The bravest fear that Americans have is that the conscience has gone down before the dollar. If we do not save this Great Republic, she will become rotten to the heart. Lust of conquest will have long ago done its work; trampling upon the helpless abroad will teach her, by a natural process, to endure with apathy the like at home; multitudes who will applaud the crushing of other people’s liberties, will live to suffer for their mistake in their own persons.  Much of the government is irrevocably in the hands of the prodigiously rich, China, and other nations and their hangers on, the suffrage is becoming a mere machine, when they use as they chose. There is no principle but commercialism, no patriotism but of the pocket. From showily and sumptuously entertaining neighboring titled aristocracies, and from trading their daughters to them, the plutocrats came in the course of time to hunger for titles and heredities themselves. The drift toward monarchy, in some form or other, began; it was spoken of in whispers at first, later in a bolder voice. The sleeping republic must awake at last, but not too late. We must drive the money changers from the temple, and put the government into clean hands. Otherwise, before long, the money changers will buy up half the country with soldier-pensions and turn a measure which has originally been a righteous one into a machine for the manufacture of bond-slaves—a machine which is at the same time an irremovable instrument of tyranny–for every pensioner has a vote, and every man and woman who has ever been acquainted with a soldier is a pensioner; pensions are dated back to the Fall of Man, and hordes of men who have never handled a weapon in their lives came forward and drew four hundred and twenty years’ back-pay. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The country’s conquests, so far being profitable to the Treasury, has been an intolerable burden from the beginning. The pensions, the conquests, and corruption together, have brought bankruptcy in spite of the maddest taxation, the government’s credit is gone, the arsenals are empty, the country is unprepared for war. The military and naval schools, and all commissioned offices in the army and navy, are the preserve of the money changers; and the standing army—the creation of the conquest-days—is their property. The army and navy refuse to serve the new congress and the new Administration, and said ironically, “What are you going to do about it?” A difficult question to answer. Landsmen man such ships which are not abroad watching the conquests—and sunk them all, in honest attempts to do their duty. A civilian army, officered by civilians, has risen brimming with the patriotism of an old forgotten day and is rushing multitudinously to the front, armed with sporting-guns and pitchforks—and the standing army sweeps into space. For the money-changers have privately sold out the shoemaker. He conferred titles of nobility upon the money-changers, and mounted the republic’s throne without firing a shot. It is thus that money has become our master. Intent on catching up with the West, China’s leaders knew this would be impossible if China focused exclusively on low-tech development while the United States of America shed Second Wave industries and raced to build a high-tech Third Wave economy. China, they therefore decided, needed more than sweatshops. It also needed its own World-beating, high-value-adding, knowledge-intensive sector. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

To make this twin-track policy work, Chin had to compress time—to accomplish in decades what took others one or more centuries. It would also have to extend its spatial reach. And, most important, it would need advanced I.T. telecom, digitalization and access to the latest economically relevant knowledge. This explains why China’s strategy since then has focused—whether deliberately or inadvertently—on precisely the three deep fundamentals emphasized in these pages: Time, space, and knowledge. Thus China had become remarkably skillful in the use of speed as a competitive weapon in international trade. According to Robert B. Cassidy, a U.S. government trade official cited in BusinessWeek, Japanese, South Korean and European exports often took “four or five years to develop their place in the market…China overwhelms a market so quickly you do not see it coming.” So fast, in fact, “that it’s nearly impossible [for companies] to adjust through the usual strategies, such as automating or squeezing suppliers,” the magazine adds. By the time they do, it is too late. And when China sets a strategic priority, it can break domestic speed records as well. “What happened in the 1990s in China was nothing short of a social miracle,” writers Robert C. Fonow, former president of Sprint Japan and general manager of Scientific-Atlanta in Shanghai. “In the space of 10 years, China has developed one of the most advanced telecommunications infrastructures in the World. Within a few years, it is likely to have the single most advanced telecommunications infrastructure in the World.” To reach this point, Fonow explains, China would first “bring in new technology as quickly as possible, study it, imitate it, and improve it.” Next, it would “develop indigenous technology capabilities equal to the West’s and use them as a base to develop a greater capacity for technological innovation.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Nor is acceleration in China limited to business tactics and technology. It is part of the country’s new culture. When author Alexander Stille went to Xian to write about historic artifacts like its third-century BC army of terracotta warriors, he wondered if ordinary people were troubled by the rush forward. “Most Chinese,” he writes, “many of whom have known famine and extraordinary hardships in their own lifetimes, are surprisingly unsentimental about these changes…For most younger Chinese [change] cannot come fast enough.” That was not the case during thousands of years of China’s past. The executive thought police, as such, earn their paychecks. Their jobs are filled with stress and difficulty. Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate the staggering complexity of the rules needed in engineering and integrating a large-scale corporate information system that delivers information to those who need it…that prevents fraud, sabotage, or invasion of  personal privacy…that regulates access to various networks and data banks by employees, customers, and suppliers…that sets priorities among them…that produces numberless specialized reports…that allows users to customize their software…that meets dozens of other requirements, does it all within budgetary constraints—and then does it over and again as new technologies, competitors, and products appear. Devising rules to guide such a system requires such high-level technical expertise that CIOs and their staffs often lose sight of the human implications of their decisions. Who gets access is, in fact, a political issue. Privacy is a political issues. Designing a system so that it serves one department better than another is a political act. If one unit gets lower communications priority than another, so that it must wait for service, even timing is political. The allocation of costs is always a power issue. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Thus, as soon as we begin to speak of policing information, all sorts of disquieting “para-political” questions pop up. Two employees are caught up in bitter personal feud. One of them learns the appropriate computer passwords, enters the personnel files, and puts damaging material into an adversary’s records. None of this comes to light until the victim has already left and gone to work for another firm, where discovery of the damaging information leads to dismissal. What happens? Who is responsible? The first company? If he or she loses access to an important data base, are a worker’s chances for promotion unfairly reduced? With only a trace of imagination, it is possible to multiply scores of such questions. In the absence of comprehensive public policies, it is left to private firms to think through the personal and political implications of all the rules governing their information systems. However, should such questions, with their human rights implications, be left entirely to private companies? And if so, who in any particular firm should write the rules? The chief information officer? We are, here, on thing and alien ice. Few have much experience with the ethical, legal, and ultimately political questions arising from the need to impose constraints on the flow of business information. Top management, as a rule, delegates the task. However, to whom? Should companies establish internal “information councils” or even “legislatures,” to write the laws governing information rights, responsibilities, and access? Should unions share in this decision-making? Do we need “corporate courts” to settle disputes over security and access? Do we need “information ethicists” to define a new informational morality? #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Will the rules regulating information in industry condition public attitudes toward freedom of information in the larger society? Might they accustom us to censorship and secrecy? Will we eventually need an explicit Bill of Electronic Information Rights? Every one f these is a power issue, and the decision about them will shift power within the firm and, ultimately, in society at large. The more turbulent, unstable, and non-equilibrial tomorrow’s business environment becomes, the more unpredictable the needs of users. Rapid change means chance. It means uncertainty. It means competition from the least-expected quarter. It means big projects that collapse and small ones that stun one with their success. It means new technologies, new kinds of skills and workers, and wholly unprecedented economic conditions. All this is amplified when the competition is blistering hot and comes, very often, from countries or cultures that are drastically different from the one the business was designed to serve. How, in this kind of World, can even the cleverest CIO accurately pre-specify what information will be needed by whom? Or for how long? In today’s high-turbulence environment, business survival requires a stream of innovative products or services. Creativity requires a kind of corporate glasnost—an openness to imagination, a tolerance for deviance, for individuality, and the serendipity that has historically accounted for many creative discoveries, from nylon and latex paint to products like the NutraSweet fat substitute. There is, therefore, a profound contradiction between the need for careful channeling and close control of information, on the one hand, and the need for innovation on the other. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

The safer and surer a business information system, and the better it is protected, pre-defined, pre-structured, and policed, the more it will constrain creativity and constipate the organization. What we learn, therefore, is that the information wars now ranging in the outside World—over everything from supermarket scanners and standards to television sets and technonationalism—are mirrored inside the corporation as well. Power, in the business of tomorrow, will flow to those who have the best information about the limits of information. However, before it does, the info-wars now intensifying will alter the very shape of business. To know how, we need to take a closer look at this crucial resource—knowledge—whose pursuit will shake the powers-that-be from New York to Tokyo, from Moscow to Monte-video. Today the organic, what is left of it, is fully mechanized under the aegis of a few petrochemical corporations. Their artificial fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides and near-monopoly of the World’s seed stock define a total environment that integrates food production from planting to consumption. Although Levi-Strauss is right that “Civilization manufactures monoculture like sugar beet,” only since World War II has a completely synthetic orientation begun to dominate. Agriculture itself takes more organic matter out of the soil that it puts back, and soil erosion is basic to the monoculture of annuals. Regarding the latter, some are promoted with devastating results to the land; along with cotton and soybeans, corn, which in its present domesticated state is totally dependent on agriculture for its existence, is especially bad. J. Russell Smith called it “the killer of continents…and one of the worst enemies of the human future.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The erosions cost of one bushel of Iowa corn is two bushels of topsoil, highlighting the more general large-scale industrial destruction of farmland. The continuous tillage of huge monoculture, with massive use of chemicals and no application of manure or humus, obviously raised soil deterioration and solid loss to much higher levels. The dominant agricultural mode has it that soil needs massive infusions of chemicals, supervised by technicians whose overriding goal is to maximize production. Artificial fertilizers and all the rest from this outlook eliminate the need for the complex life of the soil and indeed convert it into a mere instrument of production. The promise of technology is total control, a completely contrived environment that simply supersedes the natural balance of the biosphere. However, more and more energy is expended to purchase great monocultural yields that are beginning to decline, never mind the toxic contamination of the soil, groundwater and food. The U.S. Department of Agriculture says that cropland erosion is occurring in this country at a rate of two billion tones of soil a year. The National Academy of Sciences estimates that over one third of topsoil is already gone forever. The ecological imbalances caused by monocropping, not cultivating and watering the lands and forests, and synthetic fertilizers causes enormous increases in pests and crop diseases; since World War II, crop loss due to insects has actually doubled. Technology responds, of course, with spiraling application of more synthetic fertilizers, and weed and pest killers, accelerating the crime against nature. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Another post-war phenomenon was the Green Revolution, billed as the salvation of the impoverished Third World by American capital and technology. However, rather than feeding the hungry, the Green Revolution drove millions of less affluent people from farmlands in Asia, Latin America and Africa as victims of the program that fosters large corporate farms. It amounted to an enormous technological colonization creating dependency on capital-intensive agribusiness, destroying older agrarian communalism, requiring massive fossil fuel consumption and assaulting nature on an unprecedented scale. Desertification, or loss of soil due to agriculture, has been steadily increasing. Each year, a total area equivalent to more than two Belgiums is being converted to desert Worldwide. The fate of the World’s tropical rainforests is a factor in the acceleration of this dessication: half of them have been erased in the past 30 years. In Botswana, the last wilderness region of African has disappeared like much of the Amazon jungle and almost half of the rainforests of Central America, primarily to raise cattle for the hamburger markets in the USA and Europe. The few areas safe from deforestation are where agriculture does not want to go; the destruction of the land is proceeding in the USA over a greater land area than was encompassed by the original 13 colonies, just as it is the heart of the severe Africa famine of the mid of the mid-‘80s and the extinction of one species of wild animal and plant after another. Returning to animals, one is reminded of the words of Genesis in which God said to Noah, “And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hands are they delivered.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

When newly discovered territory was first visited by the advance guard of production, as a wide descriptive literature shows, the wild mammals and birds showed no fear whatsoever of the explorers. The agriculturalized mentality, however, so aptly foretold in the biblical passage, projects an exaggerated belief in the fierceness of wild creatures, which follows from progressive estrangement and loss of contact with the animal World plus the need to maintain dominance over it. The fate of domestic animals is defined by the fact that agricultural technologists continually look to factories as models of how to refine their own production systems. Nature is banished from these systems as, increasingly, farm animals are kept largely immobile throughout their deformed lives, maintained in high-density, wholly artificial environments. Billions of chickens, pigs and veal calves, for example, no longer even see the light of day much less roam the fields—fields growing silent as more and more pastures are plowed up to grow feed for these hideously confined beings. The high-tech chickens, whose beak-ends have been clipped oof to reduce death due to stress-caused fighting, often exists four or even five to a 13-inch by 18-inch cage and are periodically deprived of food and water for up to tend days to regulate their egg-laying cycles. Pigs live on concrete floors with no bedding; foot-rot, tail-biting and cannibalism are endemic because of physical conditions and stress. Sows nurse their piglets separated by mental grates, mother and offspring barred from natural contact. Veal calves are often raised in total darkness, chained to stalls so narrow as to disallow turning around or other normal postural adjustment. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

These animals are generally under regimens of constant medication due to the tortures involved and their heightened susceptibility to diseases: automated animal production relies upon hormones and antibiotics. Such systematic cruelty, not to mention the kind of food that results, brings to mind the fact that captivity itself and every form of enslavement has agriculture as its progenitor or model. Food has been one of our most direct contacts with the natural environment, but we are rendered increasingly dependent on a technological production system in which finally even our senses have become redundant; taste, once vital for judging a food’s value or safety, is no longer experienced, but rather certified by a label. Overall, the healthfulness of what we consume declines and land once cultivated for food now produces coffee, tobacco, grains for alcohol, marijuana, and other drugs creating the context for famine. Even non-processed foods like fruits and vegetables are now grown to be tasteless and uniform because the demands of handling, transportation and storage, not nutrition or pleasures, are the highest considerations. Total war borrowed from agriculture to defoliate millions of acres in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War, but the plundering of the biosphere proceeds even more lethally in its daily, global forms. Food as a function of production has also failed miserably on the most obvious level: half of the World, as everyone knows, suffers from malnourishment ranging to starvation itself. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Meanwhile, the diseases of civilization, contrasted with the healthful pre-farming diets, underline the joyless, sickly World of chronic maladjustment we inhabit as prey of the manufacturers of medicine, cosmetics, and fabricated food. Domestication reaches new heights of the pathological in genetic food engineering, with new types of animals in the offing as well as contrived microorganisms and plants. Logically, humanity itself will also become a domesticate of this order as the World of production processes us as much as it degrades and deforms every other natural system. The project of subduing nature, begun and carried through by agriculture, has assumed gigantic proportions. The “success” of civilization’s progress, a success earlier humanity never wanted, tastes more and more like ashes. Thus, we appear to have reached the end of the line. We cannot expand; we seem unable to intensify production without wreaking further havoc, and the planet is fast becoming a wasteland. This has come to pass very fast, and it leaves interplanetary archaeologists of the future a lot to discover. The probable fate of civilization will look to archaeologists of the future as a very long and stable period of small-scale hunting and gathering was followed by an apparently instantaneous efflorescence of technology…leading rapidly to extinction. Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous. Physiologist Hared Diamond termed the initiation of agriculture “a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. Agriculture has been and remains a “catastrophe” at all levels, the one which underpins the entire material and spiritual culture of alienation now destroying us. Liberation is impossible without its dissolution. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

We last talked about how Technopoly, science is used to make democracy “rational.” Polling is still another way. Just as statistics has spawned huge testing industry, it has done the same for the polling of “public opinion.” One may concede, at the start, that there are some uses of polling that may be said to be reliable, especially if the case involves a greatly restricted question such as, Do you plan to vote for X or Y? However, to say a procedure is reliable is not to say it is useful. The question is as yet undecided whether knowledge of voter trends during political campaign enriches or demeans the electoral process. However, when polls are used to guide public policy, we have a different sort of issues altogether. I have been in the presence of a group of United States of America’s congressmen who were gathered to discuss, over a period of two days, what might be done to make the future of American more survivable and, if possible, more humane. Ten consultants were called upon to offer perspectives and advice. Eight of them were pollsters. They spoke of the “trends” their polling uncovered; for example, that people were no longer interested in the woman’s movement, did not regard environmental issues as of paramount importance, did not think the “drug problem” was getting worse, and so on. It was apparent, at once that these polling results would become the basis of how the congressmen thought the future should be managed. The ideas the congressmen had (all men, by the way) receded to the background. Their own perceptions, instincts, insights, and experience paled into irrelevance. Confronted by “social scientists,” they were inclined to do what the “trends” suggested would satisfy the populace. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

It is not unreasonable to argue that the polling of public opinion puts democracy on a sound and scientific footing. If our political leaders are supposed to represent us, they must have some information about what we “believe.” In principle, there are at least four of them. The first has to do with the forms of the questions that are put to the public. Like, is it proper to smoke and pray at the same time. Or, to take a more realistic example: If we ask people whether they think it acceptable for the environment to continue to be polluted, we are likely to come up with answers quite different from those generated by the question, Do you think the protection of the environment is of paramount importance? Or, Do you think safety in the streets is more important than environmental protection? The public’s “opinion” on almost any issue will be a function of the question asked. (I might point out that in the seminar held by the congressmen, not one asked a question about the questions. They were interested in results, not in how these were obtained, and it did not seem to occur to them that the results and how they are obtained are inseparable.) Typically, pollsters ask questions that will elicit yes or no answers. Is it necessary to point out that such answers do not give a robust meaning to the phrase “the public opinion”? Were you, for example, to answer “No” to the question “Do you think the drug problem can be reduced by government programs?” one would hardly know much of interest or value about your opinion. However, allowing you to speak or write at length on the matter would, of course, rule out using statistics. The point is that the use of statistics in polling changes the meaning of “public opinion” as dramatically as television changes the meaning of “political debate.” In the American Technopoly, public opinion is a yes or no answer to an unexamined question. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Second, the technique of polling promotes the assumption that an opinion is a thing inside people that can be exactly located and extracted by the pollster’s questions. However, there is an alternative point of view, of which we might say, it is what Jefferson had in mind. An opinion is not a momentary thing but a process of thinking, shaped by the continuous acquisition of knowledge and the activity of questioning, discussion, and debate. A question may “invite” an opinion, but it also may modify and recast it; we might better say that people do not exactly “have” opinions but are, rather, involved in “opinioning.” That an opinion is conceived of as a measurable thing falsifies the process by which people, in fact, do their opinioning; and how people do their opinioning goes to the heart of the meaning of a democratic society. Polling tells us nothing about this, and tends to hide the process from our view. Which leads to the third point. Generally, polling ignores what people know about the subjects they are queried on. In a culture that is not obsessed with measuring and ranking things, this omission would probably be regarded as bizarre. However, let us imagine what we would think of opinion polls if the questions came in pairs, indicating what people “believe” and what they “know” about the subject. If I may make up some figures, let us suppose we read the following: “The latest poll indicates that 72 percent of the American public believes we should withdraw economic aid from Nicaragua. Of those who expressed this opinion, 28 percent thought Nicaragua was in central Asia, 18 percent thought it was an island near New Zealand, and 27.4 percent believed that ‘Africans should help themselves,’ obviously confusing Nicaragua with Nigeria. Moreover, of those polled, 61.8 percent did not know what ‘economic aid’ means.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Were pollsters inclined to provide such information, the prestige and power of polling would be considerably reduced. Perhaps even congressmen, confronted by massive ignorance, would invest their own understandings with greater trust. The fourth problem with polling is that it shifts the locus of responsibility between political leaders and their constituents. It is true enough that congressmen are supposed to represent the interests of their constituents. However, it is also true that congressmen are expected to use their own judgment about what is in the public’s best interest. For this, they must consult their own experience and knowledge. Before the ascendance of polling, political leaders, though never indifferent to the opinions of their constituents, were largely judged on their capacity to make decisions based on such wisdom as they possessed; that is, political leaders were responsible for the decisions they made. With the refinement and extension of the polling process, they are under increasing pressure to forgo deciding anything for themselves and to defer to the opinions of the voters, no matter how ill-informed and shortsighted those opinions might be. We can see this process of responsibility-shift even more clearly in the cause of the statistically based ratings of television shows. The definition of a “good” television show has become purely and simply a matter of its having high ratings. A “bad” show has low ratings. The responsibility of a television writer, in a word, is entirely responsible to the audience. There is no need for the writer, in a word, is entirely responsible to the audience. There is no need for the writer to consult tradition, aesthetic standards, thematic plausibility, refinements of tastes, or even plain comprehensibility. The iron rule of public opinion is all that matter.  #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Television executives are fond of claiming that their medium is the most democratic institution in America: a plebiscite is held every week to determine which programs will survive. This claim is given added weight by a second claim: creative artists have never indifferent to the preferences and opinions of their audiences. Writers, for example, write for people, for their approbation and understanding. However, writers also write for themselves and because they have something they want to say, not always because readers have something they want to hear. By giving constant deference to public preferences, polling changes the motivation of writers; their entire effort is to increase “the numbers.” Popular literature now depends more than ever on the wishes of the audience, not the creativity of the artists. However, values rather than reasons sustain communities. Thus from the outset of this second Renaissance, scholar treated Greek philosophers more as natural scientists treat atoms than as they treat other natural scientists. They were not invited to join the serious discussion of the scholars. All things Greek were subjected to our analysis based on the views of modern philosophy. This procedure alters radically what one expects to learn from them. Men of the Enlightenment looked down on Greek thinkers because they thought them wrong. Romantics respected them because their truth or falsity became a matter of indifference. Schiller’s distinction between naïve and sentimental poetry is an example of the kind of categorization that became common. Homer’s charm is a result of his not having seen what we see, his unawareness of the abyss. He still walked on enchanted ground, and his poetry lacked that reflectiveness imposed on us who know that the gods can depart. He was unaware of the death of gods and cultures as children are unaware of the death of men. He lived in the youth of the World.  #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

If we are to be whole and happy, we must recover that direct relation to things men once had. However, we must do it in the company of our awareness of the vulnerability of things. The artist has a greater responsibility than Homer knew because he does not merely imitate nature but creates it. A successful modern artist would be deeper, more fully self-conscious than was Homer. The naïve Homer belonged to a culture different from that of the sentimental Schiller, and has to be understood in his own cultural context. Naivete consists in large measure in the lack of “historical consciousness,” the belief that the greats are individuals to be understood individually and in the same way at all times. Plutarch believed he was showing forth images of greatness itself, while in fact his heroes are just Greeks and Romans, high expressions of their culture, from which they are inseparable. The awareness of this is the peculiarly modern superiority or insight. Schiller was, of course, an unusually profound and sensitive reader. It is doubtful whether his reading of Homer teaches us very much about Homer, because it is too encumbered by what we now believe to be Romantic prejudices. However, Homer, interpreted and misinterpreted by Schiller, contributed to his own artistic creation, which was founding a German literature and a German culture. It is an example of what some would call “creative misinterpretation.” The faith in one’s own vision, perhaps fed by the inspiration of others’ visions, is what is important. An act uninformed by learning is the important thing. Implicit in what I am saying is that while Schiller’s views are not true but are productive, there are true views, known presumably to scholars, which are not productive. This is what Goethe implies. The scholar is an objective reasoner, the poet a subjective creator. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Here is where Nietzsche enters, arguing with unparalleled clarity and vigor that if we take “historical consciousness” seriously, there cannot be objectivity, that scholarship as we know it is simply a delusion, and a dangerous one, for objectivity undermines subjectivity. All of classical scholarship in Germany, with its exquisite sense of the historical determination of the mind, proceeded as though the mind of the German scholars were not so determined. The discovery of culture and the folk-mind means that there cannot be universal principles of understanding. Reason is a myth that makes mythmaking impossible to comprehend. Creativity and a science of human things cannot coexist, and since the science of human things admits that man is creative, the creative man wins the day. However, scholars cannot behave creatively. The discovery of culture as the element in which man becomes himself produces an imperative: Build and sustain culture. This scholar cannot do. Culture is not only the condition of life, it is the condition of knowing. Without a German culture, the scholar in Germany cannot confront other cultures. While aiding the individual in feeling more powerful, Satanism can make relating to others outside the group even more difficult. A Satanist who formerly felt out of sync with society suddenly realized why: he was the one who was really in sync all the time; it is the rest of the World who are the “chumps.” Socializing with others of like mind only reinforces the process; and inferiority complex is transformed into a superiority complex. Weird becomes weirder. Once that happens, the need to believe becomes even stronger. Dr. Freud likened the belief in magic to a stage found in primitives and obsessional neurotics in which the thought process themselves become overvalued compared to reality. He called this the “omnipotence of thought” and noted that patients who exemplified this would go to extreme length of self-deception in order to protect their belief system. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Any accidental connection can reinforce the neurotic’s belief in his own powers: think of someone, and if that person appears, the thought made him appear. The several thousand other times that the person did not appear are conveniently forgotten. One can often see this phenomenon at work among Satanists, from the claim that the sudden appearance of a parking space was “proof” that it has been magically conjured up, to the attribution of survival of an automobile accident to “protection” by infernal powers. Seldom will a Satanist bale the Powers of Darkness for letting him get into the accident in the first place; if he did, he would be an ex-Satanist, perhaps a born-again Christian. Once advantage of magical thinking is that the results do not have to be definite and are subject to misinterpretation. Flexibility is built into the system and a ritual does not have to achieve its total purpose in order to be deemed successful. If a magician puts a death curse on an enemy, for example, and three days later the would-be victim burns his finger, the magician is able to interpret that as proof that his ritual just was not strong enough. The danger in such groups is that as the members come to rely more on this mode of thought, they can become totally emotionally dependent on the group as their alienation from society increases. A Christian man’s great-grandparents had practised magic. As a result of this his grandparents had developed mediumistic abilities. His grandmother has suffered from depression and had an irritable and selfish nature. Her psychic disturbances had finally led to her being committed to a mental hospital. The trouble reappeared in the next generation, in the generation of the man’s parents. When however, the man’s father actually turned to Christ all the symptoms of compulsion and other psychic complications disappeared. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

Ok, ok, it is REALLY early, but that doesn’t stop us from dreaming up our menu ideas for the coming holidays! No need to make fun – you’ll thank us when you’re enjoying the delicious eats! 🤤

We’re thinking something really lavish this year – that pantry is large enough to hold all the spices we need, and the island at Residence 1 gives all the room necessary for little hands to help us prep the dinner.

What’s your favorite dish for special occasions?

Cresleigh Plumas Ranch at Riverside is an entertainer’s dream home. This spacious, open floorplan invites natural light and maximizes space and seemlessly blends indoor living with the charm of out door hosting and toasting and recrreation.

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#CresleighRiverside

We, free citizens of the Great Republic, feel an honest pride in her greatness, her strength, her just and gentle government, her wide liberties, her honored name, her stainless history, her unsmirched flag, her hands clean from oppression of the weak and from malicious conquest, her hospital door that stands open to the hunted and the persecuted and the rich of all nations; we are proud of the judicious respect in which she is held by the monarchies which hem her in on every side, and proudest of all of that lofty patriotism which we inherited from our fathers, which we have kept pure, and which won our liberties in the beginning and has preserved them unto this day. While that patriotism endures the Republic is safe, her greatness is secure, and against them the powers of the Earth cannot prevail. I pray you to pause and consider. Against our traditions we are now entering upon an unjust and trivial war, a war against a helpless people, and for a base object—robbery. At first our citizens spoke out against this thing, by an impulse natural to their training. To-day they have turned, and their voice is the other way. What caused the change? Merely a politician’s trick—a high-sounding phrase, a blood-stirring phrase which turned their uncritical heads: Our Country, right or wrong! An empty phrase, a silly phrase. It was shouted by every newspaper, it was thundered from the pulpit, the Superintendent of Public Instruction placarded it in every school-house in the land, the War Department inscribed it upon the flag. And every man who failed to shout it or who was silent, was proclaimed a traitor—none but those others were patriots. To be a patriot, one had to say, and keep on saying, “Our Country, right or wrong,” and urge on the little war. Have you not perceived that that phrase is an insult to the nation? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

For in a republic, who is “the country?” Is it the Government which is for the moment in the saddle? Why, the Government is merely a servant—merely a temporary servant; it cannot be its prerogative to determine what is right and what is wrong, and decide who is a patriot and who is not. Its function is to obey orders, not originate them. Who, then, is “the country?” Is it the newspaper? is it the pulpit? is it the school-superintendent? Why, these are mere parts of the country, not the whole of it; they have not command, they have only their little share in the command. They are but one in the thousand; it is in the thousand that command is lodged; they must determine what is right and what is wrong; they must decide who is a patriot and who is not. Who are the thousand—that is to say, who are “the country?” In a monarchy, the king and his family are the country; in a republic it is the common voice of the people. Each of you, for himself, by himself and on his own responsibility, must speak. And it is a solemn and weighty responsibility, and not lightly to be flung aside at the bullying of pulpit, press, government, or the empty catch-phrases of politicians. Each must for himself alone decide what is right and what is wrong, and which course is patriotic and which is not. You cannot shrink this and be a man. To decide it against your convictions is to be an unqualified and inexcusable traitor, both to yourself and to your country, let men label you as they may. If you alone of all the nation shall decide one way, and that way be the right way according to your convictions of the right, you have done your duty by yourself and by your country—hold up your head! you have nothing to be ashamed of. Only when a republic’s life is in danger should a man uphold his government when it is in the wrong. There is no other time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

This republic’s life is not in peril. The nation has sold its honor for a phrase. It has swung itself loose from its safe anchorage and is drifting, its helm is in pirate hands. The stupid phrase needed help, and it got another one: “Even if the war be wrong, we are in it and must fight it out: we can not retire from it without dishonor. You have planted a seed and it will grow. Perhaps the most abusive example of technology is found in the work of Francis Galton, who was born in 1822, died in 1911, and therefore lived during the richest period of technological invention. He may be thought of as one of the Founding Fathers of Technopoly. Galton is also known as the founder of “eugenics,” a term he coined, which means the “science” of arranging marriage and family so as to produce the best possible offspring based on the hereditary characteristics of the parents. He believed that anything could be measured and that statistical procedures, in particular, were the technology that could open the pathway to real knowledge about every form of human behavior. The next time you watch a televised beauty contest in which women are ranked numerically, you should remember Francis Galton, whose pathological romance with numbers originated this form of idiocy. Being unsatisfied with vagueness about where the most “beauty” was to be found, he constructed a “beauty map” of the British Isles. As he told us, he classified “the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent.” He then proved statistically tht London had the most beautiful girls, Aberdeen the must unattractive; this is no doubt made it awkward for Galton to spend his vacation in Scotland. If this were not enough, he also invented a method for quantifying boredom (by counting the number of fidgets) and even proposed a statistical inquiry for determining the efficacy of prayer. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

However, Galton’s main interest was in demonstrating, statistically, the inheritance of intelligence. To that end, he established a laboratory at the International Exposition of 1884, where for threepence people could have their skulls measured and receive Galton’s assessment of their intelligence. Apparently, a visitor received no extra credit for demanding his or her money back, which would surely have been a sign of intelligence. We can be sure that not many did, since Galton was considered a major intellect of his day. In fact, Lewis Terman, the man most responsible for promoting IQ tests in America, calculated that Galton’s IQ was more than 200. Terman, who fancied making such estimates of the dead, ranked Charles Darwin (Galton’s cousin, incidentally) at a mere 135, and poor Copernicus somewhere between 100 and 110. For a definitive history and analysis of the malignant role played by statistics in the “measurement” of intelligence, I refer to the reader to Stephen Jay Gould’s brilliant book The Mismeasure of Man. Here, I will only cite three points made by Gould, which I believe are sufficient to convince anyone with a higher IQ than Copernicus of the dangers of abusing statistics. The first problem is called reification, which means converting an abstract idea (mostly, a word) into a thing. In this context, reification works in the following way: We use the word “intelligence” to refer to a variety of human capabilities of which we approve. There is no such thing as “intelligence.” It is a word, not a thing, and a word of a very high order of subtraction. However, if we believe it to be a thing like the pancreas or liver, then we will believe scientific procedure can locate it and measure it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The second problem is ranking. Ranking requires a criterion for assigning individuals to their place in a single series As Gould remarks, what better criterion can be used than an objective number? In the ranking of intelligence, we therefor assume that intelligence is not only a thing, but a single thing, located in the brain, and accessible to the assignment of a number. It is as if “beauty” were determined to inhere in the size of a woman’s chest. Then all we would have to do is measure the chest and rank each woman accordingly, and we would have an “objective” measure of “beauty.” The third point is that in doing this, we would have formulated our question “Who is the fairest of all?” in a restricted and biased way. And yet this would go unnoticed, because, as Gould writes, “The mystique of science proclaims that numbers are the ultimate test of objectivity.” This means that the way we have defined the concept will recede from our consciousness—that is, its fundamental subjectivity will become invisible, and the objective number itself will become reified. One would think that such a process would appear ridiculous on the breast of it, especially since, by believing it, we must conclude that Dolly Parton is objectively proved to be more beautiful than Audrey Hepburn. Or, in the case of intelligence, that Galton had twice as much of it as Copernicus. Nonetheless, in Technopoly all this is take very seriously, albeit not without a few protests. After a lifetime of working in the field of intelligence measurement, E.L. Thorndike observed that intelligence tests suffer from three small defects: “Just what they measure is not known; how far it is proper to add, subtract, multiply, divide, and compute ratios with the measures obtained is not known; just what the measures signify concerning intellect is not known. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In other words, those who administer intelligence tests quite literally do not know what they are doing. That is why David McClelland remarked, “Psychologists should be ashamed of themselves for promoting a view of general intelligence that has engendered such a testing program.” Joseph Weizenbaum summed it up by saying, “Few ‘scientific’ concepts have so thoroughly muddled the thinking of both scientists and the general public as that of the ‘intelligence quotient’ of ‘IQ.’ The idea that intelligence can be quantitatively measured along a single linear scale has caused untold harm to our society in general, and to education in particular.” Gould has documented some of this harm, and Howard Gardner has tried to alleviate it (in his book Frames of Mind). However, Technopoly resists such reproaches, because it needs to believe that science is an entirely objective enterprise. Lacking a lucid set of ethics and having rejected tradition, Technopoly searches for a source of authority and finds it in the idea of statistical objectivity. This quest is especially evident not only in our efforts to determine precisely how smart people are but also in our attempts to find out precisely how smart groups of people are. Aside from the fact that the procedures used do not and cannot give such an answer, one must ask, Of what Earthly use is it to declare that one group of people is smarter than another? We must keep in mind the story of statistician who drowned while trying to wade across a river with an average depth of four feet. That is to say, in a culture that reveres statistics, we can never be sure what short of nonsense will lodge in people’s heads. The only plausible answer to the question why we use statistics for such measurements is that it is done for sociopolitical reasons whose essential malignancy is disguised by the cover of “scientific inquiry.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

One has to understand, certain things are only one’s opinions but can be confirmed by objective measure, then one can believe one has an irreproachable authority for making decisions about the allocation of resources. This is how, in Technopoly, science is used t make democracy “rational.” Now, the title of Chief Information Officer did not yet exist in American firms but there was a small “Data Priesthood”—the data-processing professionals. Because no one else could make the “giant brain” do anything, these few professionals essentially “owned” the firm’s mainframes, and anyone who wanted information processed had to come to them. The priests enjoyed the blessing of an info-monopoly. Then came the micros. Desktop computers arrived with the force of a whirlwind in the late 1970s. Immediately sensing that these inexpensive new machines would erode their power, many data professionals threw everything they had into a campaign to keep them out of their companies. The DP priests sneered at the microcomputers’ limited capacity and small size. They fought against the budgeting funds for them. However, just as an entrenched monopoly, Western Union, could not keep the telephones out of the hands of Americans in the 19^th century, the business community’s voracious hunger for information swept aside all opposition from the data professionals. Soon thousands of executives were end-running the data priests, buying their own machines and programs, beginning to network with one another.  It became clear that companies would need dispersed computer power, not just a few centrally controlled mainframes. The “giant brain” fantasy was dead, and with it the concentrated power of the DP staff. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Today, in many big firms more than half of all computer processing power is outside the Information Systems department, and, as a senior manager of Deloitte & Touche puts it, the computer professional still have “Worlds more to lose.” Executives no longer came, tugging their forelocks and shuffling their feet, to beg for a few minutes of computer time. Many, no longer under the control of the DP priesthood, had their own sizable departmental budgets for computers. The priests now faced a situation not unlike that of the medical doctors, who lost their godlike status as more and more medical knowledge seeped into the lay press and the media. Instead of dealing with computer illiterates, the DP professionals now confronted a large number of “end-users” who knew something of the basics of simple computing, read computer magazines, bought machines for their kids at home, and were no longer awestruck by anyone who rattled on about RAM and ROM. The “micro revolution” demonopolized computer information and shifted power out of the hands of the priesthood. Like most revolutions, the micro revolution was a messy affair. With individuals and their departments rushing out to buy whatever kind of machines, software, and services they wanted, the result was an electronic Tower of Babel. So long as these were mainly stand-alone systems, it did not matter much. However, once it became necessary for these machines to talk to the mainframes or to one another and the outside World, the drawbacks of unrestrained liberty became starkly apparent. Computer professionals carried a grave warning to their bosses. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Computer democracy could end by shrinking the power of top management itself. How could anyone responsibly run a company when its entire computerized information system was out of control? Different machines, different programs, different data bases, everyone “doing his own thing” raised the specter of anarchy in the office. It was time to clamp down. In every revolution there is a period of upheaval and extremism, followed by a period of consolidation. Thus the DP staff, backed by senior management, now set about institutionalizing the revolution and, in the process, recouping some of the priesthood’s erstwhile influence. To impose order on computers and communications, the new CIOs were handed far greater resources and responsibilities than ever before. They were told to integrate systems, connect them up, and formulate what might be called “rules of the electronic road.” Having originally been hoarders of centralized information, and having lost control of the system for a time, the new information systems people and the CIOs who lead them have now reemerged as data police, enforcing new rules that, together, define the firm’s information system. These rules, which cover technical standards and types of equipment, also usually govern access to central data banks, priorities, and many other matters. Ironically, the latest surprising twist of the screw finds many CIOs singing the virtues of the very microcomputers they once despised. The reasons are clear. Micros are no longer the 98-pound weaklings they once were. Together with minis and workstations, they are now so powerful they can actually take over many of the old functions of the mainframe. Hence, many CIOs are calling for “downsizing” and further decentralization. “Downsizing is a phenomenal trend,” reports Theodore Klein of the Boston Systems Group, Inc. “I was recently at a conference of sixty MIS directors and just about every one was doing this in some form.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

In the words of CIO magazine, the journal of the CIOs, “Downsizing puts control in the hands of business-unit managers.” However, that control is now firmly governed by rules set by computer professionals. Many CIOs, in fact, with support from above, are attempting to recentralize control under the flag of “network management.” Says Bill Gassman, a marketing specialists for DEC: “Network management is more than a technical issue; it’s political.” His view is shared by others who believe, in the words of Datamation magazine, that “the arguments for centralized network management…frequently masks a desire by some within MIS organizations to regain personal operational control lost during the past few years.” In short, while info-wars rage in the corporation’s external environment—pitting, as we saw, retailers versus manufacturers, or industries and even nations against one another—info-wars on a smaller scale are raging internally as well. CIOs and their staffs become, whether they mean to or not, info-warriors. For though they may not conceive of their function in these terms, their largely unrecognized task is to redistribute power (while trying, not surprisingly, to expand their own). Functioning as both highway engineers and state troopers on our fast-growing electronic highways—they build as well as attempt to manage the systems—they are put in the distasteful position of being, in a sense, the corporation’s “executive thought police.” While the first, primitive assemblers were controlled by changing what molecules are in the solution around the device, getting the speed and accuracy wanted for large-scale manufacturing takes real computation. Carl’s setup uses a combination of special-purpose molecule processors and general-purpose assemblers, all controlled and orchestrated by nanocomputers. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Computers back in the 1990s used microelectronics. They worked by moving electrical charge back and forth through conducting paths—wires, in effect—using it to block and unblock the flow of charge in other paths. With nanotechnology, computers are built from molecular electronics. Like the computers of the 1990s, they used electronic signals to wave the pattens of digital logic. Being made of molecular components, though, they are built on a much smaller scale than 1990s computers, and work much faster and more efficiently. On the scale of our simulated molecular World, 1990s computer chips are like landscapes, while nanocomputers are like individual buildings. Carl’s desktop PC contains over a trillion nanocomputers, enough to out-compute all the microelectronic computers of the twentieth century put together. Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, an exploratory engineer proposed that nanocomputers could be mechanical, using sliding rods instead of moving electrons. These molecular mechanical computers were much easier to design than molecular electronic computers would have been. They were a big help in getting some idea of what nanotechnology could do. Even back then, it was pretty obvious that mechanical computers would be slower than electronic computers. Carl’s molecular electronic PC would have been no great surprise, though nobody knew just how to design one. When nanotechnology actually arrived and people started competing to build the best possible computers, molecular electronics won the technology race. Still, mechanical nanocomputers could have done all the nanocomputing jobs at Desert Rose: ordinary, everyday molecular manufacturing just does not demand the last word in computer performance. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

For Carl, the millions of nanocomputers in the milky waters of his building ponds are just extensions of machines on his desk, machines there to help him run his business and deliver products to his customers—or, in the case of the Red Cross emergency, to help provide time-critical emergency supplies. By reserving those three separate ponds, Carl can either build three different kinds of equipment for the Red Cross or use all the ponds to mass-produce the first thing on the Red Cross list: emergency shelters for ten thousand people. The software is ready, the plumbing is fine, the drums of building materials are all topped up, the Special Mix for this job is loaded: the build is ready to start. “Okay,” Carl tells the computer, “build Red Cross tents.” Computer talks to nanocomputers. In all three pools, nanocomputers talk to assemblers. The build begins. Three tragic conflicts in the twentieth century—World War I, World War II and the Cold War—represented the terminal climax of the industrial era and gave rise to the unique collision of wealth waves that we see on the planet today. The Second Wave wealth system is in retreat. By contrast, the Third Wave wealth system, starting in the United States of America, has already—in a few short decades—crossed the Pacific and transformed Asia. In the years ahead, we will see the wave overrun the shores of Latin America and Africa as well. The signs are already apparent. Behind this World transformation, we have shown, are unprecedented changes at the level of the deep fundamentals of wealth. Nowhere is this clearer or more revealing than in Asia’s historic rise and China’s great awakening. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

While much mentioned in financial news, Asia remains insufficiently understood on both Wall Street and in Washington—which, because of history and geography, face more toward the Atlantic than the Pacific. Between 2001 and 2005, when the United States of American opened free-trade negotiations with twenty nations, just one was in Asia. Citing this critically, one U.S. senator remained Washington that Asia “is hoe to six of the past decade’s ten fastest growing economies, five of the top ten U.S. trading partners and more than half the World’s population.” He might have added that it is also home to the overriding majority of the World’s Muslims and is the region most surrounded by nuclear weaponry. Above all, Asian is home to China. And unless the United States of America, Europe and the rest of the World understand what is really happening in China—the China that lies hidden behind the flood of unreliable economic and financial statistics—it will be difficult to make sense of what lies ahead. For what happens there—one way or the other—will radically reallocate wealth and shake the planet. By 2004, China had pushed past Japan to become the World’s third biggest trading nation after the United States and Germany. That same year saw China sitting on more than $500 billion of the World’s $3.5 trillion in foreign-currency reserves. It owned nearly $175 billion worth of U.S. Treasuries—an amount exceeded only by Japan—putting it in a position to jolt the entire global economy if it chose to replace dollars with euros or a basket of other currencies. In little more than two decades, China had become a giant force looming over the World economy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

However, can China’s spectacular growth continue? Will China actually become the global superpower of the year 2020, as so many forecasters predicted? No, but they have made significant progress and they have moved the date of expectation of becoming the global superpower to 2025. Conventional wisdom attributes China’s startling progress to its break with communism and its transition toward a market economy. However, that is hardly a sufficient explanation. Other nations have tried shifting in the same direction, and none has experienced anything like China’s success. Moreover, China even now cannot yet be described as a fully developed market economy. That market cliché also overlooks the trickle-down effect set in motion when, as we have seen, Silicon Valley transferred progressively higher-level computer-manufacturing operations to Japan, South Korea and Taiwan—each of which then set up plants and mainlined capital into China—all this before Beijing’s shift toward market economies had gone very far. Another equally important reason for China’s spectacular performance can be found in the way it has applied its novel twin-track development strategy. Now, humans have been long lived on this planet. An immediate aspect of agriculture, brought to light increasingly in recent years, involved the physical well-being of its subjects. Lee and Devore’s researchers show that “the diet of gathering peoples was far better than that of cultivators, that starvation is rare, that their health status was generally superior, and that there is a lower incidence of chronic disease.” Conversely, Farb summarized, “Production provides an inferior diet based on a limited number of foods, is much less reliable because of blights and the vagaries of weather, and is much more costly in terms of human labor expended.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The new field of paleopathology has reached even more emphatic conclusions, stressing, as does Angel, the “sharp decline in growth and nutrition” caused by the changeover from food gathering to food production. Earlier conclusions about life span have also been revised. Although eyewitness Spanish accounts of the 16^th century tell of Florida Indigenous fathers seeing their fifth generation before passing away, it was long believed that primitive people died in their 30’s and 40’s. Robson, Boyden and others have dispelled the confusion of longevity with life expectancy and discovered that current hunter-gatherers, barring injury and severe infection, often outlive their civilized contemporaries. During the industrial age fairly recently did life span lengthen for the species, and it is now widely recognized that in Paleolithic times humans were long-lived, once certain risks were passed. Devries is correct in his judgment that duration of life dropped sharply upon contact with civilization. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearance of large cities. Malaria, probably the single greatest killer of humanity, nearly all other infectious diseases are the heritage of agriculture. Nutritional and degenerative diseases in general appear with the reign of domestication and culture. Cancer, coronary thrombosis, anemia, dental carries, and mental disorders are but a few of the hallmarks of agriculture; previously women gave birth with no difficulty and little or no pain. People were far more alive in all their senses. !Kung San, reported R.H. Post, have heard a single-engined plane while it was still 70 miles away, and many of them can see for moons of Jupiter with the unassisted eye. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The summary judgment of Harris and Ross, as to “an overall decline in the quality—and probably in the length—of human life among farmers as compared with earlier hunter-gatherer groups,” is understated. One of the most persistent and universal ideas is that there was once a Golden Age of innocence before history began. Hesiod, for instance, referred to the “life-sustaining soil, which yielded its copious fruits unbribed by toil.” Eden was clearly the home of hunter-gatherers and the yearning expressed by the historical images of paradise must have been that of disillusioned tillers of the soil for a lost life of freedom and relative ease. A history of civilization shows the increasing displacement of nature from human experience, characterized in part by a narrowing of food choices. According to Rooney, prehistoric people found sustenance in over 1500 species of wild plants, whereas, “All civilizations,” Wenke remind us, “have been based on the cultivation of one or more of just six plant species: wheat, barley, millet, rice, maize, and potatoes.” It is a striking truth that over the centuries “the number of different edible foods which are actually eaten,” Pyke points out, “has steadily dwindled.” The World’s population now depends for most of its subsistence on only about 20 genera of plants while their natural strains are replaced by artificial hybrids and the genetic pool of these plants becomes far less varied. The diversity of food tends to disappear or flatten out as the proportion of manufactured foods increases. Today the very same articles of diet are distributed Worldwide so that Inuit Eskimo and an African native may soon be eating powdered milk manufactured in Wisconsin or frozen fish stick from a single factory in Sweden. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

A few big multinationals such as Unilever, the World’s biggest food production company, preside over a highly integrated service system in which the object is not to nourish or even to feed, but to force an ever-increasing consumption of fabricated, processed products upon the World. When Descartes enunciated the principle that the fullest exploitation of matter to any use is the whole duty of man, our separation from nature was virtually complete and the stage was set for the Industrial Revolution. Three hundred and fifty years later this spirit lingers in the person of Jean Vorst, Curator of France’s Museum of Natural History, who pronounces that our species, “because of intellect,” can no longer recross a certain threshold of civilization once again become part of a natural habitat. He further states, expressing perfectly the original and preserving imperialism of agriculture, “As the Earth in its primitive state is not adopted to our expansion, man must shackle it to fulfill human destiny.” The early factories literally mimicked the agricultural model, indicating again that at the base all mass production is farming. The natural World is to be broken and forced to work. One thinks of the mid-America prairies where settlers had to yoke six oxen to a plow in order to cut through the soil for the first time. Or from a scene from the 1870s in The Octopus by Frank Norris, in which gang-plows were driven like “a great column of field artillery” across the San Joaquin Valley, cutting 175 furrows at once. Did you know that in 1948, the Lady of Endor Coven was started by a Toledo, Ohio barber tuned fortune-teller, Herbert A. Sloane, and ceased with this death in the 1980s? Well, Sloane’s creed, based heavily on Gnosticism, taught that Satan was not evil, but the bringer of wisdom and the messenger of God. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

The Christian God was identified with the Demiurge, whose spirit was trapped in the material World, with Satan sent to Earth to give man occult knowledge, or gnosis, so that the divine aspect within humanity could be returned to God. The Orthodox Satanic Church, in existence from 1971 to 1974 in Chicago, which at its height claimed more than five hundred members, taught a similar system of beliefs. The group’s anti-LaVey philosophy taught that Got the Creator created Satan, who, in turn, became the teacher of all knowledge. Through ritual, prayer, and songs, held every Saturday night at Chicago’s Occult Book Shop, members were exhorted to absorb as much of Satan’s wisdom as they could. For all their differences, all of the neo-Satanic churches share several structural and psychological traits, not only with themselves but with other occult sects. With hero worship often a large factor in the success of these groups their existence has been dependent on the charisma and continued life of the leader. As he or she goes, so goes the cult—which has resulted in a short life span for a majority of occult and virtually all Satanic organizations. As seen, many Satanists are frustrated people reacting against the banality and powerlessness of their lives. Feeling like insignificant cogs in a machine, bewildered by the complexities of various bureaucracies, these people seek out a group that will accept them, in which they can vent their feelings of hostile alienation without being censured. Through the practice of “magic” and the achievement of “adept” levels they can feel that they are unique and powerful. However, becoming part of an elect elite can have side effects. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Rousseau initiated a second Renaissance when he expressed his dissatisfaction with modernity, made possible by his knowledge of the Greek and Roman examples. “Ancient statesmen spoke endlessly of morals and virtue; ours speak only of commerce and money.” Rousseau’s use of his knowledge of antiquity—which was, although not scholarly, very profound—is a perfect model of the reason for having ancient thought available to those great individuals who, as Nietzsche put it, are untimely and need a vantage point from which to get their bearings and become the most timely of all. It is the old Greeks who make men both untimely and timely in crises. Nothing fancy, no infinite searching outside; the book in itself always intelligible, as long as human nature remains the same. This is the role played by the Greek authors throughout the wildly varying ages since they wrote, always Phoenix-like when they appear to have been consumed and are only ashes conserved by the scholars. Rousseau’s fervent appeal for modern man to look back to the ancient city, because it was whole and a true community, was the source of the romantic longing to breathe the fresh air of Greece again. Its moral and esthetic health was what Rousseau conveyed so convincingly. He gave the impulse to all kinds of attempts at a new communitarian beginnings, from Robespierre to Owen to Tolstoy and the kibbutz, an impulse still alive in contemporary thought. However, most of all, as I have discussed earlier, his observations on the tension between Enlightenment and decent politics gave birth to the idea of culture. It was to the study of Greece or Sparta or Athens as models of cultures that Rousseau’s reflection led. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The motive for this study—which flourished particularly in Germany, where Rousseau’s influence was most strongly felt, precisely because of Kant’s and Goethe’s predominance there—was to understand culture, with a view to the founding of a German culture. It was primarily Greek and Roman poetry and secondarily history to which the German thinkers turned for inspiration, and the scholars followed. It was distinctly not Greek philosophy. This was evident in Rousseau himself. The philosophers whose theoretical reflection was necessary to him were Bacon, Descartes and Newton, not Plato and Aristotle. The latter two just did not know the truth about nature. Whatever interest later scholarship had in them was as parts of Greek culture, as typical expressions of it and less interesting than poets, who are culture founders. The Greek philosophers were not valid interlocutors. Rousseau admired Plato and thought he had deep insight into human things, but rather more as a poet than a philosopher or a scientist. Plato was indeed the philosopher for lovers, but Rousseau, without consulting Plato, taught that eros is the child of pleasures of the flesh and imagination. Its activity is poetry, the source of what Rousseau understand to be the life-creating and -enhancing illusions and thereby the source of the ultimate grounds of the folk-minds that make peoples possible. In Plato, eros led to philosophy, which in turn led to the rational quest for the best regime, the one good political order vs. the plurality of cultures. So the discovery of Greek “culture” was contrary to Greek philosophy. And this particular difference, concerning the best regime as opposed to culture, proved fatal to reason. We can recognize this in a preliminary way in Weber’s assumption that it is values rather than reasons that found and sustain communities. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Cresleigh Homes

So you’ve moved into your new #CresleighHome and you’re ready to tackle the backyard. Head on over to our blog and search “landscaping” for all the tips and tricks you’ll need.

Here are a few of our favorite blog posts on the subject:
🌼 14 Low-Maintenance Plants for Easy Landscaping
🌼 5 Landscaping Mistakes to Avoid
🌼 5 Best Places to Order Seeds Online

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#MillsStation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Some men find God in nature, others place the Divinity in a different type of Grand Canyon. Many have had enough of pretty faces. They hardly even notice them. Beauty is not anything. They are too busy looking for something wore than what they saw last week. And perhaps that is what is what is wrong with society. No longer do most people look for things that are ascetically pleasing. They are looking for negative ways of release and projecting emotions and insecurities to make themselves feel better. Their only interest in other people is to see some disgrace that they have yet witnesses. A man down and out on his luck, a success woman who is beautiful that they can make feel insecure, a slave graveling for a pay check, someone from Asia waiting in line to become the next Ms. America when her citizenship is permitted. All these are good enough to make fun of for a momentary diversion, but then they must move on, searching for the next golden moment to exploit. It is best to keep looking, rather than pausing to consider what all this sinful behavior means. If the theologians are correct, and our bodies are only the ephemeral vessels of our eternal souls, then is not sullying other people a porous thing, allowing seepage of cruel rot from one’ mind to become the permanent life force inside? Their souls may be corroded to the point of damnation everlasting. Life for many is about humiliating others. Their mouths have become sphincters with a wriggling mouth lizard. After all, slander is all in fun! Unable to find sufficiently degraded specimens in the community, the sick thriller seeker moves on to other targets. Denigrating everyone individual with conduct disorder comes upon. One sees slavering prostration of offense on others as more than a national pastime; it is the new America godhead. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

I recently had one of my most memorable counselling experience. We were holding a mission when a young man came to me and unburdened himself. His case was so typical that I told him at once that either he or his family had been engaging in occult practices. He admitted this freely and what he went on to confess left a deep impression on my mind. This will in no way break any seal of confession, as the man himself asked me to use his experience wherever possible to warn people of the dangers of occultism. Let us begin the story, then. Even as a child the young man had suffered from depression and had had thoughts of suicide and other psychic disorders. From his early years he had heard noises during the night and had sometimes witnessed ghost-like appearances, which had caused rustling and whistling noises. A psychiatrist would perhaps diagnose these experiences as psychoneurosis, but this would not explain the cause of the disturbances. However, when one went into the family history the source became clear. The young man’s great-grandmother had been a magic charmer. She had healed both animals and people by means of her charms. In addition to this she had also belonged to a spiritistic circle which practised communication with departed spirits. It was her involvement with occult phenomena that brought about the tragic downfall of the family. The magic practices of the great-grandmother had been passed down to her son and daughter, who in turn had charmed both animals and people. Others were warned to stay away from the because they “might ask you out,” which means you may become enthralled by their presence and want a relationship because once you get their attention, they seem so charming and innocent and caring and attentive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

They had also carried on communication with the dead, and had practised the use if a pendulum and the laying of cards as a means of fortune-telling. They both died in a terrible way. The woman had at night seen ghost in her room, and she had the feeling that evil spirits were forever trying to keep her mouth and nose shut. This continued for many years and finally she had been committed to an asylum. Since she was not really mentally ill though, she was released after six months. Her brother later died in terrible agony in spite of the fact that he had asked that all his magic books be burned or thrown out of the house. He had even asked for a Bible to read, but he was not able to understand it. When he finally died in great pain an obnoxious, he was greatly missed. The grandchildren were no better off. One granddaughter used to have fits of frenzy in which she threw furniture around or sometimes lay down in the street screaming almost unbearably. She too was committed to an asylum. Another granddaughter heard the already mentioned sound of knocking during the night, and she was so emotionally disturbed that one day she suffered death by suicide, with two of her children, by jumping off a cliff with them. A grandson became a medium for a spiritistic séance, and he too suffered from a persecution mania and finally ended up in a mental home. Among the great-grandchildren, one girl continued the card-laying and charming tradition and later died when she was quite young. Her family asserts that she still haunts the house in which they live in the form of a poltergeist. It was one of the brothers of this girl who had come to me for counselling. He told me that he was utterly convinced that all the terrible psychic disorders in his family history could be traced back to their contact with occultism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

We see evidenced here the punishment for sin mentioned in the second commandment, “…visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children to the third and the fourth generation of those who hate me.” And this is not an isolated cause. In my missionary work I have heard many similar family histories while counselling people. It is distressing to note how little is known of the powers of Satan among psychiatrists and Christian counsellors. The present atmosphere of rationalistic thought has caused these things to be regarded lightly as if they did not exist. However, if it is our desire to help people then we must take these satanic forces seriously. Man stands in the midst of a battle between Christ and Satan. When people think of Satan merely as a man with a tail and horns, and just mock at the ideas of a real devil, they make a terrible mistake and thus enable Satan to ensnare and attack his victims without hindrance. The most dangerous area of satanic seduction is magic, for it is here that people consciously participate in Satan’s work even though he hides behind a camouflage of pious ceremonies. Ronald Adam, a London electronics engineer and also a member of the Church of Satan for years, expressed a sentiment calling Satanists the “lunatic fringe of the occult.” Adam told me that he needs no group to practice his Satanism, which to him is more of a philosophy than a religion. “The essence of Satanism is material success,” he said. “Your own positive outlook gives you success, and that outlook comes from Satanic doctrine.” When told about the man’s feelings about his fellow members, LaVey, rather than expressing disapproval, said emphatically, “Those are the kind of members I want—people who can stand on their own without a bunch of slobbering idiots propping them up!” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

LaVey claims that this is what differentiates his cult from others. Unlike other cult leaders, he does not seek to impose his “truth” on his members. He does not even profess to know the truth. “The truth never set anyone free,” he wrote in 1969. “It is only DOUBT which will bring mental emancipation.” True Satanist, he says, now need no hierarchy to tell them how to think. And once that bulwark of Satanists is formed, the older order will fall. It is difficult to say how much of this LaVey actually believes, and how much of it is rationalization to compensate for his unwillingness to deal with the inevitable personality conflicts that would accompany the building up of another organization. However, the late High Priest seemed more interested in compiling his essays for publication, transferring obscure pieces of celluloid to videotape and DVD, and playing his keyboards than he was to committing himself to administering the day-to-day needs of his flock. Although he is purposely vague when discussing membership figures, saying that the position of the players carried greater importance than the numbers, LaVey asserted that subscribers to The Cloven Hoof the church newsletter, stand at about two thousand. More significant, perhaps, is the increase report by LaVey in the membership applications since 1982. LaVey attributed the rise to the new public visibility of the church in response to the recent wave of allegation of Satanic child abuse, and theorized that the hysteria had perhaps generated a perverse result. However, will the new recruits understand that LaVey’s  brand of Satanism was the ultimate conscious alternative to hard mentality and institutionalized thought? The High Priest proclaimed: “It is a studied, contrived set of principles and exercises, designed to prevent and liberate from the contagion of mindlessness which destroys innovation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

“Here are some reasons why it is called ‘Satanism’: It is most stimulating under that name, and self-discipline and motivation are easier under stimulating conditions. It means ‘the opposition,’ and epitomizes all symbols of non-conformity. It represents the strongest ability to turn a liability into an advantage—to turn alienation into exclusivity. In other words, the reason it’s called ‘Satanism’ is because it’s fun, it’s accurate, and it is productive.” Some of the “few good men” attracted to LaVey’s free thinking, egotistic philosophy might be able to utilize it and turn it into a source of strength. However, for the weaker-minded, turning “alienation into exclusivity” might only promote further alienation and exacerbate already existing psychological and emotional problems. Yet LaVey was optimistic that those people he sought—his underground men—would seek him out, and that when they do, society would be transformed. All that went before the grottos, the striptease acts, the carnie jive—was part of the Master Plan, LaVey insisted, like the trial-and-error procedure of programming one of his musical sequencers. “Eventually, you get the entire tune by pressing one note,” he says with a diabolical glint in his eyes. “It’s like painting by the numbers. People can’t see the picture until it’s finished.” With LaVey, it was difficult to gauge just how serious he was in making such proclamations, but Walt Harrington summed up the man when he wrote: “Anton LaVey is not a cartoon Satan. He’s far less frightening than you might imagine, because he is admittedly a carnival hustler. Yet he is still terrifying, because he touches, if not the mystical darkness, then the psychological darkness—the hate and fear—in us all. Ans because he, sadly, knows a haunting truth: Everybody wants to feel better than somebody.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

It is generally imagined that eugenics was a quack science that began with Mein Kampf and ended with the experiments of Dr. Mengele. This is not the case. “Family planning” and “genetic engineering” are the current euphemistic equivalents, as we will see, euphemism is very often a means of killing you softly, with a new song. Eugenics is the practical application of genetic theory to strengthen the genetic material of the human species (positive eugenics) or eliminate genetic dross (negative eugenics). At the turn of the century, eugenics was sold as a moral imperative. To housewives and mothers at that time, eugenics meant health-consciousness applied in a positivist science-directed manner. To social scientists, eugenics was a way to increase the quality of humanity similar to that of breeding more resilient strains of cattle. The presumed results would be auspicious: a steady increase in man’s intelligence and a decrease in crime and birth defects. Many America states took up the eugenic cudgel, passing sterilization laws for the physically unfit. By the end of the 1920s many thousands of mental defectives and violent criminals had undergone compulsory sterilization—a scientifically and legislatively sanctioned foray into the realm of preventive sociology. By the mid-1930s, however, eugenics more and more became a synonym for racism and pseudo-science, as some think that ending a pregnancy on purpose is a form of terminating a human life and age discrimination. Hostilities with Germany were increasing, and Nazi racial policy was vulnerable to Allied propaganda since Americas and British alike were threatened by intimations of Teutonic racial superiority. Great quantities of anti-Nazi tracts and books appeared, pillorying the myth of the Aryan superman. “What planet are you from? Whatcha doing to my body? Seems like science fiction. I felt it in my backbone. Your heart transmitting vibes. My system crashes one by one, two, one, two, three, four. Lovers in slow motion. Let us be unspoken (Super Human). Just keep your body close to me (Super Human). And we’re super human. Some cosmic confusion. I’m scared I will lose you (Super Human). We’re super human. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

“You’ll find someone new. Someone to love you, too. You were never really mine. We’re super human. But then you let me go. That’s okay cause I’m super human. Your power went through me once (Super Human). We were super human. We were super human babe (Super Human). Yeah, we were (Super Human). We were super human,” lyrics by Andrew Bayer featuring Asbjorn, name of song: Super Human. Many Ayrans are not racist, but they like to remind their brothers that they are a super race and understand that some of them are from different origins and that some will fall in love with some of the new people on Earth, but they are stronger together. Great quantities of anti-Nazi tracts and books appeared in the 1930s, pillorying the legend of Aryan Superman. It is ironic to note, however, that the German Population Courts were merely emulating American eugenic policy. As early as 1930, Hitler reveals to economic advisor Wagener, “I have studied with great interest the laws of several American states concerning prevention of reproduction by people whose progeny would, in all probability, be of no value or be injurious to the racial stock.” [Otto Wagner, Hilter: Memoris of a Confidant, 1985, Yale University Press.] Eugenics=race hatred became an equation hard to shake in a country of Hun-haters. Yet in the 1920s, mainstream eugenicists were quick to distance themselves from those who, like Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard, promoted de Gobineau-derived theories of Nordic racial superiority. An ounce of eugenics is worth a pound of race prejudice,” wrote Professor Frank Hankins in Evolution in Modern Thought, attempting to salvage eugenic science by merging it with American melting-pot sloganeering. Hankins and fellow scientists failed to keep the flame alive. By 1940, funding for research and legal sterilizations slowed to a halt, and the eugenic ideal of a nation full of geniuses and free of imbeciles became just a fading memory. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

In the repudiation of applied genetics, however, a tyranny of a very different nature arose. Grigori Lysenko’s announcement in the late 1930s that there is no such thing as an inherited trait, that all traits are environmentally determined, paved the way for the reordering of the Russian spirit in the likeness of Joseph Stalin. Rejecting theories of inheritance made it easier for Soviet rulers to expect unswerving allegiance to heavy inoculations of communist dogma. Aldous Huxley and other science fiction writers painted pictures of eugenic/technological nightmares, of gleaming post-partum assembly lines complete with stainless steel nipples. (Later in his life, Huxley found an “unregulated” breeding process a far greater nightmare.) In the U.S.A., an environmentally-based theory of intelligence created the legal basis for lawsuits of race bias against institutions utilizing I.Q. test and the SAT in which Asian-Americans and Whites tend to be the highest scorers. Equalitarianism found its answer in Equal Opportunity programs, and not in a science which spoke about genetic advantages and disadvantages. There is no more frightening picture to the civil libertarian than the vision of a State drunk on the scripture of Social Darwinism. After WWII, in the wake of widespread anti-Nazi sentiment, UNESCO-underwritten scientists such as the anthropologist Ashley Montagu flooded the bookstores, colleges, and academics with books such as Man’s Most Dangerous Myth, a debunking expose about “fascism of the gonads.” More recently, the anti-eugenicist torch has been passed to journalist-scientists such as Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man), Allen Chase (The Legacy of Malthus) and Daniel Kevles (In the Name of Eugenics). Their tomes rebuke, in the tradition of American and British anti-Nazi propaganda, the moral premises—and scientific verities—of eugenics. Concludes Kevles in his book, “…the more masterful the genetic sciences have become, the more they have corroded the authority of moral custom in medical and reproductive behavior.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

UNESCO’s muddled role vis a vis eugenics—now for, now against—is worth contemplating since it describes throwing the birth process in one direction or the other for solely political purposes. G. Brock Chisholm, a former director of the World Health Organization, articulated UNESCO’s apparent aim: “What people everywhere must do is practice birth control and miscegenation in order to create one race in one World under one government. [U.S.A magazine, August 12, 1955]. A statement such as Chisholm’s demonstrates that a version of eugenics more in line with humanist ideals is exonerated under the rubric of sexual freedom and racial equality while the early eugenicists’ aims of intellectual and moral improvement of the species continue to be damned as diabolic. One of the earliest questioners was Jonathan Swift, who saw what was intended and spoke up against it in the name of the ancients and of poetry. Gulliver’s Travels is to early modern philosophy what Aristophanes’ The Clouds was to early ancient philosophy. Gulliver’s Travels is nothing but a comic statement of Swift’s preference for antiquity, casting his ancients as giants and noble horses, his modern as midgets and Yahoos. He addressed the aspect that most concern us, the establishment of the academies and universities—the Republic of Letters, to use Pierre Bayle’s expression—in the chapter entitled “A Voyage to Laputa.” Guliver, after observing modern politics in Lilliput, goes to Laputa to see modern science and its effect on life. Laputa is a flying island ruled by natural scientists. It is, of course, a parody of the British Royal Society, in Swift’s time a relatively recent association of the philosophers and scientists who had been tempted more into public and public life by modern thought. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

In this strange new land Gulliver finds a theoretical preoccupation abstracted from primary human concerns, one whose beginning point was not the human dimension, but which ends up altering it. On the Flying Island the men have one eye turned inward, the other toward the zenith. They are perfect Cartesians—one egotistical eye contemplating the self, one cosmological eye surveying the most distant things. The intermediate range, which previously was the center of concentration and defined both the ego and the pattern for the study of the stars, is not within the Laputain purview. They only studies are astronomy and music, and the World is reduced to these two sciences. The men have no contact with ordinary sense experiences. This is what permits them to remain content with their science. Communication with others outside their circle is unnecessary. Rather than making their mathematics follow the natural shapes of things, they change things so as to fit their mathematics. Their food is cut into all sorts of geometrical figures. Their admiration for woman, such as it is, is due to the resemblance of women’s various parts to specific figures. Jealousy is unknow to them. Their wives can commit adultery before their eyes without its being noticed. This absence of eroticism is connected with an absence of poetic sensibility. These scientists cannot understand poetry, and hence, in Gulliver’s view, their science cannot be a science of man. Another peculiarity of these men is described by Gulliver as follows. “What I chiefly admired, and thought altogether unaccountable, was the strong disposition I observed in them towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their judgments in matters of state and passionately disputing every in of a party opinion. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

“I have indeed observed the same disposition among most of the mathematicians I have known in Europe, although I could never discover the least analogy between the two sciences.” Gulliver recognizes the political concern of theoretical science and doubts that it can comprehend the actual practice of politics. He also thinks the scientists have a sense of special right to manipulate politics. The Laputians’ political power rests on the new science. The Flying Island is built on the principles of physics founded by Gilbert and Newton. Applied science can open new roads to political power. This island allows the king and the nobles to live free from conspiracies by the people—in fact, free from contact with them—while still making use of them and receiving the tribute that is necessary to the maintenance and leisure of the rulers. They can crush the terrestrial cities. Their power is almost unlimited and their responsibilities nil. Power is concentrated in the hands of the rulers; hence they are not forced even by fear to develop a truly political intelligence. They require no virtue. Everything runs itself, so there is no danger that their incompetence, indifference or vice will harm them. Their island allows their characteristic deformity to grow to the point of monstrosity. Science, in freeing men, destroys the natural conditions that make them human. Hence, for the first time in history, there is the possibility of tyranny grounded not on ignorance, but on science. The actual path to nanotechnology—the one that history books will record—could emerge from any one of the research directions in physics, biochemistry, and chemistry recounted in past reports. The availability of so many good options build the confidence that some particular path will be fastest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Several years ago, researchers at the University of Brobdingnag began work on developing a molecular manipulator. To reach this goal, a team of a dozen physicists, chemists, and protein researchers banded together (some working full time, some part time) and began the creative teamwork needed to solve the basic problems. First they needed to attach a gripper to an AFM tip. As grippers, they chose fragments of antibody molecules, the selectively sticky protein that the immune system uses to bind and identify germs. If they could get the “back” of the molecule stuck onto a tip, then the “front” could bind and hold molecular tools. (The advantage of antibody fragments was this: freedom of tool choice. Since the late 1980s, researchers had been able to generate antibodies able to bind almost any preselected molecule—or molecular tool.) They tried half a dozen methods before finding one that worked reliably. In parallel, the U. Brob AFM researchers worked on placing tips in a precise location and then holding them there with atomic accuracy for seconds at a time. This proved straightforward. They used techniques developed elsewhere during the early 1990s, adding only modest refinements. They now had their griper and a way putting it where they wanted it, but they needed a set of tools. The gripper was like the chuck of a drill, waiting to have different bits fitted into its tool-slot holder. So as the final step, the synthetic chemists on the team made a dozen different molecular tools, all identical at one end but different at the other. The similar parts all bound to the same anti-body tool-holder, slotting neatly into position. The different parts were all chemically reactive in different ways. Each of these tools could use a chemical reaction to transfer some atoms to a molecular object under construction. Developing the molecular tool kit was the toughest part of the project; it took about as much work as had gone into duplicating the palytoxin molecule back in the 1980s. None of the tasks in the project demanded the solution of a deep scientific puzzle, and none demanded the solution of a notoriously difficult engineering problem. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Each task had many possible solutions, the problem was to find a compatible set of solutions and apply them. After a few years, the solutions came together and the U. Brob research team began building new molecules by molecular manipulation. Now many teams are doing likewise. A university, a political party, a religious denomination, a judicial proceeding, even corporate board meetings are not improved by automating their operations. They are made more imposing, more technical, perhaps more authoritative, but defects in their assumptions, ideas, and theories will remain untouched. Computer technology, in other words, has not yet come close to the printing press in its power to generate radical and substantive social, political, and religious thought. If the press was, as David Riesman called it, “the gunpowder of the mind,” the computer in its capacity to smooth over unsatisfactory institutions and ideas, is the talcum powder of the mind. I do not wish to go as far as Weizenbaum in saying that computers are merely ingenious devices to fulfill unimportant functions and that the computer revolution is an explosion of nonsense. Perhaps that judgment will be in need of amendment in the future, for the computer is a technology of a thousand uses—the Proteus of machines, to use Seymour Papert’s phrase. One must note, for example, the use of computer-generated images in the phenomenon known as Virtual Reality. Putting on a set of miniature goggle-mounted screens, one may block out the real World and move through a simulated three-dimensional World which changes its components with every movement of one’s head. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

That Timothy Leary is an enthusiastic proponent of Virtual Reality does not suggest that there is a constructive future for this device. However, who knows? Perhaps, for those who can no longer cope with the real World, Virtual Reality will provide better therapy than Eliza. Wang Shiwu, a peddler in rural Anhui Province in China, used to haul his wares in a basket hoping to find customers in nearby villages and markets. It was a way of life not too different from that of peddlers or peasants a thousand years ago. Wang’s life changed in 1999. He realized then, he says, that “a wonderful opportunity had arrived.” And today Wang’s customers come to him. The wonderful opportunity was the Internet. Wang was not a geek. And, at fifty-two, he was not a kid. However, he was entrepreneurial, and before long he was surfing the Net in his home, collecting marketing information and offering it to fellow villagers free of charge. Every farmer knows the importance of timely prince information. Traditionally, sellers had to take their crop or herd to market on the bare chance that it would sell. Only then would they learn what prices were being offered—a system that severely limited their bargaining power. By supplying current price information, Wang changed all that. Wang then also offered to sell their products online. He sold the first 2 million kilograms of sweet potatoes at a higher price than that available in the local market. Before long, e-mail began pouring in, and Wang was in business. Wang’s story is told by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, which reported enthusiastically that, as of 2001, most farmers in Anhui had access to a computer and that 1,634 towns in the province—90 percent of the total—could obtain free market information online. The province also sponsored online “trade fairs” that saw more than 100 million kilograms of grain change hands in one year alone. As of October 2019, more than 98 percent of China’s administrative villages have been connected with fiber-optic networks and 4G networks, and 99 percent of the impoverished villages had been linked with broadband internet services. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The Internet is not just directly reducing rural poverty. It is also helping to create jobs for hundreds of thousands across China by enabling the growth of mega businesses like Alibaba and Tencent. In addition, the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology (CAICT) estimates that 5G will create more than 8 million jobs by 2030. Thus, the whole economy is boosted, making it possible to devote extra resources to rural development. This trend will continue. What is clear is that, to date, computer technology has served to strengthen Technopoly’s hold, to make people believe that technological innovation is synonymous with human progress. And it has done so by advancing several interconnected ideas. It has, as already noted, amplified beyond all reason the metaphor of machines as humans and humans as machines. I do not claim, by the way, that computer technology originated this metaphor. One can detect it in medicine, too: doctors and patients have come to believe that, like a machine, a human being is made up of parts that function as the original did without impairing or even affecting any other part of the machine. Of course, to some degree that assumption works, but since a human being is in fact not a machine but a biological organism all of those organs are interrelated and profoundly affected by mental states, the human-as-machine metaphor has serious medical limitations and can have devastating effects. Something similar may be said of the mechanistic metaphor when applied to workers. Modern industrial techniques are made possible by the idea that a machine is made up of isolatable and interchangeable parts. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

However, in organizing factories so that workers are also conceived of as isolatable and interchangeable parts, industry has engendered deep alienation and bitterness. This was the point of Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, in which he tried to show the psychic damage of the metaphor carried too far. However, because the computer “thinks” rather than works, its power to energize mechanistic metaphors is unparalleled and of enormous value to Technopoly, which depends on our believing that we are at our best when acting like machines, and that in significant ways machines may be trusted to act as our surrogates. Among the implications of these beliefs is a loss of confidence in human judgment and subjectivity. We have devalued the singular human capacity to see things whole in all their psychic, emotional and moral dimensions, and we have replaced this with faith in the powers of technical calculation. Eavesdrop on a group of CIOs at a conference, and chances are that before long you will hear their standard complaints: That they are misunderstood by top management. Bosses view them as budget-busting cost centers, whereas they believe that effective high-tech Information Systems can actually cut costs and bring in profit. Bosses are too uninformed—ignorant is the mot juste—about computers and communications to make intelligent judgments. And they are not patient enough to learn. In fact, only one CIO in thirteen actually gets to report directly to his president or chief executive officer. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

However, while CIOs may grumble, they are far from powerless. As the super-symbolic economy expands, business expenditures for knowledge-processing soar. Only a fraction of these are for computers and related information systems. However, that fraction represents enormous amounts of money. By 1988 sales of the World’s top one hundred information technology firms, according to Datamation magazine, topped the $243 billion mark. That number was projected to rise to $500 billion by 1998. However, as of 2021, the top three technology companies: Alphabet, Microsoft, and Meta combined have a total revenue of $1.4 trillion. The pandemic sped up growth in the technology industry. Anyone who helps direct these purchases and allocate these funds is hardly bereft of clout. What CIOs scarcely mention, however, is that they also allocate information—the source of power for other and, not incidentally, for themselves. As soon as a company budgets mega-dollars for information technology, struggles break out as different factions try to bite a chunk off the budget. However, in addition to traditional turf and money conflict, CIOs also find themselves smack in the middle of fights over information itself. Who gets what kinds of information? Who has access to the main data bases? Who can add to that data base? What assumptions are built into the accounting? Which department or division “owns” what data? And even more important, who dictates the assumptions or models built into the software? The conflicts over such questions, while seemingly technical, clearly affect the money, status, and power of individuals. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Moreover, these conflicts escalate. As the CIO and his staff redirect flows of information, they shake existing power relations. To use the expensive new computers and networks effectively, most companies are compelled to reorganize. Major restructurings are thus set in motion—and these trigger repercussive power struggles throughout the firm. Before long, smart management, prodded by the CIO, discovers that new information technology is not just a way to cut paperwork or speed service. It can sometimes be used strategically to capture new markets, create new products, and enter entirely new fields. We have already seen Citibank selling software to travel agents in the United States of America, or Seino Transport in Japan peddling software to truckers. Such forays into new businesses begin to change the shape and mission of the organization. This, however, triggers even more dangerous power struggles in the executive suite. To complicate matters, as computers and communications fuse and networks proliferate, a new power group begins to poke its head under the managerial tent: the telecommunications managers and their staff, who often jockey with the IS people for resources and control. Should communications be subordinate to Information Systems or independent? Chief information officers thus find themselves at the vortex of many disputes, some of which lead to, or become part of revolutions at the highest level. Because of what computers commonly do, they place an inordinate emphasis on the technical processes of communication and offer very little in the way of substance. With the exception of the electrical light, there never has been a technology that better exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s aphorism “The medium is the message.” #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

The most computer is almost all process. There are, for example, no “great computers,” as there are great writers, painters, or musicians. There are “great programs” and “great programmers,” but their greatness lies in their ingenuity either in simulating a human function or in creating new possibilities of calculation, speed, and volume. Of course, if J. David Bolter is right, it is possible that in the future computers will emerge as a new kind of book, expanding and enriching the tradition of writing technologies. Since printing created new forms of literature when it replaced the handwritten manuscript, it is possible that electronic writing will do the same. However, for the moment, computer technology functions more as a new mode of transportation than as a new means of substantive communication. It moves information—lots of it, fast, and mostly in a calculating mode. The computer, in fact, makes possible the fulfillment of Descartes’ dream of the mathematization of the World. Computers make it easy to convert facts into statistics and to translate problems into equations. And whereas this can be useful (as when the process reveals a pattern that would otherwise go unnoticed), it is diversionary and dangerous when applied indiscriminately to human affairs. So the computer’s emphasis on speed and especially its capacity to generate and store unprecedented quantities of information. In specialized contexts, the value of calculation, speed, and voluminous information may go uncontested. However, the “message” of computer technology is comprehensive and domineering. The computer argues, to put it badly, that the most serious problems confronting us at both personal and public levels require technical solutions through fast access to information otherwise unavailable. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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We believe ourselves to be living in a democracy because from time to time we get to vote on candidates for public office. Yet our vote for congressperson or president means very little in the light of our lack of power over technological inventions that affect the nature of our existence more than any individual leader has ever done. Without our gaining control over technology, all notions of democracy are a farce. If we cannot even think of abandoning a technology, or thinking of it, affect the ban, then we are trapped in a state of passivity and impotence hardly to be distinguished from living under a dictatorship. What is confusing is that our dictator is not a person. Though a handful of people most certainly benefit from and harness to their purposes these pervasive technologies, the true dictators are the technologies themselves. Unlike human beings accused of crimes, all technologies should be assumed guilty of dangerous effects until proven innocent. No new technology should ever be introduced, until its ultimate effects are known and explained to the population. This is necessary because once it has been introduced, getting rid of any technology is practically impossible—so much of life gets reorganized around it and so much power and vested interest attaches to its continuance. Of course, this vision is itself practically impossible. Many technologies are too technically complex for the average person, like myself, not technically trained, to understand them. Also, in many instances it is impossible to identify all effects of a technology in advance of its introduction, especially those which do not lend themselves to scientific proofs and evidences. However, where does this leave us? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

Since it is impossible fully to grasp or explain many technologies, do we then go ahead with them? Do we trust our industrial leaders? Do we merely let them shoot craps with our existence? And if we do foresee undesirable effects from a technology, what means exist for then getting rid of that technology? Are there are? And what does all of this mean to the ultimate control of our lives? There is the possibility of an alternative way of thinking about a problem. If we believe in democratic processes, then we must also believe in resisting whatever subverts democracy. In the case of technology, we might wish to seek a line beyond which democratic control is not possible and then say that any technology which goes beyond this line is taboo. Although it might be difficult to define this line precisely, it might not be so difficult to know when some technologies are clearly over it. Any technology which by its nature encourages autocracy would surely be over such a line. Any technology that benefits only a small number of people to the physical, emotional, political, and psychological detriment of large numbers of other people would also certainly be over that line. In fact, one could make the argument that any technology whose operations and results are too complex for the majority of people to understand would also be beyond this line of democratic control. Can we really say any longer that a reason to go ahead with a technology is that it is too complex for people to grasp, or too clumsy or difficult to dismantle? Either we believe in democratic control or we do not. If we do, then anything which is beyond such control is certainly anathema to democracy. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

At the moment our only choices are personal ones Though we may not be able to do anything whatever about genetic engineering or neutron bombs, individually we can say “no” to television. We can throw our sets in the garbage pail where they belong. However, while this is an act that may be very satisfying and beneficial, in making this act we must never forget that, like choosing not to drive a car, it is no expression of democratic freedom. In democratic terms, this individual act is meaningless, as it has no effect at all upon the wider society, which continues as before. In fact, this act disconnects us from the system and leaves us less able to participate in and affect it than before. Like Huxley’s “savage,” or like today’s young people who drop out to rural farms, we find ourselves even further removed from participation in the central processes that direct our society, our culture, our politics, and our economic organization. We are struggling in a classic double blind. Because eliminating television seems impossible, and personal withdrawal is in some ways not enough, at least at a systematic level, most of us naturally attempt to reform matters. In the case of television we have worked to improve and democratize its output. However, a central argument of these reports has been that television, for the most part, cannot possibly yield to reform. Its problems are inherent in the technology itself to the same extent that violence is inherent in guns. No new age of well-meaning television executives can change what the medium does to people who watch it. Its effects on body and mind are inseparable from the viewing experience. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

As for the political effects, if we switched from the commercial control of television to, say, governmental control, as in Sweden or Argentina or Russian, this would not change the essential political relationships: the unification of experience, the one speaking to the many, the inevitable training in autocracy that these conditions engender. Similarly, no  change is programming format from the present violent, antisocial tendencies to the more “prosocial” visions of education and psychologists will mean much compared with the training in passivity, the destruction of creativity, the dulling of communicative abilities that any extended exposure to television inevitably produces. This even assuming that the programming could be substantially changed which, as we have seen, is highly doubtful. No influx of talented directors or writers can offset the technical limits of the medium itself. No matter who is in control, the medium remains confined to its cold, narrow culverts of hyperactive information. Nothing and no one can change this, nor can anyone change how television’s technical limits confine awareness. As the person who gazed at streams becomes streamlike, so as we watch television we inexorably evolve into creatures whose bodies and minds become television-like. True, if we banned all advertising, that would allay many negative effects of the medium and diminish the power of the huge corporations that are re-creating life in their image. True, if we banned all broadcast television, leaving only cable system, that would reduce the effect of the centralization of control. More kinds of people might have access to the medium, but they would still have to submit to the dictates of the technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

As they used the machine, they would find their material and their own consciousness changing to suit the technological form. The people who use television become more like each other, the Indian who learns television is an Indian no longer. If we reduced the number of broadcast hours per day, or the number of days per week that television is permitted to broadcast, as many countries have, that would surely be an improvement. If we eliminated all crimes shows and other sensational entertainment, it would reveal what an inherently boring medium this is, producing awareness of artificial fixation despite boredom. If we banned all nature shows or news broadcasts from television, due to the unavoidable and very dangerous distortions and aberrations which are inherent in televising these subjects, then this would leave other, better-qualified media to report them to us. The result would be an increased awareness of far more complex, complete and subtle information. If we outlawed networks, there would be a new emphasis on local events, bringing us nearer to issues upon which we might have some direct personal effect. All of these changes in television would be to the good, in my opinion, and worthy of support, but do you believe that they would be any easier to achieve than the outright elimination of the whole technology? I do not think so. Considering how difficult it has been merely to reduce the volume of the kind of advertising that is directed at our children, and considering the overwhelming power of the interests who control communications in this country, we might just as well put our efforts toward trying for the whole in one. It will take no greater amount of organization and it does not suffer the inhibitions of ambiguity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Imagining a World free of television, I can envision only beneficial effects. What is lost because we can no longer flip a switch for instant “entertainment” will be more than offset by human contact, enlivened minds and resurgence of personal investigation and activation. What is lost because we can no longer flip a switch for instant “entertainment” will be more than offset by human contact, enlivened minds and resurgence of personal investigation and activation. What is lost because we can no longer see fuzzy and reduced versions of drama or forests will be more than offset by the actual experience of life and environment directly lived, and the resurgence of the human feeling tht will accompany this. What is lost by the unavailability of escape from what may be the painful conditions of many people’s lives, might be more than offset by the concrete realization that life had been made painful, more to some than to others, and the desire to do something about this, to attack whatever forces have conspired to make this so. The average child has watched more than 200,000 commercials by the time he or she graduates from high school. Advertisers spend over a half-billion dollars each year to tell children to buy expensive toys and unhealthy food. Each year the average viewer sees 18,000 commercials. In a typical American household, a television set is on for seven hours and two minutes a day. By the time a young person finishes high school, he or she will have spent more time watching television than sitting in a classroom. 99.5 percent of American homes have a television set. More than 250,000 Americans write to Doctor’s on TV asking for medical advice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

An American will have spent nine years of his or her life in front of a television by the age of sixty-five. A Detroit paper offered $500 to 120 families to turn off their sets for a month. Ninety-three of the families turned the offer down. Children show classic withdrawal symptoms normally associated with drugs when their families agree to kick the TV habit. By the age of fourteen, a devoted viewer will have witnessed 11,000 television murders. There is an average of eighteen violent acts per hour on children’s weekend programs, and pre-school children show “unwarranted aggressive behavior” after heavy television viewing. When asked to choose between their fathers and their television sets, more than half the young people in a survey chose television. Once rid of television, our information field would instantly widen to include aspects of life which have been discarded and forgotten. Human beings would residcover facets of experience that we have permitted to lie dormant. The nature of political process would surely change, making possible not only more subtle perspectives, but also the possibility of content over style. Political and economic power, now more concentrated than ever before in American history, would surely shift somewhat in the direction of more decentralized, noncapitalistic, community-based structures. Learning would doubtless reemerge to substitute for brainwashing. Individual knowledge and the collective knowledge of communities of friends and peers would again flower as monolithic, institutional, surrogate knowledge declined. Overall, changes are excellent that human beings, once outside the cloud of television images, would be happier than they have been of late, once again living in a reality which is less artificial, less imposed, and more responsive to personal action. How to achieve the elimination of television? I certainly cannot answer that question. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

It is obvious, however, that the first step is for all of us to purge from our minds the idea that just because television exists, we cannot get rid of it. The biggest conspiracy of all, which few even dare to acknowledge, is that we are victims of our birth. Thanks to the often accidental result of a cojoining of simpletons we are yanked unasked into this noxious land of pretense. We are doomed to fit into someone else’s plan until we become cunning enough to find a way out. By the time we figure out where we stand, it is too late to leave, and even suicide has become a felony. The second biggest conspiracy comes into play soon after birth—the weaning and shaping of new lives into the Consumerist Reality, which is what the behavioral science of marketing children’s cereals is all about. Leaving the supermarket without a box of Breakfast With Barbie is not a crime. However, if you do not purchase at least a couple of the latest holographic polychromatic “free prizes inside” Nintendo Cereal Systems, your kids will make you think it is a crime. It is not just the mood-elevating refined sugared product they are selling. (You could make a god case for food manufacturer’s collusion with the AMA, ADA, and FDA, supplying a ready quantity of sugar-addicted children with juvenile diabetes and dental carries.) With children’s breakfast cereal, the product is only nominally different from brand to brand, and then primarily in its food coloring. No, the food product is only a Trojan horse into the hearts and minds of the little Billys and Debbies. Food manufacturers are training children to gorge themselves on style, on popular culture. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

The corporate mascots and icons of the past can no longer serve contemporary corporate lebensraum. Children are to have a tv show, a top movie, a record album, a video game, and a toy doll to accompany their eating experience. Kids are to have breakfast with the same “friend” who appears on the back of their tee-shirts and as toys in their sandbox and as characters on endlessly re-run television shows. This “friendship” is purposefully imaginary rather than tactile. The images are seductive, but are not tangible, creating angst in the young children, who gorge themselves with Super Mario Brothers cereal in order to fill the absence inside of them. Advertising works on two premises: 1. Convincing us to buy what we already have. Advertising spreads its economic hegemony through the tried and true religious principles of fear and guilt. Advertising intervenes between people and their needs, separates them from direct fulfillment and urges its victims to believe that satisfaction can only be obtained through the symbolic magic or grace of its commodity. Foodstuffs that are advertised are usually processed—meaning more expensive, less naturally appealing, less nourishing, and often harmful. Children’s cereals rate in all four of these iniquities. Cereal boxes are designed to hold young ones in thrall as they progress through the normal transitory stages of orality and anality. The symbol of consumption—the open mouth—is found on nearly every box. More subliminally, symbols of the act of excretion are found on such products as Cookie Crisps, Corn Pops, and the aptly named Cocoa Pebbles. Cookie Crisp gives us a lipsmacking bandit with a tongue sticking out of a stretching mouth. Cocoa Pebbles is even less subtle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

Barney and Fred are placed opposite sides of a large bowl containing the chocolate cocoa pebbles. The first perversion comes with the concept of Barney and Fred engaging in a menage-a-trois in oral consumption of Pebbles (the name of Fred’s daughter). The clincher is in the giant cereal blow before them with a hole bored out in the center with the aid of Barney’s “drill.” From that spincterish hole, large brown blobs are expelled. The cover of Corn Pops, formerly Sugar Pops, also boasts the prevalent hole with flying feces, with the O in Pops jettisoning large yellow brown blobs to all corners of the box. The predominate color of Cookie Crisp and Cocoas Pebbles is brown, while Corn Pops accompanies its brown with urine-yellow stains. Breakfast with Barbie appeals to the precocious libido of pre-teen girls and boys. The pink motif of the box is targeted for girls and, perhaps, gender neutral boys rebelling from their puddy dog tail stereotype. However, the image of a scantily-clad Barbie showing lots of plastic flesh or a Jeff Stryker 12-inch actions figure might be just the perfect breakfast companion for some boys. No longer does Barbie have superiority over the short He-men or tiny Gi-Joe action figures. However, the result of this may confuse a young boy’s gender role. This may be welcomed by food manufactures, for market surveys have found homosexual men to be more avid shoppers than their heterosexual counterparts. For the girls the pink design of Breakfast with Barbie cereal box suggests nothing more than pre-pubescent female private parts. To this end, an optical illusion that appears on the Breakfast with Barbie box panders to the primal fears of a young girl’s maturation and self-development. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

 In between Barbie’s legs an undefinable form emerges very pink and very erect. What is it? Further investigation reveals the form as Barbie’s pink sunglasses, which she rests upon her knee. Exclusivity which has played such a big part in status advertising for the last 70 years, has only just recently been applied to the children’s marketplace. Forested Flakes, Cheerios, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles all offers a “limited edition” box with a hologram on the front. This may be the most dangerous form of advertising of all, since it foments such anti-social and competitive values as wealth and status. The collision of children’s games with consumerist doctrine carries the developing mind further afield from the childhood dreamstate, so necessary to the formation of a whole and healthy personality. Paramount in the invasion of economic hegemony into childhood imagination is the cynical revamping of fairy tales in the use of the “Magical Agent” to convince children of the merits of sugar cereals. Lucky Charms’ friendly Irish midget is a pied piper who keeps children in line with the promise of sweet confections, controverting parental dicta not to accept any candy from strangers. Ghostbusters and its spinoffs make good use of the unspoken secrets and mysteries that comprise the religious experience of childhood through its ridicule of adult oppressors. The prize inside Ghostbusters glows in the dark, glows secretly to children beyond the consciousness of adulthood. Corn Pops offers a prize “Ghost Detector” inside its box. The “Ghost Detector” is a psychic Geiger counter, a thin piece of heat-sensitive glow-in-the-dark plastic which curls up in one’s hand indicating the presence of a “ghost.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

Batman cereal (the bat itself has long been associated with darker practitioners of the occult) offers a glow-in-the-dark “bat disc flyer” in exchange for a coupon. The hologram, itself a form of Techno-magic, is an offer available from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cereal in the form of a Holographic tee-shirt from another dimension. And Nintendo Cereal System offers the child an opportunity to buy the secret “power” either on cassette or in a magazine. Presumably, this empowers the child to go beyond the limits of parental authority. PMRC would do well to look at these marketing ploys as the earliest link in the breakdown of the family unit. The masters of commerce have let children of America know that they are what they eat. A kid can be Batman or Barbie or Mario or even the voracious Pac-Man. Can Satan Crispies be far off? (We have heard of a plan afoot by one of the three big cereal manufacturers to begin test marketing Jesus Flakes in several predominantly Catholic South America countries and Mexico.) When it comes to the conquest of fortune, the strategy adopted for the assault on the old regime had two parts—one belonging to natural science and the other to political science. First, Descartes proposed that the humble doctor, one of Socrates’ ordinary examples of a reasonable artisan, lacking in the political or religious splendor that brings men to the center of the human stage, could, if science were to increase his power to heal a thousandfold, promise enough—if not eternity, at least an ever-increasing longevity—to gain men’s attachment and disenchant the priest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

Then, Hobbes proposed that if another humble type, the policeman, who protects men against those who administer violent death, could be made effective in a new way, he could ward off the real dangers for men who had been made to look those dangers in the face and thereby away from fear of invisible powers and their ministers. Doctor and policemen, enhanced by the application of science to their endeavors, were to be the foundations of a wholly new political undertaking. If the pursuit of health and safety were to absorb men and they were led to recognize the connection between their preservation and science, the harmony between theory and practice would be established. The actual rulers, after a couple of centuries of astute propaganda directing popular passions against throne and altar, would in the long run be constrained by their subjects and would have to enact the scientists’ project. The scientists would, to use Harvey Mansfield’s formula, be the hidden rulers. The ends pursued by politicians and the means they use would be determined by philosophers. Scientists would be free and get support, and scientific progress would be identical to political progress so conceived. The scientists in this system belong to a World order of scientists, for national loyalties and customers are irrelevant to them as scientists. They are cosmopolitan. Gradually the political orders would have to be transformed, so that no particularity remains in the way of reason’s operations or produces conflict between the scientist’s loyalty to country and his loyalty to truth. There is only one science. It is the same everywhere and produces the same results everywhere. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

Similarly, there can, in principle, be only one legitimate political order, founded by, on, and for science. There may well remain individual nations with old but decaying traditions stemming from special experiences in the past, and attachment to them may tug at the scientists’ cosmopolitanism. However, the nations must all gradually become similar. They must respect the rights of man. It is part of Manifest Destination, Globalization, and Americanizing. This doctrine of rights is the clear and certain rational teaching about justice that was intended to take the place of the ancient teachings, which were “like castles built on sand.” In fact, rights are nothing other than the fundamental passions, experienced by all men, to which the new science appeals and which it emancipates from the constraints imposed on them by specious reasoning and fear of divine punishment. These passions are what science can serve. If these passions, given by nature are what men have permission—a “right”—to seek satisfaction for, the partnership of science and society is formed. Civil society then sets as its sole goal that satisfaction—life, liberty and the pursuit of property—and men consent to obey the civil authority because it reflects their wants. Government becomes more solid and surer, now based on passions rather than virtues, rights rather than duties. These life-preserving passions act as the premises of moral and political reasoning, the form of which is as follows: “If I desire to preserve myself then I must seek peace, then…etcetera.” On the basis of such evident and deeply felt premises, men’s allegiance to government can be a matter of reason rather than passionate faith. Such imperatives are the very opposite extreme from those enunciated in the Ten Commandments, which provide no reasons for obeying their injunctions and do not affirm fundamental passions but inhibit them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Men now owe their clarity about their ends to reasoners. They obey on rational grounds the law that protects them. And they respect, and demand that the government respect, the scientists who most of all can, by the higher use of reason, understand and tame hostile nature, including human nature. Government becomes the intermediary between the scientists and the people. Part of human nature is autonomy and the freedom to travel, and Americans love their private vehicles that run of fossil fuels. However, oil-company executives are currently talking about the “last days of the Age of Oil.” Dr. Robert E. Armstrong, author of the NDU paper, takes this idea one step further, suggesting that we are moving toward a “biobased” economy in which “genes will replace petroleum” as a key source not only of many types of raw material and products but of energy. American farmers at the start of this century were gaining 280 million tons of waste leaves, stalks and other plant parts a year. Some of that biomass is already converted into chemicals, electricity, lubricants, plastics, adhesives and above all fuel. This, however, is only the beginning. Armstrong foresees the countryside dotted with small “biorefineries” that would turn biomass into foods, feeds, fibers, bioplastics and other goods. He cites a 1999 National Research Council report estimating that a domestic bio-based economy in the United States of America could ultimately fulfill “90 percent of the U.S. organic chemical consumption and 50 percent of our liquid fuel needs.” Nor is this just an American matter. In such an economy, Armstrong continues, “the basic raw material will be genes, and these, unlike oil, are found all over the World.” He thus forecasts a huge geopolitical shift of power from desert-bare oil countries toward tropical regions richly endowed with biodiversity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

“In a biobased World,” he writes, “our relations with Ecuador (to use a representative country…) will be more important than those with Saudi Arabia.” The reason: Ecuador has far greater biodiversity—hence gene diversity—of potential value to the World. And if that is true for Ecuador, what might it mean for Brazil? Or central Africa? At the Eden Project in Cornwall, England, Tim Smit directs what Fast Company calls “the World’s largest greenhouse.” “We are on the verge of a revolution that is greater than any in the 20^th century,” according to Smit. “There are now composite materials that you can make from plants that are stronger than steel and Kevlar. The implications are phenomenal. Every country in the World could have access to advanced materials created from their own plants.” Moreover, he continues, “biorefineries will have to be built close to the source of their raw materials. A regionalized agriculture will likely develop, with certain areas growing specific crops to supply regional biorefineries…The significance is the likely creation of nonfarming jobs in rural areas.” Armstrong concludes, “a biobased economy ultimately could help stem the flow of urbanization.” Are the Japanese bearing their share of the burden in nanotechnology research? For a variety of reasons, Japan’s contribution to nanotechnology research promises to be excellent. While the United States of America has generally pursued research in this area with little sense of long-term direction, it appears that Japan has begun to take a more focused approach. Researchers there already have clear ideas about molecular machines—about what might work and what probably will not. Japanese researchers are accustomed to a higher level of interdisciplinary contact and engineering emphasis than are Americans. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

In the United States of America, we prize “basic science,” often calling it “pure science,” as if to imply that practical applications are a form of impurity. In Japan instead of emphasizes “basic technology.” Nanotechnology is a basic technology, and the Japanese recognize it as such. Recent changes at the Tokyo Institute of Technology—Japan’s equivalent of MIT—reflect their views of promising directions for future research. For many decades, Tokyo Tech has had two major divisions: a Faculty of Science and a Faculty of Engineering. To these is now being added a Faculty of Bioscience and Biotechnology, to consist of four departments: a Department of Biomolecular Engineering, and what is termed a “Department of Biostructure.” The creation of a new faculty in a major Japanese university is a rare event. What U.S.A university has a department of Biostructure.” The creation of a new faculty in a major Japanese university is a rare event. What U.S.A. university has a department explicitly devoted to molecular engineering? Japan has both the departments at Tokyo Tech and Kyoto University’s recently established Department of Molecular Engineering. Japan’s Institute for Physical and Chemical Research (RIKEN) has broad-based interdisciplinary strength. Hiroyuki Sasabe, notes that the institute has expertise in organic synthesis, protein engineering, and STM technology. Sasabe says that his laboratory may need a molecular manipulator of the sort to accomplish its goals in molecular engineering. Research consortia in Japan are also moving toward nanotechnology. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

The Exploratory Research for Advanced Technology Organization (ERATO) sponsors many three-to-five-year projects in parallel, each with a specific goal. Consider the work in progress: Yoshida Nanomechanism Project, Hotani Molecular Dynamic Assembly Project, Kunitake Molecular Architecture Project, Nagayama Protein Array Project, Aono Atomcraft Project. These focuses on different aspects of gaining control over matter at the atomic level. The Nagayama Protein Array Project aims to use proteins as engineering materials to move toward making new molecular devices. The Aono Atomcraft does not involve nuclear power—as its translation might imply—but is instead an interdisciplinary effort to use an STM to arrange matter on the atomic scale. At some point, work on nanotechnology must move beyond spinoffs from other fields and undertake the design and construction of molecular machinery. This shift from opportunistic science to organized engineering requires a change in attitude. In this, Japan leads the United States of America, but America is gaining significant ground. Certainly, after the invention of the digital computer, it was abundantly clear that the computer was capable of performing functions that could in some sense be called “intelligent.” In 1936, the great English mathematician Alan Turing showed that it was possible to build a machine that would, for many practical purposes, behave like a problem-solving human being. Turing claimed that he would call a machine “intelligent” if, through typed messages, it could exchange thoughts with a human being—that is, hold up its end of a conversation. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

In the early days of MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a program called Eliza, which showed how easy it was to meet Turing’s test for intelligence. When asked a question with a proper noun in it, Eliza’s program could respond with “Why are you interested in,” followed by the proper noun and a question mark. That is, it could invert statements and seek more information about one of the nouns in the statement. Thus, Eliza acted much like a Rogerian psychologist, or at least a friendly and inexpensive therapist. Some people who used Eliza refused to believe that they were conversing with a mere machine. Having, in effect, created a Turning machine, Weizenbaum eventually pulled the program off the computer network and was stimulated to write Computer Power and Human Reason, in which, among other things, he raised questions about the research programs of those working in artificial intelligence; the assumption that whatever a computer can do, it should do; and the effects of computer technology on the way people construe the World—that is, the ideology of the computer, to which I now turn. From the sixteenth century until recently we were “Gutenberg’s Men.” The computer is the dominant metaphor of our age; it defines our age by suggesting a new relationship to information, to work, to power, and to nature itself. That relationship can best be described by saying that the computer redefines humans as “information processors” and nature itself as information to be processed. The fundamental metaphorical message of the computer, in short, is that we are machines—thinking machines, to be sure, but machines nonetheless. It is for this reason that the computer is the quintessential, incomparable, near perfect machine for Technopoly. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

The computer subordinates the claims of our nature, our biology, our emotions, our spirituality. The computer claims sovereignty over the whole range of human experience, and supports its claim by showing that it “think” better than we can. Indeed, the thinking power of silicon “brains” will be so formidable that if we are lucky, they will keep us as their best friend. Even machines as simple as thermostats can be said to have beliefs. The thermostats has three beliefs—it is too hot in here, it is too cold in here, and it is just right in here. This statement redefines the word “belief.” The remark rejects the view that humans have internal states of mind that are the foundation of belief and argues instead that “belief” means only what someone or something does. The remark also implies that simulating an idea is synonymous with duplicating the idea. And, most important, the remark rejects the idea that mind is a biological phenomenon. In other word, what we have here is a case of metaphor gone mad. From the proposition that humans are in some respects like machines, we move to the proposition that humans are little else but machines and, finally, that human beings are machines. We have also suggested to the propostion that machines are human beings. If follows that machines can be made that duplicate human intelligence, and thus research in the field known as artificial intelligence was inevitable. What is most significant about this line of thinking is the dangerous reductionism it represents. Human intelligence is not transferrable at this time. The plain fact is that humans have a unique, biologically rooted, intangible mental life which in some limited respects can be simulated by a machine but can not at this time be duplicated. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Machines cannot feel and, just as important, cannot understand. Eliza can ask, “Why are you worried about your mother?,” which might be exactly the question a therapist would ask. However, the machine does not know what the question means or even that the questions. (Of course, there may be some therapists who do not know what the question means either, who ask it routinely, ritualistically, inattentively. In that case we may say that are acting like a machine.) It is meaning, not utterance, that makes mind unique. I use “meaning” here to refer to something more than the result of putting together symbols the denotations of which are commonly shared by at least two people. As I understand it, meaning also includes those things we call feelings, experiences, and sensations that do not have to be, and sometimes cannot be, put into symbols. They “mean” nonetheless. Without concrete symbols, a computer is merely a pile of junk. Although the quest for a machine that duplicates mind has ancient roots, and although digital logic circuitry has given that quest a scientific structure, artificial intelligence does not and cannot lead to a meaning-making, understanding, and feeling creature, which is what a human being is. All of this may seem obvious enough, but the metaphor of the machine as human (or the human as machine) is sufficiently powerful to have made serious inroads in everyday language. People now commonly speak of “programming” or “deprogramming” themselves. They speak of their brains as a piece of “hard wiring,” capable of “retrieving data,” and it has become common to think about thinking as a mere matter of processing and decoding. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

Standards have long been set by industries or government to assure the safety or quality of products and, more recently, to safeguard the environment. However, they are also designed by protectionists governments to keep competitive foreign products out or to advance an industrial policy. West Germany, for instance, conveniently enough for local industry, effectively barred foreign beer on grounds that it was “impure.” And what good is beer without sausage? So Italian canned luncheon meats were also excluded, as were many other imported foods that happened to contain an additive widely used to improve the consistency of the jelly in canned ham and beef. It took a minuet of negotiations and ultimately the threat of legal action by the European Community to make the Germans back down. By now it should come as no surprise that GATT, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, has devised yet another standard—this one intended to reduce the use of standards for unfair trade purposes. However, even beyond their competitive purpose and their use as weapons in today’s blistering trade wars, there is another, deeper reason why la guerre de norms is heating up. A provocative article by the French writer Philippe Messine has suggested that fights over standards must multiply, because in advanced economies the ratio of systemic products to stand-alone products rises, putting standards “at the center of great industrial battles.” This important insight is underlined by the fact that computer-based manufacture leads to a tremendous increase in the variety of products, which means that systems must link more products into wholes or gestalts, and that, in turn, explains why demands for standards must skyrocket. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

It also helps us understand Messine’s remark that the new systemic products increasingly include “an important non-material component, gray matter.” For the manufacture of many goods in small runs aimed at segments or niches of the market increases the amount of information needed to coordinate the economy, making the entire cycle of production and distribution more knowledge-dependent. Then, too, as science and technology advance, technical standards themselves reflect our deeper knowledge. The tests and technologies employed to measure standards become more precise; tolerances, narrower. More information and even-deeper knowledge are embedded in the standards. Finally, as competitive innovations drive more new products into the marketplace, filling (and simultaneously creating) new consumer needs, the push for the definition of standards itself propels research forward. Thus, on every front—scientific, political, economic, and technological—the battle over standards can be expected to intensify as the new system for wealth creation replaced the fast-fading somestack World of the past. Victors in the widening wars over standards will wield immense, high-quality power in the fast-arriving World of tomorrow. Many people believe that the “Big Brother” syndrome—lies, disinformation, and deceptions which are setting the stage for a mass yoking to the false Messiah. There are plans to initiate a new colored currency which is being developed as the pretext of stopping organized crime. This U.S. government plot to destroy the “underground economy” will involve registering each citizen’s every purchase on a master computer. This emergent system is a multi-pronged plan of government monitoring the decisions and movements of its citizenry. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

Cresleigh Homes

Sure, the lemons make the spacious kitchen island at #PlumasRanch Riverside Residence 2 LOOK pretty, but they’re also really useful around the house…

🍋 Toss used lemon rinds in your garbage disposal to freshen
🍋 Remove kitchen odors from your hands by rubbing with cut lemon
🍋 Add some to your water to increase refreshment!

Our home at Homesite 70 is move-in ready! We’re so excited to see who comes to make this gorgeous house a home. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/move-in-ready-homesite-70/