefit to the individual, but not perfectly correlated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

The spread of the infectious microbe induces an observer of the system, such as a public health official, to subdivide the population into three types: those who have not been infected but can be, those infected, and those who have recovered and have immunity. Types are not given from on high but are defined by actors within the system. To take another example, police would like to pick out drivers they cannot be sure of that intoxication before an accident occurs. Blood levels of alcohol cannot be observed as traffic passes by. Erratic driving can be observed, so those cars can be stopped. Some stopped cars with a high-blood alcohol driver will pass by. The police officer’s test, erratic driving, divides the population into types, those who can be stopped and those who cannot. It predicts blood alcohol levels only imperfectly. For example, some drivers may perform unsafely with blood alcohol concentrations below the legal limit (which may cause the driver to be cited for driving under the influence, which can lead to them being arrested). Here we have a tangled set of categories used by the actors within the system. Each of the working categories (or type definitions) only approximates the issues of actual concern. Many examples of complex systems have the property that the population contains at least some agents, such as the disease-avoiders or police officers, whose actions are conditional on aspects of the other agents that they can detect. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

At a border crossing the detection of a fraudulent passport can spell the difference between freedom and prison. This is an example of how a small difference related to a condition can or trigger a large difference in subsequent actions. For this reason, conditional action can result in consequences that are not smoothly proportional to causes, so-called nonlinear dynamics. So far we have used examples in which agents in the population or outside analysts employ similar distinctions to divide populations into types. Distinctions can also be made that are completely external to the population. They may be suggested because they correspond usefully to some differences in the population that matter, even though the actions of agents in the population may not necessarily be conditional on the differences. So, for example, a product designer might want to suggest that there could be two types of buyers for the proposed video recorder: perhaps “movie renters” and “time shifters.” The designer need not content that real consumers classify themselves this way. The distinction may be offered to highlight that these different kinds of users have different kinds of uses have different needs for the controls on the device. A pure movie watcher might have no need for the elaborate systems to program recording that begins and ends automatically, nor even for a clock. A pure time shifter might need those capabilities and many more. Designers might debate if these are useful types to distinguish, whether or not consumers make the proposed distinction themselves. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

And though real consumers might rarely fall into one of the pure categories, the distinction may help designers think about the potential market. Perhaps they will want to consider introducing a cheaper, simplified machine that only plays prerecorded films. In the surprising World of contemporary consumer electronics, the low-end version might just be the full-featured machine with some features disabled. This can be a way of charging different types of customers different prices. Such price discrimination can rise profits even when the more cost-effective machines cost somewhat more to manufacture with turned-off features. Whether this will work requires designers and marketers to analyze the detailed pattern of consumer types. Here are the five important aspects to the notion of types: Types are generally defined by some detectable features of the agents in the population; many other dimensions of variety in the population may persist in the population without being recognized as types by the agents themselves; the features that distinguish types usually provide only an imperfect indicator for the actual differences in action among the agents in the population; types are often endogenous in complex system—agents within the population may detect types and act conditionally (and even change type definitions if the system is adaptive); and types can be exogenous as well—defined only in the minds of those analyzing a Complex Adaptive System the outside. The notion of type will help us to analyze the sources and contributions of variety by considering how systems create, destroy, and modify types. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Conduct a poll around the globe, and you will find a vast number of people who believe that America’s great wealth has been squeezed or stolen from the World’s poor. This assumption can often be found behind the slogans chanted by anti-American and anti-globalization protestors. However, the same questionable premise also lies behind a recent torrent of seemingly scholarly books and articles claiming that the United States of America is new Rome—the latest example of classical imperialism—or that it is, as the Chinese prefer to put it, the new hegemon. The problem with these analogies is that they do not fit the twenty-first century model of the United States of America. If America is such a rich and powerful hegemon, how come nearly 33 percent of the U.S. Treasury bonds were owned by other nations as of November 2022? Was that the case when Rome ruled much of the World, or when England did? Why has not the United States of America sent permanent settlers to the various countries that it presumably dominates? Rome did. The Spaniards did. The British, French, Germans and Italians did, all across Africa. The Japanese did in Asia. Exactly what America university trains an elite class of colonial administrator to spend their lives ruling over remote regions, as Oxford and Cambridge did? And where is there a clamour among Americans for a long-term military occupation of another country? The United States of America is powerful and surely makes its weight felt around the World. However, there is something wrong about the way America—and the World—is pictured and understood here. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Critics are still thinking in terms of the agrarian and industrial past. With the increased of knowledge-intensivity, the entire global game has different rules and different players. And so has the future of wealth. It a recurring theme in the cartoon strip “Peanuts,” Lucy holds a football on the ground and invites Charlie Brown to run up and kick it. At the last moment, Lucy pulls the ball away. Charlie Brown, kicking air, lands on his back, and this gives Lucy great perverse pleasure. Anyone could have told Charlie that he should refuse to play Lucy’s game. Even if Lucy had not played this particular trick on him last year (and the year before and the year before that), he knows her character from other contexts and should be able to predict her action. At the time when Charlie is deciding whether or not to accept Lucy’s invitation, her action lies in the future. However, just because it lies in the future does not mean Charlie should regard it as uncertain. He should know that of the two possible outcomes—letting him kick and seeing him fall—Lucky’s preference is for the latter. Therefore he should forecast that when the time comes, she is going to pull the ball away. The logical possibility that Lucy will let him kick the ball is realistically irrelevant. Reliance on it would be a sort of remarriage, a triumph of hope over experience. Charlie should disregard it, and forecast that acceptance will inevitably land him on his back. He should decline Lucy’s invitation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The essence of a game of strategy is the interdependence of the players’ decisions. These interactions arise in two ways. The first is sequential, as in the Charlie Brown story. The players make alternative moves. Each player, when it is one’s turn, must look ahead to how one’s current actions will affect the future actions of others, and one’s own future actions in turn. The second kind of interaction is simultaneous, as in the prisoners’ dilemma tale we discussed in the past. The players act at the same time, in unenlightenment of the others’ current actions. However, each must be aware that there are other active players, who in turn are similarly aware, and so on. Therefore each must figuratively put oneself in the shoes of all, and try to calculate the outcome. One’s own best action is an integral part of this overall calculation. When you find yourself playing a strategic game, you must determine whether the interaction is simultaneous or sequential. Some gams such as football have elements of both. Then you must fit your strategy to the context. The story of Charlie Brown is a preliminary way of ideas and rules that will help one play sequential games. Stories are not for great importance in themselves, and the right strategies are usually easy to see by simple intuition, so the underling idea stand out that much more clearly. During the years spent working as a factory and foundry worker, we put in time on an auto assembly line. Even now, more than a third of a century later, it is impossible to forget what it felt like—especially the harrowing impact of the speedup. Every day, from the moment the bell started our shift, we workers raced to do our repetitive jobs while desperately trying to keep pace with the car bodies moving past us on the clanking, fast-jerking conveyor. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The company was forever trying to accelerate the line. Suppressed rage so filled the plant that every once in a while, for no apparent reason, an eerie wordless wail would issue from the throats of hundreds of workers, swell into a keening, ear-knifing sound as it was picked up and passed from department to department, then fade away into the clatter and roar of the machines. As the cars sped past we were supposed to prepare them for the paint shop, hammering out dents and dings, and grinding them smooth. However, the bodies flew by before we could do a good job. After they left us, they passed in front of inspectors who chalk-circled the remaining problems to be cleaned up afterward. Eight or ten hours a day of this was enough to numb us to any calls for “quality.” Somewhere there were “managers”—men in white shirts and ties. However, we had almost no contact with them. The power of these men in white shirts came not merely from our need for a paycheck, but from their superior knowledge about the factory, its goals, procedures, or plans. By contrast, we knew almost nothing about our job, except the few preprogrammed steps necessary to do it. Apart from exhortations to work harder, we received almost no information from the company. We were the last to find out if a shop or plant was to be closed down. We were given no information about the market or the competition. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We were told nothing about the new products soon to be introduced, or new machines. We were supposed to take on faith that our superiors knew that they were doing. We were expected to show up on time, work, keep our muscle moving and our mouths shut. Even with a strong union in place, we felt powerless. A faceless “they” had us in their power. They were the men in white shirts. Managers. We were, during our work shift, citizens of a totalitarian state. We are reminded of these experiences as reports arrive almost daily describing the newest plants now going up. For power is shifting in the workplace, and things will never be the same. Building large objects is basic to solving problems of housing and transportation. Smart materials can help. Today, buildings are expensive to construct, require a big-budget to replace, and high-cost to make fireproof, tornado-proof, earthquake-proof, and so forth. Making buildings tall is pricey; making walls soundproof is costly; building underground is exorbitant. Efforts to relieve city congestion often founder on the high cost of building subways, which can amount to hundreds of millions of dollars per mile. Building codes and political permitting, nanotechnology will make possible revolutions in the construction of buildings. Superior materials will make it easy to construct tall (or deep) buildings to free up land, and strong buildings that can ride out the greatest earthquake without harm. Buildings can be made so energy-efficient and so good at using the solar energy falling on them that most are not energy producers. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

What is more, smart materials can make it easy to build and modify complex structures, such as walls full of windows, wiring, plumbing, data networks, and the like. For a concrete example that shows the principle, let us picture what smart pipes could be like. Let us say that you want to install a fold-down sink in the corner of your bedroom. The new materials make fold-down sinks practical, and in a house made of advanced smart materials, just sticking one on the wall would be enough—the plumbing would rearrange itself. However, this is an antiquated, pre-breakthrough house, so the sink is a retrofit. To do this home-handiwork project, you buy several boxes full of inexpensive tubing, T-joints, valves, and fixtures in a variety of sizes, all as light as wood veneer and feeling like soft rubber. The biggest practical problem will be to make a hole from an existing water pipe and drainpipe to where you want the sink. Molecular manufacturing can provide excellent power tools to make the holes, and smart pain and plaster to cover them again, but the details depend on how your house is built. The smart plumbing system does help, of course. If you want to run the brain line through the attic, built-in pumps will make sure that the water flows properly. The flexibility of the pipes makes it much easier to run them around curves and corners. Low-cost power makes it practical for the sink to have a flow-through water heater, so you only need to run a cold-water pipe to have both hot and cold water. All the parts go together as easily as a child’s blocks, and seem about as flimsy and likely to leak. When you turn it on, though, the microscopic components of the pipes lock together and become as strong as steel. And smart plumbing does not leak. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Smart plumbing is one example of a general pattern. Molecular manufacturing can eventually make complex products at low cost, and those complex products can be simpler to use than anything we have today, freeing our attention for other concerns. Buildings can become easy to make and easy to change. The basic conveniences of the modern World, and more, can be carried to the ends of the Earth and installed by the people there to suit their tastes. There are a hundred other things to remember that may help one to warm to the United States of America, including the fact that it has been, and perhaps always will be, a series of experiments that the World watches with wonder. Three such experiments are of particular importance. The fist, undertaken toward the end of the eighteenth century, posed the question, “Can a nation allow the greatest possible degree of political and religious freedom and still retain a sense of identity and purpose?” Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, a second great experiment was undertaken, posing the question, “Can a nation retain a sense of cohesion and community by allowing into it people from all over the World? And now comes the third—the great experiment of Technopoly—which poses the question, “Can a nation preserve its history, originality, and humanity by submitting itself totally to the sovereignty of a technological thought-World? If there is an awareness of and resistance to the dangers of Technopoly, there is a reason to hope that the United States of America may yet survive its Ozymandias-like hubris and technological promiscuity. Which brings me to the “resistance fighter” part of my principle. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

 Those who resist the American Technopoly are people: who pay no attention to a poll unless they know what questions were asked, and why; who refuse to accept efficiency as the pre-eminent goal of human relations; who have freed themselves from the belief in the magical powers of numbers, do not regard calculation as an adequate substitute for judgement, or precision as a synonym for truth; who refuse to allow psychology or any “social science” to pre-empt the language and thought of common sense; who are, at least, suspicious of the idea of progress, and who do not regard the aged as irrelevant; who take seriously the meaning of family loyalty and honour, and who, when they “reach out and touch someone,” expect that person to be in the same room; who take the great narratives of religion seriously and who do not believe that science is the only system of thought capable of producing truth; who know the difference between the sacred and the profane, and who do not wink at tradition for modernity’s sake.; who admire technology ingenuity but do not think it represents the highest possible form of human achievement. A resistance fighter understands that technology must never be accepted at part of the natural order of things, that every technology—from an IQ test to an automobile to a television set to a computer—is a product of a particular economic and political context and carries with it a program, an agenda, and a philosophy that may or may not be life-enhancing and that therefore require scrutiny, criticism, and control. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

In short, a technological resistance fighter maintains an epistemological and psychic distance from any technology, so that it always appears somewhat strange, never inevitable, never natural. I can say no more than this, for each person must decide how to enact these ideas. However, it is possible that one’s education may help considerably not only in promoting the general conception of a resistance fighter but in helping the young to fashion their own ways of giving it expression. Education is very important, but also so are political action and social policy in offering opposition to Technopoly. There are even now signs that Technopoly is understood as a problem to which laws and policies might serve as a response—in the environmental movement, in the contemplation of legal restrictions on computer technology, in a developing distrust of medical technology, in reactions against widespread testing, in various efforts to restore a sense of community cohesion. However, in the United States of America, whenever we need a revolution, we get a new curriculum. School, to be sure, is a technology itself, but of a special kind in that, unlike most technologies, it is customarily and persistently scrutinized, criticized, and modified. It is America’s principle instrument for correcting mistakes and for addressing problems that mystify and paralyze other social institutions. The center of gravity of the intellectual center is in the brain; the center of gravity of the emotional center is in the solar plexus; the centers of gravity of the moving and instinctive centers are in the spinal cord. It must be understood that in the present state of scientific knowledge we have no means of verifying this statement, chiefly because each center includes in itself many properties which are still unknow to ordinary science and even to anatomy. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

It may sound strange, but the fact is that anatomy of the human body is far from being a completed science. So the study of centers, which are hidden from us, must begin with the observation of their functions, which are quite open for our investigation. This is quite a usual course. In the different sciences—physics, chemistry, astronomy, physiology—when we cannot reach the facts or objects or matters we wish to study, we have to begin with an investigation of their results or traces. In this case we shall be dealing with the direct functions of centers; so all that we establish about functions can be applied to centers. All the centers have much in common and, at the same time, each center has its own peculiar characteristics which must always be kept in mind. One of the most important principles that must be understood in relation to centers is the great difference in their speed, that is, a difference in the speeds of their functions. The slowest is the intellectual center. Next to it—although very much faster—stand the moving and instinctive centers, which have more or less the same speed The fastest of all is the emotional center, though in the state of “waking sleep” it works only very rarely with anything approximating to its real speed, and generally works with the speed of the instinctive and moving centers. Observations can help us to establish a great difference in the speeds of functions, but they cannot give us the exact figures. In reality the difference is very great, greater than one can imagine as being possible between functions of the same organism. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

With our ordinary means we cannot calculate the difference in the speed of centers, but, if we are told what it is, we can find many facts which will confirm not the figures but the existence of the enormous difference. So before bringing in figures, I want to speak about ordinary observation which can be made without any special knowledge. Try, for instance, to compare the speed of mental processes with moving functions.  Try to observe yourself when you have to perform many quick simultaneous movements, as when driving a car in a very crowded street, or riding fast on a bad road, or doing any work requiring quick judgment and quick movements. You will see at once that you cannot observe all your movement. You will either have to slow them  down or miss the greater part of your observations; otherwise you will risk an accident and probably have one if you persist in observing. There are many similar observations which can be made, particularly on the emotional center, which is still faster. Every one of us really has many observations on the different speeds of our functions, but only very rarely do we know the value of our observations and experiences. Only when we know the principle do we begin to understand our own previous observations. At the same time, all the figures referring to these different speeds are established and known in school systems. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The difference in the speed of centers is a very strange figure which has a cosmic meaning, that is, it enters into many cosmic processes or, it is better to say, it divides many cosmic processes one from another. This figure is 30,000. This means that them moving and instinctive centers are 30,000 times faster than the intellectual center. And the emotional center, when it works with its proper speed, is 30,000 times faster than the moving and instinctive centers. It is difficult to believe in such an enormous difference in the speeds of functions in the same organism. It actually means that different centers have quite different time. The instinctive and moving centers have 30,000 times longer time than the moving and instinctive centers. Do you understand clearly what “longer time” means? It means that, for every kind of work that a center has to do, it has so much more time. However strange it may be, this fact of the great difference in the speed of centers explains many well-known phenomena which ordinary science cannot explain and which it generally passes over in silence, or simply refuses to discuss. I am referring now to the astonishing and quite inexplicable speed of some of the physiological and mental processes. For instance—a man drinks a glass of water, and immediately, in no more than a second, he experiences many new feelings and sensations—a feeling of warmth, relaxation, relief, peace, contentment, well-being, or on the other hand, anger, irritation, and so on. What one feels may be different in different cases, but the fact remains that the body responds to the stimulant very quickly, almost at once. There is really no need to speak about water or any other stimulant; if a human is very thirsty or very hungry, a glass of water or a piece of bread will produce the same quick effect. Similar phenomena representing the enormous speed of certain processes can be noticed, for instance, in observing dreams. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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