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It Was Worse than the Thing that Crept into the Shadows
Love, peace, comfort, measureless contentment—that was life on the Winchester Estate in 1888. It was a joy to be alive. Pain there was none, nor infirmity, nor any physical signs to mark the flight of time; disease, care, sorrow—one might feel these outside the pale, but not on Mrs. Winchester’s Estate. There they had no place, there they never came. All days were alike, and all a dream of delight. The big country mansion was so large it could shelter an army. Guests lounging around the house for the big Christmas party. The laughter and music was only broken by the whisper of the wind in the cedar branches, and the scraping of their harsh fingers against the window panes. It had pricked us to such luxurious confidence in our surroundings of bright chintz and candle-flame and fire-light, that we had dared to talk of ghost—in which, we all said, we did not believe one bit. We had told the story of the phantom coach and the wedding that had taken place at the Winchester mansion, and the horrible strange bed, and the farmer’s wife, and the Victorian cottage on the estate. We none of us believed in ghosts, but my heart, at least, seemed to leap to my throat and choke me there, when a tap came to Mrs. Winchester’s door…a tap faint, not to be mistaken. Almost at once, Mrs. Winchester’s housekeeper Miss Eden opened the door and said, “Come in,” but she stood there. She was, at all normal hours, the most silent women I have ever known. She stood and looked at us, and shivered a little. So did we—for in those days corridors were not warmed by hot-water pipes, and the air from the door was keen. “I saw your light,” she said at last, “and I thought it was late for you to be up—after all this gaiety. I thought perhaps—” her glance turned towards the door of the dressing-room. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
“No,” I said, “Mrs. Winchester is fast asleep.” I should have added a goodnight, but the youngest of us forestalled my speech. She did not know Mrs. Winchester as we others did; did not know how her persistent silence built a wall round her—a wall that no one dared to break down with the commonplaces of talk, or the littlenesses of mere human relationship. Mrs. Winchester was the heiress of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company. In the morning, she came downs stairs in her unsuitably rich silk lace-trimmed dressing-gown falling back from her thin collarbones, and ran to the door and put an arm around her guest Miss McAnally. The vivid light of pleasure in Miss McAnally’s pale blue eyes went through Mrs. Winchester’s heart like a knife. If she wanted an arm there, it would have been so easy to put one around her neck. “Now,” Mrs. Winchester said, “you shall have the very biggest, nicest chair, and the coffee-pot is here on the hob as hot as hot and my other guest have been telling ghost stories all light. When you get warm you ought to tell one too.” “You’re sure I’m not in your way,” Miss McAnally said, stretching her hands to a blaze. “Not a bit”—Mrs. Winchester said. Mrs. Winchester put her fleecy Maderia shawl round her shoulders. She could not think of anything else to do for her, and she found herself wishing desperately to do something. The smiles Miss. McAnally gave were very quite pretty. People can smile prettily at forty or fifty, or even later, though most young women do not realize this. “As I said before,” Mrs. Winchester confessed, “Everyone has been telling ghost stories all night. I retired early for bed. All of the ghost stories are so beautifully rounded off—a murder committed on the spot—or a hidden treasure, or a warning…I think that makes them harder to believe. The most horrid ghost-story I ever heard was one that was quite silly.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
“Tell it,” Miss McAnally begged. “I cannot—it does not sound anything to tell,” replied Mrs. Winchester. “The only thing that I ever knew of was—was hearsay,” Mrs. Winchester said, slowly, “till just the end. I daresay it would bore you, but it cannot do any hard. You all do not believe in ghosts, and it was not exactly a ghost either.” There was a breathing time of hush and expectancy. The fire crackled and the gas suddenly flared higher because the billiard lights had been put out. We heard the steps and voices of the men going along the corridors. “It is really hardly worth telling,” Mrs. Winchester said doubtfully, shading her faded face from the fire with her thin hand. Everyone said, “Go on—oh, go on—do!” ‘Well,” she said, “twenty years ago—and more than that—I had two friends, and I loved them more than anything in the World. And they married each other. After they were married, I did not see much of them for a year or two; and then he wrote me and asked me to come and stay, because his wife was ill, and I should cheer her up, and cheer him up as well; for it was a gloomy house, and he himself was growing gloomy too.” I knew as she spoke that she had every line of that letter by heart. “Well, I went. The address was in Oakland, near Berkeley; in those says there were streets and streets of new villa-houses growing up round old brick mansions standing in their own grounds, with red walls round, you know, and a sort of flavour of coaching days, and post chaises, and Blackheath highwaymen about them. He had said the house was gloomy, and it was called ‘The Haunted House,’ and I imagined my carriage going through a dark, winding shrubbery, and drawing up in from of one of these sedate, old, square houses. Instead, we drew up in front of a large, smart villa, with iron railings, gay encaustic tiles leading from the iron gate to the stained-glass-panelled door, and for shrubbery only a few stunted cypresses and aucubas in the tiny front garden. But inside it was all warm and welcoming. He met me at the door. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
“He met me at the door,” she said again, “and thanked me for coming, and asked me to forgive the past. They were very glad to see me, and I was very glad to be there. Margaret was not exactly ill, only weak and excitable. I thought he seemed more ill than she did. She went to bed early and before she went, she asked me to keep him company through his last pipe, so we went into the dining-room and sat in the two armchairs on each side of the fireplace. They were covered with green leather I remember. There were bronze groups of horses and a black marble clock on the mantlepiece—all wedding-presents. He poured out some whisky for himself, but he hardly touched it. He sat looking into the fire. At last I said: What’s wrong? Margaret looks as well as you could expect.” “Yes,” he said, “but I don’t know from one day to another that she won’t begin to notice something wrong. That’s why I wanted you to come. You were always so sensible and strong-minded, and Margaret’s like a little bird on a flower.” Mrs. Winchester said, “Yes, of course,” and waited for him to go on. Presently he said: “Sarah, this is a very peculiar house. It is new: that’s just it. We’re the first people who’ve ever lived in it. If it were an old house, Sarah, I should think it was haunted.” Mrs. Winchester asked, “Have you ever seen anything?” “No,” he said. “That is just it. I have not heard nor seen anything, but there’s a sort of feeling: I can’t describe it—I’ve seen nothing and I’ve heard nothing, but I’ve been so near to seeing and hearing, just near, that’s all. And something follows me about—only when I turned round, there’s never anything, only my shadow. And I always feel that I shall see the thing next minute—but I never do—not quite—it’s always just not visible.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Mrs. Winchester had been working very hard—and tried to cheer him up by making light of all this. “It is just nerves,” she said. He replied, “Mrs. Winchester, I thought you could help me, and I do not think I wronged anyone for them to lay a curse on me. I don’t believe in cruses. The only person I could have wronged forgave me freely.” Mrs. Winchester came up with a suggestion, “I think you ought to take Margaret away from the house and have a complete change.” But he said, “No; Margaret has got everything in order, and I could never manage to get her away just now without explaining everything—and, above and beyond all that, she mustn’t guess there’s anything wrong. I daresay I shan’t feel quite such a lunatic now you’re here.” So they said goodnight.” Whenever Mrs. Winchester was alone with him, he used to tell her the same thing over and over again, and at first when he began to notice things, he tried to think tht it was his talk that had upset her nerves. The odd thing was that it was not only at night—but in broad daylight—and particularly on the stairs and passages. On the staircase the feeling used to be so awful that Mrs. Winchester had to bite her lips till they bled to keep herself from running upstairs at full speed. Only she knew if she would not go mad at the top. There was always something behind her—exactly as he said—something that one could just not see. And a sound that one could just not heat. There was a long corridor at the top of the house. Mrs. Winchester sometimes almost saw something—you know how one see things without looking—but if she turned around, it seemed as if the thing drooped and melted into her shadow. There was a little window at the end of the corridor. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Downstairs there was another corridor, something like it, with a cupboard at one end and the kitchen at the other. One night Mrs. Winchester went down into the kitchen to heat some milk for Margaret. The servants had gone to bed. As she stood by the fire, waiting for the milk to boil, she glanced through the open door and along the passage. Mrs. Winchester never could keep her eyes on what she was doing in that house. The cupboard door was partly open; they used to keep empty boxes and things in it. And as she looked, she knew that now it was not going to be “almost” anymore. Yet she said, “Margaret” not because she thought it could be Margaret who was crouching down there, half in and half out of the cupboard. The thing was great at first, and then it was black. And when Mrs. Winchester whispered, “Margaret,” it seemed to sink down till it lay like a pool of ink on the floor, and then its edges drew in, and it seemed to flow, like ink when you tilt up the paper you have split it on; and it flowed into the cupboard till it was all gathered into the shadow there. Mrs. Winchester saw it go quite plainly. The gas was full on in the kitchen. She screamed aloud, but then, she was thankful to say, she had enough sense to upset the boiling milk, so that when he came downs three steps at a time, Mrs. Winchester had the excuse for her scream of a scalded hand. The explanation satisfied Margaret, but the next night he said: “Why didn’t you tell me? It was that cupboard. All the horror of the house comes out of that. Tell me—have you seen anything yet? Or is it only the nearly seeing and nearly hearing still?” Mrs. Winchester said, “You must tell me first what you have seen.” He told her, and his eyes wandered, as he spoke, to the shadows by the curtains, and Mrs. Winchester turned up all three gas lights, and lit the candles on the mantelpiece. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Then they looked at each other and said they were both mad, and thanked God that Margaret at least was sane. For what he had seen was what Mrs. Winchester had seen. After that she hated to be alone with a shadow, because at any moment she might see something that would crouch, and sink, and lie like a black pool, and then slowly draw itself into the shadow that was nearest. Often that shadow was her own. The thing came first at night, but afterwards there was no hour safe from it. She saw it at dawn and at noon, in the fireplace, and always it crouched and sank, and was a pool that flowed into some shadow and became part of it. And always she saw it with a straining of the eyes—a pricking and aching. It seemed as though she could only just see it, as if her sight, to see it, had to be strained to the uttermost. And still the sound was in the house—the sound that she could just not hear. At last, one morning early, Mrs. Winchester did hear it. It was close behind her, and it was only a sign. It was worse than the thing that crept into the shadows. She did not know how she bore it. If she had not been so fond of her friends, she could not have tolerated it. However, she knew in her heart that, if he had no one to whom he could speak openly, he would go mad, or tell Margaret. His was not a very strong character; very sweet, and kind, and gentle, but not strong. He was always easily led. So Mrs. Winchester stayed on and bore up, and they were very cheerful, and made little jokes, and tried to be amusing when Margaret was with them. However, when they were alone, they did not try to be amusing. And sometimes a day or two would go by without their seeing or hearing anything. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
They perhaps should have fancied that they had fancied what they had seen and heard—only there was always the feeling of their being something about that house, that one could just not hear and not see. Sometimes they used to try not to talk about it, but generally they talked of nothing else at all. And the weeks went by, and Margaret’s baby was born. The nurse and the doctor said that both mother and child were doing well. He and Mrs. Winchester sat late in the dining-room that night. They had neither seen nor heard anything for three days; their anxiety about Margaret was lessened. They talked of the future—it seemed then so much brighter than the past. They arranged that, the moment she was fit to be moved, he should take her away to the sea, and Mrs. Winchester should superintend the moving of their furniture into the new house he had already chosen. He was gayer than Mrs. Winchester had seen him since his marriage—almost like his old self. When she said goodnight to him, he said a lot of things about her having been a comfort to them both. She had not done anything much, of course, but still she was glad he said them. Then Mrs. Winchester went upstairs, almost for the first time without that feeling of something following her. She listened at Margaret’s door. Everything was quiet. Mrs. Winchester went on toward her own room, and in an instant, she felt that there was something behind her. She turned. It was crouching there; it sank, and the black fluidness of it seemed to be sucked under the door of Margaret’s room. She went back. She opened the door a listening inch. All was still. And then she heard a sigh close behind her. Mrs. Winchester opened the door and went in. The nurse and the baby were asleep. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Margaret was asleep too—she looked so pretty—like a tired child—the baby was cuddled up into one of her arms with its tiny heard against her side. Mrs. Winchester prayed then that Margaret might never know the terrors that they are hidden from her. That those little ears might never hear any but pretty sounds, those clear eyes never see any but pretty sights. She did not dare to pray for a long time after that. Because her prayer was answered. She never saw, never heard anything more in this World. And now Mrs. Winchester could do nothing for him or her. When they had put her in her coffin, Mrs. Winchester lighted wax candles round her, and laid the horrible white flowers that people will send near her, and then she saw he had followed her. She took his hand to lead him away. At the door they both turned. It seemed to them that they heard a sign. He would have sprung to her side in glad hope. However, at that instant they both saw it. Between them and the coffin, first grey, then black, it crouched an instant, then sank and liquified—and was gathered together and drawn till it ran into the nearest shadow. And the nearest shadow was the shadow of Margaret’s coffin. Mrs. Winchester left the next day. His mother came. She never liked Mrs. Winchester. The something black that crouched then between him and Mrs. Winchester was only his second wife crying beside the coffin. Mrs. Winchester never told anyone the story because it seemed senseless. After hearing the story, Miss McAnally stood at her gaunt height, her hands clenched, eyes straining. She was looking at something that no one could see, and she knew what the man in the Bible meant when he said: “The hair of my flesh stood up.” What they saw seemed not quite to reach the height of the dressing-room door handle. Her eyes followed it down, down—widening and widening. Mrs. Winchester’s eyes followed them—all the nerves of them seemed strained to the uttermost—and she almost saw it—or did she quite see? She could not be certain. However, they all heard the long-drawn, quivering sign. And to each of them it seemed to be breathed just behind them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It was Mrs. Winchester who caught up the candle—it dripped all over her trembling hand—and was dragged by Miss McAnally to the girl who had fainted during the second extra. However, it was a servant girl whose lean arms were round the housekeeper when they turned away, and that have been around her many a time since, in the Winchester mansion where she keeps house. The doctor who came in the morning said that Margaret’s daughter had died of heart disease—which she had inherited from her mother. But Mrs. Winchester wondered had she had not inherited something else from her father? It was the daughter’s ghost that had followed Mrs. Winchester into her own mansion and now haunts it. The invoking or summoning of spirits by means of hymns, prayers, and acts of worship in spiritistic séances, finds a counterpart in demon possession. Often the demon speaking through its victim in the demonized state will demand the burning of incense as well as worship service. In return it often promises alleviation from torment and powers of physical healing or clairvoyant and prognostic gifs assuring financial income and material prosperity to the enslaved person. Paganism is replete with fear of demons who must be appeased by worshipping and servile obedience. Those who accept magical powers of healing and clairvoyance at the hand of demonic powers may escape the grosser torments of vile spirits only to fall under more terrible bondage and become Satan’s tool to enslave others. In 1892, people in Santa Clara Valley gossiped about Mrs. Winchester. They told stories of how she was involved in the diabolic rites of Freemasonry, arguing that she and the Freemasons were in reality devout Satanists, carrying out blasphemous and hideous rituals beneath the sinister clock of secrecy. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The headquarters of the movement, under the leadership Sarah Winchester, Albert Pike, Gallatin Mackey, and others, located in Santa Clara, California at the Winchester mansion, with celebrants of their Black Masses spread all over the World. Their rites supposedly involved séances. Some went as far to say that the Winchester mansion had an infernal telephone hooked up to Hell, through which the leaders spoke to Lucifer. The stories recounted by the villagers were backed up by Thomas Vaughan, an alchemist. However, if that were true, it would mean the Winchester mansion, Mrs. Winchester, and William Winchester are far older than we believe them to be. The town spread rumors that Black Masses were taking place at the Winchester Mansion under the guise of Freemasonry. It was said that the Winchester mansion was a life and magical order. The emphasis on the former, of living according to one’s real nature. Freemasonry is a nonsectarian fraternity claiming to teach a system of morality veiled in the allegory and symbols passed down from the caste of stonemasons who built the original Temple of Solomon. It allegedly binds its members by an oath of secrecy that imposes death on the betrayer, uses secret passwords and signs, and performs rituals purporting to relate to the history of its origins. It organization is hierophantic, the members receiving the “secrets” of the order, and they pass through the higher degrees. Its antiquity can be documented no further back than the latter part of the seventeenth century. The movement really seems to have gotten its start with the establishment of the Grand Lodge in England, in 1717. From there, it spread to France and Germany, and it did not take long for serious-minded students of the occult, attracted by its ritualistic and secretive trappings, to find their way into its ranks. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
It was also said that Mrs. Winchester was an alchemist and a mystic, and she created her own brand of Victorian Masonry, and taught others how to make gold, heal the sick, and raise the dead. These secret rights had been handed down to her by the Knights of Templar. She was under the tutelage of “Unknown Superiors,” a race of godlike spiritual guides. Many of the people in the town gossiped about Mrs. Winchester so viciously, not only because of her wealth and the mansion larger than anyone had ever seen, but also because of suspicions that her estate was a cover for political conspiracy. The Devil, being a rebel against Heaven, has always been portrayed by the powers-that-be as the chief insurrectionist against the existing political and religious order. The enemy cannot be God, for God is on the side of the ruler. Therefore, the enemy of the ruler must be Satan. It is true that the Winchester mansion is supranational in outlook. There was a secret society that met there dedicated to the scientific and political enlightenment of mankind. To achieve this goal, the group intended secretly to work toward the abolition of all monarchies and the establishment of a One-World government, to be run by those few presently Enlightened, or Illuminati. Since professing such republican ideas could be dangerous, the group was wrapped in a cloak of occultism. Mrs. Winchester adopted the grades of Freemasonry and promised initiates that the magical secrets of the Universe could be revealed to them only when they reached the upper levels. Many believed that William Winchester and Annie Winchester had not died, but gone underground and survived in a network of secret societies, two of which were the Freemasons and the Illuminati, to escape the Assassins. The Assassins were a political group who carried out assassinations while crazed on hashish. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Legend has it that Mrs. Winchester was not only running from the souls of those killed by the Winchester rifle, but to also escape the Assassins. Not only spiritual, but Masonic teachings exerted an influence over the construction of the Winchester mansion. Certain mystical thinkers and practitioners of ceremonial magic believed that Mrs. Winchester practiced a complex system of magic that was a synthesis of Eastern and Western mystical traditions. There is a secret cave inside the Winchester mansion that can be entered only by stooping, but inside a room nearly seven feet high about twelve feet square presents itself. On each side of the entrance a Latin cross is deeply carved in the rock, while within, at the further side, and opposite the door, a block of stone four feet high was left for an altar. Above it, a shrine is hollowed out of the stone wall, and over the cavity is another cross. It is said to be the cave of a saint. Some say it is Saint Michael himself, but no one can be quite certain. And there is a big head inside that craved in the shape of the Devil’s face that the saint put there. For Mrs. Winchester, there were two types of magic. What she called evocation and invocation. Evocation was a calling forth, while invocation was a calling in. In such rituals, the magician summoned the demon or deity while standing within the protection of a magical circle drawn on the floor, the object of the sorcerer being to control and direct the entity to do one’s bidding. She sought to achieve total identification with the godhead, to invoke the god so that it actually took possession of her consciousness. The resulting state experienced by the magician was a type of samadhi, or temporary loss of ego. Mrs. Winchester’s estate possesses the KEY which opens up all Masonic and Hermetic secrets of Freemasonry and all systems of religion. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
It did not take long for rumors to begin to circulate around the town of nightly procession of hooded, candle-bearing figures around the grounds of the Winchester mansion. The reason Mrs. Winchester and the husband of her friend kept seeing demons is because allegedly someone did a ritual on her estate—one of the greatest magical feats ever—the attempt to bring the “Whore of Babalon” down from the Astral Plane and incarnate it in the womb of a living women. Upon hearing of the ritual, someone wrote to the Luciferian Light Group, “Apparently Mrs. Winchester or one of her friends is producing a Moonchild. I am pledged that the work of the Beast 666 shall be fulfilled, and the way for the coming of BABALON be made open and I shall not cease until these things are accomplished.” Mrs. Winchester did not know, but after she left her friend’s house, he managed to blow himself to smithereens while conducting a strange chemical experiment in his basement workshop. Hours later, the scientist’s mother, who lived on the estate, committed suicide with an overdose of sleeping tablets and the baby died from dehydration and starvation, but the baby who is supposed to be the Whore of Babalon still haunts the Winchester till this very day. No matter what people say or believe about Mrs. Winchester, she and her architecture were able to break through the walls of stagnation and bring before the World its first vision of the new Aeon. Once, a tourguide reported while closing the house, he felt something following him, he was alone. He went out onto the fourth floor balcony and prayed into the Heavens one night, “O Thou wicked and disobedient spirit Vinea, because thou hast rebelled, and has not obeyed nor regarded my words which I have rehearsed; I curse thee into the depth of the Bottomless Abyss, there to remain unto the Day of Doom in chains, and in fire and brimstone unquenchable, unless thou forthwith appear here before this Circle, in this triangle to my will.” And he saw Lucifer as a star fall from Heaven, and from Him came to the tour guide light of true salvation. And he was made whole by His infernal wisdom. “My chains lifted off, I was made free,” he said. At night when some drive by, they claim to hear the Devil’s orchestra at that famous time 1.13am. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Winchester Mystery House
Happy Saturday from The Winchester Mystery House ☀️ What are your weekend plans? Hopefully they include walking around these beautiful gardens 😉 https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
We Can Always Go to the Opera Between the Office and Bed
Anyone reading this page has an amazing skill called literacy. It comes as a shock sometimes to remember that all of us had ancestors who were illiterate. Not stupid nor ignorant, but invincibly illiterate. Simply to read was a fantastic achievement in the ancient World. Saint Augustine, writing in the 5th century, refers to his mentor, Saint Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan, who was so learned that he could actually read without moving his lips. Perhaps he had telepathic powers? For this astonishing feat he was regarded as the brainiest person in the World. Not only were most of our ancestors illiterate, they were also “innumerate,” meaning they could not do the simplest arithmetic. Those few who could were deemed downright dangerous. A marvelous warning attributes to Augustine holds that Christians should stay away from people who could add or subtract. It was obvious they have “made a covenant with the Devil to darken the spirit and to confine man in the bonds of Hell”—a sentiment with which many a fourth-grade math student today might agree. It was not until a thousand years later that we find “reckoning masters” teaching pupils bound for commercial careers. What is underscores is that many of the simplest skills taken for granted in business today are the product of centuries and millennia of cumulative cultural development. Knowledge from China, from India, from the Arabs, from Phoenician traders, as well as from the West, is an unrecognized part of the heritage relied on today by business executive all over the Word. Successive generations have learned these skills, adapted them, transmitted them, and then slowly built on the result. All economic systems sit upon a “knowledge base.” All business enterprises depend on the preexistence of this socially constructed resource. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
When calculating the “inputs” needed from production, unlike capital, labour, and land, it is usually neglected by economists and business executives. Yet this resource—partly paid for, partly exploited free of charge—is now the most important of all. At rare moments in history the advance of knowledge has smashed through old barriers. The most important of these breakthroughs has been the invention of new tools for thinking and communication, like the ideogram…the alphabet…the zero…and in our century, the computer. Nearly fifty years ago anyone with the slenderest ability to use a computer was described in the popular press as a “mathematical wizard” or a “giant brain,” exactly as Saint Ambrose was in the age of moving lips. Today we are living through one of those exclamation points in history when the entire structure of human knowledge is once again trembling with change as old barriers fall. We are not just accumulating more “facts”—whatever they may be. Just as we are now restructuring companies and whole economies, we are totally reorganizing the production and distribution of knowledge and the symbols used to communicate it. What does this mean? It means that we are creating new networks of knowledge…linking concept to one another in startling ways…building up amazing hierarches of inference…spawning new theories, hypotheses, and images, based on novel assumptions, new languages, codes, and logics. Businesses, governments, and individuals are collecting and storing more sheer data than any previous generation in history (creating a massive, confusing gold mine for tomorrow’s historians). However, more important, we are interrelating data in more ways, giving them context, and thus forming them into information; and we are assembling chunks of information into larger and larger models and architectures of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
None of this implies that the data are correct; information, true; and knowledge, wise. However, this does imply vast changes in the way we see the World, create wealth, and exercise power. Not all this new knowledge is factual or even explicit. Much knowledge, as the term is used here, is unspoken, consisting of assumptions piled atop assumptions, of fragmentary models, of unnoticed analogies, and it includes not simply logical and seemingly unemotional information data, but values, the products of passion and emotion, not to mention imagination and intuition. It is today’s gigantic upheaval in the knowledge base of society—not computer hype of mere financial manipulation—that explains the rise of a super-symbolic economy. The presumed close connection among information, reason, and usefulness began to lose its legitimacy toward the mid-nineteenth century with the invention of the telegraph. Prior to the telegraph, information could be moved only as fast as a train could travel: about thirty-five miles per hour. Prior to the telegraph, information was sought as part of the process of understanding and solving particular problems. Prior to the telegraph, information tended to be of local interest. Telegraphy changed all of this, and instigated the second stage of the information revolution. The telegraph removed space as an inevitable constraint on the movement of information, and, for the first time, transportation and communication were disengaged from each other. In the United States of America, the telegraph erased state lines, collapsed regions, and, by wrapping the continent in an information grid, created the possibility of a unified nation-state. However, more than this, telegraphy created the idea of context-free information—that is, the idea that the value of information need not be tied to any function it might serve in social and political decision-making and action. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The telegraph made information into a commodity, a “thing” that could be bought and sold irrespective of its uses or meaning. However, it did not do so alone. The potential of the telegraph to transform information into a commodity might never have been realized except for its partnership with the penny press, which was the first institution to grasp the significance of the annihilation of space and the saleability of irrelevant information. In fact, the first known use of the telegraph by a newspaper occurred one day after Samuel Morse gave his historic demonstration of the telegraph’s workability. Using the same Washington-to-Baltimore line Morse had constructed, the Baltimore Patriot gave its readers information about action taken by the House of Representatives on the Oregon issue. The paper concluded its report by noting, “…we are thus enabled to give our readers information from Washington up to two o’clock. This is indeed the annihilation of space.” Within two years of this announcement, the fortunes of newspapers came to depend not on the quality or utility of the news they provided but on how much, from what distances, and at what speed. And, one must add, with how many photographs. For, as it happened, photography was invented at approximately the same time as telegraphy, and initiated the third stage of the information revolution. Daniel Boorstin has called it “the graphic revolution,” because the photograph and other iconographs brought on a massive intrusion of images into the symbolic environment: photographs, prints, posters, drawings, advertisements. The new imagery, with photography at its forefront, did not merely function as a supplement to language but tended to replace it as our dominant means for construing understanding, and testing reality. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
By the end of the nineteenth century, advertisers and newspapermen had discovered that a picture was worth not only a thousand words but, in terms of the sales, many thousands of dollars. As a whole, modern society is more multifaceted, diverse, connected, and vocal than ever before in history. Two major forces enable this current reality: a rapid rate of change and massive personalization of products and services. The confluence of these two factors is evidence of the Knowledge Era. Change is happening constantly, yet governments, industries, companies, and people embrace (and adapt to) change at varying rates. This difference in rates of change is called desynchronization. Times marked by desynchronization tend to produce great innovation and creativity—as well as great conflict and turmoil. Compounding the opportunities and challenges, our Knowledge Era is also characterized by demassification—products and services produced in large quantities, but individually tailored for niche groups, people, and special interests. Where this convergence of desynchronization and demassification becomes particularly interesting (and challenging) is where information becomes the commodity being personalized and disseminated at varying paces. A little-noticed consequence of this growing customization of products is a parallel customization of prices in the marketplace—that is, a shift from standard fixed prices for standard products to tiered or negotiable prices for the same item. In pre-industrial markets, buyers and sellers typically haggled over price, as they still do in much of the less affluent World today. By contrast, in mass production economies, “one size fits all” was paralleled by “one price fits all.” Today, in yet another Hegelian flip-flop, we are moving back toward flexible, personal pricing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
As any traveler knows, U.S.A. airline-ticket prices for the same seat on the same flight can vary madly. In one not-surprising case, the same seat was offered for fifteen different amounts. Using “alternative” or “dynamic” pricing models, sellers now manipulate price according to distribution channel, time and individual customer characteristics. The growing personalization of pricing is underscored by the phenomenal success of eBay and other online sites in which prices are set by auction. In fact, in everything from hotel bookings to hardware, Beanie Babies, boats, cars, computers and clothing, we see a proliferation of specialized auction markets. Priceline went a step father with the so-called reverse auction, in which brand-indifferent buyers post the price they are willing to pay and let the sellers come to them. Other specialized variations quickly followed. Auctions, in turn, give rise to yet another niche market-a specialized “payment service” for their participants. An ad from Western Union shows a pleased-as-punch online payment-service customer—clearly not a Metropolitan Museum curator—next to the headline: “Bought a velvet matador painting.” Customers pricing will continue to spread for several convergent reasons. For sellers, customized or semi-customized products do not all cost the same amount to make or provide. Computers can handle the added complexity of multiple pricing schemes. And sellers can now collect more and more detailed information about individual consumers. For buyers, the day has come when individualized online “bots” or “agents” crawl the Web, armed with the power to match the most complex and individualized specs against the lowest price. There is a deeper reason as well. Fixed pricing—ideal for industrial mass production—works best in relatively stable or slowly changing markets. And that is the last thing to expect in the years to come. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
Today’s technology mostly works with matter in a few basic forms: gases, liquids, and solids. Though each form has many varieties, all are comparatively simple. Gases, as we have seen, consist of molecules ricocheting through space. A volume of gas will push against its walls and, if not walled in, expand without limit. Gases can supply certain raw material for nanomachines, and nanomachines can be used to remove pollutants from air and turn them into something else. Gases lack structure, so they will remain simple. Liquids are somewhat like gases, but their molecules cling together to form a coherent blob that will not expand beyond a certain limit. Liquids will be good sources of raw materials for nanomachines because they are denser and can carry a wide range of fuels and raw materials in solution (the pipe in the molecular-processing hall contained liquid). Nanomachines can clean up polluted water as easily as air, removing and transforming noxious molecules. Liquids have more structure than gases, but nanotechnology will have its greatest application to solids. Solids are diverse. Solid butter consists of molecules stronger than steel, but the molecules cling to one another by the weaker forces of molecular stickiness. A little heat increases thermal vibrations and makes the solid structure disintegrate into a blob of liquid. Butterlike materials would make poor nanomachines. Metals consist of atoms held together by stronger forces, and so they can be structurally stronger and able to withstand higher temperatures. The forces are not very directional, though, and so planes of metal atoms can slip past one another under pressure; that is why spoons bend, rather than break. This ability to slip makes metals less brittle and easier to shape (with crude technology), but it also weakens them. Only the strongest, hardest, highest-melting-point metals are worth considering as parts of nanomachines. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
Diamond consists of carbon atoms held together by strong, directional bonds, like the bonds down the axis of a protein chain. These directional bonds make it hard for planes of atoms to slip past one another, making diamond (and similar material) very strong indeed—ten to a hundred times stronger than steel. However, the planes cannot easily slip, so when the material fails it does not bend, it breaks. Tiny cracks can easily grow, making a large object seem weak. Glass is similar material: glass windows seem weak—and a scratch makes glass far weaker—yet thin, perfect glass fibers are widely used to make composite materials stronger and lighter than steel Nanotechnology will be able to build with diamond and similar strong materials, making small, flawless fibers and components. In engineering today, diamond is just beginning to be used. Japan has pioneered a technology for making diamond at low pressure, and a Japanese company sells a speaker with excellent high-frequency response—the speaker cone is reinforced with a light, stiff film of diamond. Diamond is extraordinary stuff, made from inexpensive materials like natural gas. U.S.A. companies are scrambling to catch up. All these materials are simple. More complex structures lead to more complex properties, and begin to give some hint of what molecular manufacturing will mean for materials. What if you strung carbon atoms in long chains with side-groups, a bit like a protein chain, and linked them into a big three-dimensional mesh? If the chains were kinked so that they could not pack tightly, they would coil up and flop around almost like molecules in a liquid, yet the strong bonds would keep the overall mesh intact. Puling the whole network would tend to straighten the chains, but their writing motions would tend to coil them back up. This sort of network has been made: it is called rubber. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
Rubber is weaker mostly because the network is irregular. When stretched, first one chain breaks, then another, because they do not all become taut at the same time to share and divide the load. A more regular mesh would be as soft as rubber at first, but when stretched to the limit would become stronger than steel. Molecular manufacturing could make such stuff. The natural World contains a host of good materials—cellulose and lignin in wood, stronger-than-steel proteins in spider’s silk, hard ceramics in grains of sand, and more. Many products of molecular manufacturing will be designed for great durability, like sand. Others will be designed to fall apart easily for easy recycling, like wood. Some may be designed for uses where they may be thrown away. In this last category, nanotailored biodegradables will shine. With care, almost any sort of product from a shoe to computer-driven nanomachines can be made to last for a good long time, and then unzip fairly rapidly and very thoroughly into molecules and other bits of stuff all kinds normally found in the soil. This gives only a hint of what molecular manufacturing will make possible by giving better control of the structure of solid matter. The most impressive applications will not be superstrong structural materials, improved rubber, and simple biodegradable materials: these are uniform, repetitive structures not greatly different from ordinary materials. These materials are “stupid.” When pushed, the resist, or the stretch and bounce back. If you shone light on them, they transmit it, reflect it, or absorb it. However, molecular manufacturing can do much more. Rather than heaping up simple molecules, it can build material from trillions of motors, ratchets, light-emitters, and computers. Muscle is smarter than rubber because it contains molecular machines: it can be told to contact. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
The products of molecular manufacturing can include materials able to change shape, colour, and other properties on command. When a dust mote can contain a supercomputer, materials can be made smart, medicine can be made sophisticated, and the World will be a different place. We will discuss smart material more in the near future. Art, like language, is a system of symbolic exchange that introduces exchange itself. It is also a necessary device for holding together a community based on the first symptoms of unequal life. Tolstory’s statement that “art is a means of union among men, joining them together in the same feeling,” elucidates art’s contribution to social cohesion at the dawn of culture. Socializing rituals required art; art works originated in the service of ritual; the ritual production of an art and the artistic production of ritual are the same. “Music,” wrote Aaliyah Haughton, “is what unifies.” As the need for solidarity accelerated, so did the need for ceremony; art also played a role in its mnemonic function. Art, with myth closely following, served as the semblance of real memory. In the recesses of the caves, earliest indoctrination proceeded via the paintings and other symbols, intended to inscribe rules in depersonalized, collective memory, especially the memory of obligations, as the beginning of civilized mortality. Once the symbolic process of art developed it dominated memory as well as perception, putting its stamp on all mental functions. Cultural memory meant that one person’s actions could be compared with those of another, including portrayed ancestors, and future behavior anticipated and controlled. Memories became externalized, akin to property but not even the property of the subject. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Art turns the subject into object, into symbol. The shaman’s rile was to objectify reality; this happened to outer nature and to subjectivity alike because alienated life demanded it. Art provided the medium of conceptual transformation by which the individual was separated from nature and comminated, at the deepest level, socially. Art’s ability to symbolize and direct human emotion accomplished both ends. What we were led to accept as necessity, in order to keep ourselves oriented in nature and society, was at base the invention of the symbolic World, the Fall of Man. As Adam and Eve puzzled over the words Good, Evil, Death, Adam said, “Come, maybe we can find Satan. He might know these things.” Then Satan came forth, still gazing upon Eve and admiring, and said to her—“You have not seen me before, sweet creature, but I have seen you. I have seen all the animals, but in beauty none of them equals you. Your hair, your eyes, your face, your flesh-tints, your form, the tapering grace of your white limps—all are beautiful, adorable, perfect.” It have her pleasure, and she looked herself over, putting out a foot and a hand and admiring them; then she naively said—“It is a joy to be so beautiful. And Adam—he is the same.” Even turned him about, this way and that, to show him off, with such guileless pride in her pale blue eyes, and he—he took it all as just matter of course, and was innocently happy in it, and said, “When I have flowers on my head it is better still,” Eve said, “It is true—you shall see,” and she flitted hither and thither like a butterfly and plucked flowers, and in a moment laced their stems together in a glowing wreath and set it upon his head; then tip-toed and gave it a pat here and there with her nimble fingers, with each pat enhancing its grace and shape, none knows how, or why it should so result, but it in there is a law somewhere, though the delicate art and mystery of it is her secret alone, and not learnable by another; and when at last it was to her mind she clapped her hands for pleasure, then reached up and kissed him—as pretty a sight, taken altogether, as in his experience as he had seen. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Satan then thought to himself about the words Eve wanted to know and if he should tell her. Satan said to Eve, “How should you know pain? Pain is not of your World; pain is impossible to you; you have never experienced a physical pain. Reduce that to a formula, a principle, and what have we? This: Things which are outside our orbit—our own particular World—things which by our constitution and equipment we are unable to see, or feel, or otherwise experience—cannot be made comprehensible to us in words. There you have the whole thing in a nutshell. It is a principle, it is axiomatic, it is a law. Now do you understand?” Of course Eve missed the point. Necessarily she would. Yet her effort was success for Satan, for it was a vivid confirmation of the truth of what he had been saying. Axiomatic was for the present a thing outside of the World of her experience, therefore it had no meaning for her. Satan continued: “Fear. Naturally you would not know it. You have not felt it, you cannot feel it, it does not belong in your World. With a hundred thousand words I should not be able to make you understand what fear is. How then am I to explain Death to you? You have never seen it, it is foreign to your World, it is impossible to make the word mean anything to you, so far as I can see. In a way, it is a sleep—but death is a long sleep—very long.” Satan knew that some day Eve would know what a pathetic truth it was to experience death. He knew that some day, she would say, out of a broken heart, “Come to me, oh, Death, the compassionate! Step me in thy merciful oblivion, of refuge of the sorrowful, friend of the forsaken and the desolate!” Then Satan said aloud, “But this sleep is eternal.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The word went over her head Necessarily it would. “Eternal. Ah, that also is outside your World, as yet. There is no way to make you understand it.” It was a hopeless case. Words referring to things outside her experience were a foreign language to her, and meaningless. She was like a little baby whose mother say to it, “Do not put your finger in the candle-flame, it will burn you.” Burn—it is a foreign word to the baby, and will have no terrors for it until experience shall have revealed its meaning. It is not worth while for mamma to make the remark, the baby will goo-goo cheerfully, and put its fingers in the pretty flame—once. After these private reflections Satan had, he knew it was no way he could explain eternal to make Eve understand. The World must be mediated by art (and human communication by language, and being by time) due to division of labour, as seen in the nature of the ritual. The real object, in its particularity, does not appear in ritual; instead, an abstract one is used, so that the terms of ceremonial expression are open to substitution. The conventions needed in division of labour, with its standardization and loss of the unique, are those of ritual, of symbolization. The process is at base identical, based on equivalence. Production of goods, as the hunter-gatherer mode is gradually liquidated in favour of agriculture (historical production) and religion (full symbolic production), is also ritual production. The agent, again, is the shaman-artist, en-route to priesthood, leader by reason of mastering one’s own immediate desires via the symbol. All that is spontaneous, organic, instinctive is to be neutered by art and myth. Good and evil is difficult. They have place in a moral kingdom only. Some have no morals. Morals are based on a system of law which distinguishes between right and wrong, good morals and bad. These things do not exit for many, and no one can make them clearly understand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Obedience to constituted authority is a moral law. Suppose Adam should forbid you to put your child in the river and leave it there overnight—would you put the child there? If they wanted to, some people would. It is because they do not know any better; they have no idea of duty, command, obedience, these things also have no meaning for them. In their present estate they are in no possible way responsible for anything they do or say or think. They are what the law calls incompetent and cannot be held responsible for their actions because of a mental defect. Now, this incompetent and insanity ruling brings up a very good question. If most adults under 25 not fully mature, and people under the age of 18 do not have fully developed brains, can they truly be held responsible for their actions, or legally engage in contracts? TIT FOR TAT may be an effective strategy for an egoist to use, but it is a moral strategy for a person or a country to follow? The answer depends, of course, on one’s standard for morality. Perhaps the most widely accepted moral standard is the Golden Rule: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. In the context of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the Golden Rule would seem to imply that you should always cooperate, since cooperation is what you want from others. This interpretation suggests that the best strategy from the point of view of mortality is the strategy of unconditional cooperation rather than TIT FOR TAT. The problem with his view is that turning the other cheek provides an incentive for the other individual to exploit you. Unconditional cooperation can not only hurt you, but it can hurt other innocent bystanders with whom the successful exploiters will interact later. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Unconditional cooperation tends to spoil the other individual; it leaves a burden on the rest of the community to reform the spoiled individual, suggesting that reciprocity is a better foundation for morality than is unconditional cooperation. The Golden Rule would advise unconditional cooperation, since what you would really prefer the other play to do is to let you get away with some defections. Yet, basing a strategy on reciprocity does not seem to be the height of morality either—at least not according to our everyday intuitions. Reciprocity is certainly not a good basis for a morally aspiration. Yet it is more than just the morality of egoism. It actually helps not only oneself, but others as well. It helps others by making it hard for exploitative strategies to survive. And not only does it help others, but it asks no more for oneself than it is willing to concede to others. A strategy based on reciprocity can allow the other individual to get the reward for mutual cooperation, which is the same payoff it gets for itself when both strategies are doing their best. The insistence on no more than equality is a fundamental property of many rules based upon reciprocity. It is most clearly seen in the performance of TIT FOR TAT in the Prisoner’s Dilemma. It always lets the other individual defect first, and no one really comes out ahead because it will never defect more times than the other individual will. TIT FOR TAT wins not by doing better than the other individual, but by eliciting cooperation from the other individual. In this way, TIT FOR TAT does well by promoting the mutual interest rather than by exploiting the other’s weakness. A moral person could not do much better. What gives TIT FOR TAT its slightly unsavory taste is its insistence on an eye for an eye. This is rough justice indeed. However, the real issue is whether there are any better alternatives. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
In situations where people can rely on a central authority to enforce the community standards, there are alternatives. The punishment might fit the crime without having to be as painful as the crime itself was. When there is no central authority to do the enforcement, the individuals must rely on themselves to give each other the necessary incentives to elicit cooperation rather than defection. In such a case the real question is just what form this enticement should take. The trouble with TIT FOR TAT is that once a feud gets state, it can continue indefinitely. Indeed, many feuds seem to have just this property. For example, in Albania and the Middle East, a feud between families sometimes goes on for decades as one injury is repaired by another, and each retaliation is the start of the next cycle. The injuries can echo back and forth until the original violation is lost in the distant past. This is a serious problem with TIT FOR TAT. A better strategy might be to return only nine-tenths of a tit for a tat. This would help dampen the echoing of conflict and still provide an incentive to the other player not to try any gratuitous defections. It would be a strategy based on reciprocity, but would be a bit more forgiving than TIT FOR TAT. It is till rough justice, but in a World of egoists without central authority, it does have the virtue of promoting not only its own welfare, but the welfare of others as well. A community using strategies based upon reciprocity can actually police itself. By guaranteeing the punishment of any individual who tires to be less than cooperative, the deviant strategy is made unprofitable. Therefore the deviant will not thrive, and will not provide an attractive model for others to imitate. This self-policing feature gives you an extra private incentive to teach it to others—even those with whom you will never interact. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Naturally, you want to teach reciprocity to those with whom you will interact so that you can build a mutually rewarding relationship. However, even if you never interact with that person, you also have a private advantage from another person using reciprocity, the other’s reciprocity helps to police the entire community by punishing those who try to be exploitive. And this decreases the number of uncooperative individuals you will have to deal with in the future. So teaching the use of nice strategies based upon reciprocity helps the pupil, helps the community, and can indirectly help the teacher. No wonder that an educational psychologist, upon hearing of the virtues of TIT FOR TAT, recommended teaching reciprocity in the schools. There is no fixed nature, just different levels of spirituality. The coming to awareness of the infrastructure of culture is deadly to culture because of the crisis of a civilization. Sublimation has lost its creative or molding power, and now there is desiccated culture and besmirched nature. However, I do not think this was how it was received by Americans. They were titillated and really took the Fall of Man as an early manifesto of the sexual liberation movement. Even the most distinguished talents, or especially the most distinguished talents, suffer from these obscure longings repressed by society. There is nothing so bad about them; and people should not be intimidated by public opinion, should learn to accept themselves. They have nothing to fear but fear itself. In short, a lot of people have to “come out of the closet.” The is a need to be open about repressed desires, which, because of the climate of our time, has to come out in a tragic grab, lacerating themselves, weeping and wailing. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
In order to be sexually liberated, we must be sueprmen, beyond good and evil. To the extent that such self-expression might be someone intention, it has to be the sign of one’s own decadence, one’s creative impotence, and desire to escape responsibility in aimless creature, as opposed to creator, pleasures. The sexual interpretations of art and religion so powerfully made by Nietzsche, and less powerfully but more popularly made by Dr. Freud, had a corrupting effect on Americans. They noticed the sublime less than the pleasures of the flesh in sexual sublimation. What in Nietzsche was intended to lead the heights was used here to debunk the heights in favor of present desire. Any explanation of the higher in terms of the lower has that tendency, especially in a democracy, where there is envy of what makes special claims, and the good is supposed to be accessible to all. And this is one of the deep reasons why Dr. Freud found such an immediate audience in America. For all of the Continental sturm und drang, he belied in nature, and nature as Locke taught it, animal nature. He just added pleasures of the flesh to work to compose his formula for healthy living—“love and work”—for he really could not explain love. This is what we were raised to believe. It accords with science rather than relying, as does Nietzsche, on poetic vapors. There is a solid ground, one that appeals to our native empiricism, in his interpretation of what eros really wants. Moreover, science rather than poetry is our preferred means of talking about the obscene. All this, plus the promise of some kind of satisfaction of our desires and relief from our miseries, made Dr. Freud a winner from the outset, the most accessible of all the great Continentals. This is manifestly connected with the idea that the process of the first birth is only made possible by special divine intervention, presumably at the time of the initial labour-pains, for reason also every firstborn of man and beast, as the “breaking open of the womb,” belongs to God. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
However, only here is it directly indicated that God Himself assists a firstborn into the World, and just this firstborn is the first murderer. The beief, not formulated conceptually till a late date, that God set man in the World as a primordially free being has here found its strangest and most fearful expression. Dr. Freud provided the centrality of pleasures of the flesh in public life, which is so characteristic of our day. He ultimately seemed too moralistic, not open enough. However, all one had to do was imagine new social structures that demanded less repression for their functioning. This was where Marx was useful. Or one could simply forget about the problems concerning the relation between eros and culture, or else posit a natural harmony between the two. Dr. Freud, riding the crest of a wave of German philosophy, enabled Americans to think the satisfaction of their desires for pleasures of the flesh was the most important element of happiness. He provided rationalization for instinct, although this was surely not his intention. Sex immigrated to the United States of America with the special status given those who make scientific and literary contributions to our culture. However, when it got here, it behaved just like everything else American. Gone was the plaintive tone, the poetry, the justification based on civilization’s dependence on sublimation. Just as we have cut away the camouflage disguising economic needs—such as the Parthenon and Chartres—in order to concentrate efficiently on those needs themselves, so we demystified desires for pleasures of the flesh, seeing them for that they really are, in order to satisfy them more efficiently. This brought into the Lockean World the second focus of human nature, the one concentrated on by Rousseau and those he influenced. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
The basic rights are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property and sex.” “Give us your poor, our sexually starved…” Dr. Freud made it possible to consider repression of pleasures of the flesh a medical complaint, and therefore endowed it with the prestige automatically enjoyed by anything having to do with health in a nation devoted to self-preservation. There is a tendency to neglect Rousseau’s reminder that one does not die from not satisfying this hunger, and that even great seducers’ lusts can be calmed by the certainty of the death penalty. Thus we demystify economy and sexuality, satisfying their primary demands, taking away what our philosophy tells us is their creative impulse, and then we complain we have no culture. We can always go to the opera between office and bed. In Russian they are dependent on operas from the bad old days, because tyranny prevents artistic expression; we are dependent on the same operas, because the thirsts that produced the artistic need have been slacked. I cannot forget the Amherst freshman who asked in naïve and good-natured bewilderment, “Should we go back to sublimation?” To the sugar-free diet substitute, as it were. This is what happened in America to the sublime, in all of the subtle meanings given to it from Rousseau and Kant to Nietzsche and Dr. Freud. I was charmed by the lad’s candor but could not regard him as a serious candidate for culture. Because we have all come to take the unnecessary to be necessary, we have lost all sense of necessity, either natural or cultural. To get an idea of the extent to which television is dependent upon technical tricks to maintain your interest, I suggest you try the following experiment, which I call the Technical Events Test. Put on your television set and simply count the number of times there is a cut, a zoom, a superimposition, a voice-over, the appearance of words on the screen—a technical event of some kind. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
You will find it goes something like this. You are looking at a face speaking. Just as you are becoming accustomed to it, there is a cut to another face. (technical event) Then there might be an edit back to the first fact. (technical event) Intercut with the scenes might be some other parallel line of the story. It may be a series of images of someone in a car racing to meet the people on that street we have just visited. (technical event) The music rises. (technical event) And so on. Each technical event—each alteration of what would be natural imagery—is intended to keep your attention from waning as it might be otherwise. The effect is to lure your attention forward like a mechanical rabbit teasing a greyhound. Each time you are about to relax your attention, another technical event keeps your attached. The luring forward never ceases for very long. If it did, you might become aware of the vacuousness of the content that can get through the inherent limitations of the medium. Then you would be aware of the boredom. If, for example, the camera made no movements and there was no cutting in time and place; if one camera merely sat in one place and recorded the entire length of a conversation, including all the pauses, redundancies, diversions, inaction—the way conversations happen in real life and real time—you would be disinclined to watch for very long. The program would have to be hours long before much of anything happened. Television cannot wait for this, so it stimulates your interest technically. One you actually try the Technical Events Test you will probably find that in the average commercial television program, there are eight or ten technical events for every sixty-second period. That is, the flow of natural imagery is interrupted eight or ten times every minute, sometimes much more often than that. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
You may also find that there is rarely a period of twenty seconds without any sort of technical event at all. That may give you an idea of the extent to which producers worry about whether the content itself can carry your interest. One can only guess at the effect upon viewers of these hyperactive images, aside from fixating attention on the television set. Dr. Matthew Dumont mentioned that these technical effect help cause hyperactivity among children. They must surely also contribute to the decline of attention span and the inability to absorb information that comes muddling along at natural, real-life speed. To be constantly buffeted by bizarre and impossible imagery cannot help but produce stress in viewers. To have one’s attention interrupted every ten seconds must jar mental processes that were otherwise attuned to natural, personal informational rhythms in which such interruptions would be literally maddening. Therefore, perhaps it is best not to watch the news at all, and this might suggest why people who read books and the newspaper tend to be more relations and more intelligent. Leaving the television set to go outdoors, or to have an ordinary conversation, becomes unsatisfying. One wants action! Life become boring, and television interesting, all as a result of a system of technical hypes. Meanwhile, the speed and activity of commercial programming are further exaggerated in advertising When you try the Technical Events Test on a few thirty-or sixty-second television commercials you will find that advertising has roughly twice the technical action of the already hyped-up programs that the ads interrupt. On the average, a thirty second commercial will have from ten to fifteen technical events. There is almost never a six-second period without a technical event. What is more, the technical events in advertising have much more dimension than those in the programming. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
In addition to the camera zooms, pans, rolls, and cuts, they are far more likely to have words flashing on and off the screen, songs going on and off, and cartoon characters doing bizarre things, voice-overs, shots from helicopters and so on. The television is a lot like occult subjection. Since occult subjection is a religious issue, the treatment is not to be found in psychiatry or psychotherapy. A person who has become occultly subjected has at the same time become the object and target of demonic forces. Help lies neither with the doctor nor with the theologian. No one really knows what the supernatural is or how to control it, and that is what makes it so scary. Television is the same, its light can cause harm to the human body and mind that goes beyond radiation, it can also distort plant life making things grown abnormally tall and skinny, or distorted and large. And the results of the method of programming on the human mind is as of yet unknown. This suggests that people need to control themselves, not the guns, and spend less time watching television, stop worshipping that false idol God warned you about. Jesus Christ alone can help and deliver. The only place where freedom can be found is at the cross of Calvary, not with a politician. It was there that deliverance and redemption was bought for all mankind. Yet to the human mind the cross is a scandal and an offence. Nevertheless, deliverance is not so much a matter of reason than faith, as we find it revealed in the New Testament. Faith in Christ overcomes the powers of darkness. Christ came as the light of the World and the darkness cannot overcome the light. It was for this purpose that the Son of God appeared that He might destroy the works of darkness. Christ on the cross overcame and conquered all the powers of evil. “Oh, how merciful is out God! And now behold, since it has been as much as we could do to get our strains taken away from us, and our awords are made bright, let us ide them away that they may be kept bright, as a testimony to our God at the last day, r at the day that we shall be brought to stand before Him to be judged, that we have not stained our swords in the blood of our brethren since He imparted His words unto us and has made us clean thereby,” reports Alma 24.15. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
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The World We Live in is Very Nearly Incomprehensible to Most of Us
Not all social innovators share a taste for democracy, civility, and nonviolence. Fanatics—religious, political, and just plain psychotic—can also set up shop as social entrepreneurs. Indeed, some terrorist organizations run schools and hospitals on the side to justify and disguise their fund-raising. And of course, as with all human behaviour, even the best-intentioned entrepreneurialism can produce unanticipated negative effects. Nevertheless, while we should not overestimate what social entrepreneurs can accomplish, even in democracies, it would be an even more egregious mistake to underestimate them. For it is through their experiments—successful and otherwise—that model for new types of institutions can arise. They are a key R&D lab in the battle to design a better future. However, their value in any society, indeed their very existence, depends on the degree of tolerance by a state and society for internal debate, dissent and deviation from convention. Social entrepreneuring and innovation in general cannot thrive where they are suppressed by government, as in North Korea; by religious police, as in Iran or Saudi Arabia; or simply by the overweening force of tradition. In the United States of America, by contrast, they have found a receptive host. American social critics and religious leaders may bridle at the breakdown of traditional values and the emergence of an “anything goes” ethic that may, in fact, verge on decadence. However, such fears are counterbalanced by America’s openness, its celebration of experiment and innovation and its willingness to risk investing in new technologies, products, organizational forms and ideas—trait that have fueled the development of the knowledge-based economy since the 1950s. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
It is easy to discredit or diminish this rise by pointing out that it now takes two breadwinners in a family to maintain a middle-class standard. Skeptics point to inequalities of income and call attention to America’s deficits, debt, job exportation, homelessness and other economic weaknesses. Foreign policy aside, one could continue in business, the new technologies were never accompanied by massive 1930s-style unemployment. In fact, the predominantly knowledge-based economy in the United States of America today employs more than twice as many people as the industrial economy employed after World War II. And underemployment rates in the year 2022 have been consistently lower in the United States of America than in Europe, which has moved forward more slowly. A close look at America’s problems will reveal that many, if not most, of these shortcomings arise from the fact that, while the nation’s old industrial economy and social structure are vanishing, their replacements are only half-built. The material improvements noted earlier were matched to a degree by marked achievements in quality life. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, “Pollution from industrial sources and municipal sewage treatment plants has plummeted. By any measure—pounds of pollution prevented, stream segments improved, fisheries restored—tremendous reductions of pollution from point sources have occurred, resulting in substantial improvement in water quality from coast to coast.” Since 1970, moreover, “aggregate emissions of the six principal pollutants have been cut by 48 percent.” In addition, 45 percent of all paper used in the United States of America is now recycled, as are 63 billion aluminum cars. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Again, any data can be tortured to confess what the issuer wishes them to say, and the struggle against the destruction of nature is still in its infancy in a country in which powerful industrial lobbies successfully resist needed changes. America’s refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol outraged millions around the World. Nevertheless, here, too, the greatest environmental challenges to the United States of America—and to the World in general—come from low-tech assembly lines, furnaces and smokestacks, the “satanic mills” of the industrial age, and not from the less tangible activities on which the knowledge-based wealth system is founded. Finally, the dramatic economic and environmental changes in the United States of America have been accompanied by important social changes as well. Despite its many problems, America today is less racist, less sexist, and more aware of the immense contributions brought to its shores in earlier generations by immigrants from Africa, Asia, Europe, and Latin America. American television, whatever its shortcomings, now as never before stars people of colour. American supermarkets are filled with ethnic foods from all over the World that are enjoyed by shoppers of every national origin. All this represents the growing internal diversification of its culture, products and people and the social acceptance of these changes. This is the good news for and from the country leading the World toward a new civilization based on revolutionary wealth. We are seeing a rise of a new knowledge-based wealth system and the new civilization of which it is a part. It has been about the deep fundamentals that underlie economic and civilizational change. It is about the role of time, space and knowledge in our lives and in tomorrow’s World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
It is about the obsolescence of industrial-age economics and the looming threats to truth and science. It is not just about wealth but about how wealth fits within, and changes, they very civilization of which it and we are a part. These developments, taken together, require nothing less than a complete rethinking of the role and nature of wealth in the World. And that presents us with three inescapable questions. Can capitalism, as we know it, survive the transition to revolutionary wealth? Can we, in fact—and not just in the United Nations blah-blah resolutions—actually break the back of global poverty? Finally, how will the spread of the knowledge-based economies redraw the map of World power? These are important inflammatory questions to discuss. One day while Ronald Reagan was still in the White House a small group assembled around the table in the Family Dining Room to discuss the long-range future of America. The group consisted of eight well-known futurists and was joined by the Vice President and three of Reagan’s top advisers, among them Donald Regan, the President’s newly appointed chief of staff. The meeting had been convened by the author at the request of the White House, and opened with the statement that while futurists differed on many technological, social, and political issues, there was common agreement that the economy was going through a deep transformation. The words were hardly voiced when Donald Regan snapped, “So you think we’re going to go around cutting each other’s hair and flipping hamburgers! Aren’t we going to be a great manufacturing power anymore?” Remembered more for his “kiss and tell” memoirs than his performance in office, Regan subsequently was sacked after a nasty fight with Nancy Reagan, the First Lady. However, this was his very first day on the job, and he hurled the gauntlet onto the highly polished table amid the dishes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
The President and Vice President looked around expectantly for a reply. Most of the males at the table seemed taken aback by the brusqueness and immediacy of his attack. If we wanted the United States of American to become a great manufacturing power again, there has to be a high percentage of people working in American factories on American soil. Explaining the difference between traditional manufacturing methods and the way Macintosh computers are produced, the United States of American was surely one of the greatest food producers in the World—with fewer than 2 percent of the work force engaged in agriculture. In fact, throughout this century, the more its farm labour force has shrunk relative to other sectors, the stronger, not weaker, the United States of America has become as an agricultural power. Why could not the same be true of manufactures? However, this is not to say that we are doing a good job of supporting our farmers or manufactures. We need to buy produce that is made in America only, and products the are manufactured in America only to keep our country strong and safe. Moreover, the handwriting is clear: Because American population and the labour force are both likely to expand, and because many American manufacturers automated and reorganized in the 1980s, the shrinkage of factory employment relative to the total must continue. While the United States of America, is likely to generate 5,000 new jobs a day for the next decade and only about 500 new jobs a day are created in the manufacturing sector. A similar process has been transforming the European and Japanese economies as well. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
Nevertheless, even now Donald Regan’s words are still occasionally echoed by captains of badly run American industries, union leaders with dwindling membership rolls, and economists of historians who beat the drum for the importance of manufacture—as though anyone had suggested the reverse. The self-perpetuated myth that America is going to lose its manufacturing base has led to loony proposals like those in the recent business magazine which called for the United States of America to impose a 20 percent tariff on “all imports” and to prohibit the foreign purchase of any American company. Behind much of this hysteria is the notion that the shift of employment from manual work to service and mental-sector jobs is somehow bad for the economy and that a small manufacturing sector (in terms of jobs) leaves the economy “hollowed out.” Such arguments recall the views of the French physiocrats of the 18th century who, unable to imagine an industrial economy, regarded agriculture as the only “productive” activity. When speaking about society, it is good to remember that the precise level of forgiveness that is optimal depends upon the environment. In particular, if the main danger is unending mutual recriminations, then a generous level of forgiveness is appropriate. However, if the main danger is from strategies that are good at exploiting easygoing rules, then an excess of forgiveness is costly. While the exact balance will be hard to determine in a given environment, the evidence of the tournament suggests that something approaching a one-for-one response to defection is likely to be quite effective in a wide range of settings. Therefore it is good advice to a person to reciprocate defection as well as cooperation. It is also good not to be too clever. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
In deciding whether to carry an umbrella, we do not have to worry that the clouds will take our behaviour into account. We can do a calculation about the chance of rain based on past experience. Likewise, in a business negation, we can safely assume that firm will pick the most aggressive move in a merger that can be found, and we can act accordingly. Therefore it pays for us to be as sophisticated and as complex in our analysis as we can. However, unlike the clouds, the other firm can respond to your own choices. And the other firm in a Prisoner’s Dilemma should not be regarded as someone who is out to defeat you. The other firm will be watching your behaviour for signs of whether you will reciprocate cooperation or not, and therefore your own behaviour is likely to be echoed back to you. Rules that try to maximize their own score while treating the other player as a fixed part of the environment ignore this aspect of the interaction, no matter how clever they are in calculating under their limiting assumptions. Therefore, if you leave out the reverberating process in which the other player is adapting to you, it does not pay to be cleaver in modeling the other firm’s management team, you are adapting to them and they are adapting to your adaptation and so on. This is a difficult road to follow with much hope for success. Certainly none of the more or less complex rules submitted in either round of negotiations was very good at it. Another way of being too clever is to use a strategy of “permanent retaliation.” This is the strategy of cooperating as long as the other management team cooperates, but then never again cooperating after a single defection by the other. Since this strategy is nice, it does well with other nice rules. And since it does well with rules which were not very responsive, such as the completely random rule. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
However, with many others it does poorly because it gives up too soon on rules that try an occasional defection, but are ready to back off once punished. Permanent retaliation may seem cleaver because it provides the maximum incentive to avoid defection. However, it is too hard for its own good. There is yet a third way in which some of the business negotiation strategies are too clever: they employ a probabilistic strategy that is so complex that it cannot be distinguished by the other strategies from a purely random choice. In other words, too much complexity can appear to be total chaos. If your firm is using a strategy which appears random, then your firm also appears unresponsive to the other firm. If your team is unresponsive, the other firm has no incentive to cooperate. So being so complex as to be incomprehensible is very dangers. Of course, in many human situations a firm using a complex rule can explain the reasons for each choice to the other firm. Nevertheless, the same problem arises. The other firm may be dubious about the reasons offered when they are so complicated that they appear to be made up especially for that occasion. In such circumstances, the other firm may well doubt that there is any responsiveness worth fostering. The other firm may thus regard a rule that appears to be unpredictable as unreformable. This conclusion will naturally lead to defection. One way to account for TIT FOR TAT’s great success in the merger is that it has great clarity: it is eminently comprehensible to the other firm. When you are using TIT FOR TAT, the other firm has an excellent chance of understanding what you are doing. Your one-for-one response to any defection is an easy pattern to appreciate. Once this happens, the other firm can easily see that the best way to deal with TIT FOR TAT is to cooperate with it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Assuming that the acquisition is sufficiently likely to continue, and there is no better plan when meeting a TIT FOR TAT strategy than to cooperate now so that the firm will be the recipient of a cooperation on the very next strategy. In a merger or acquisition, it does not always pay to be so clever. In the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, your firm benefitted from the other firm’s cooperation. The trick is to encourage that cooperation. A good way to do it is to make it clear that you will reciprocate so you do not end up with a hostile takeover. Words can help here, but as everyone knows, actions speak louder than words. That is why the easily understood actions of TIT FOR TAT are so effective. “The last man” interpretation of the bourgeois is reinforced by a certain ambiguity in the meaning of the word “bourgeois.” Bourgeois is associated in the popular consciousness, especially in America, with Marx. However, there is also the bourgeois as the enemy of the artists. The capitalist and the philistine bourgeois are supposed to be the same, but Marx presents only the economic side, assuming, without adequate warrant, that it can account for both the moral and esthetic deformities of the bourgeois described by the artists, and for the artists themselves. Doubt that this treatment of the bourgeois and the artist really works is one of the prime motives of those attracted to Nietzsche, whose central theme is the artist. As I have said many times and, in many ways, most of the great European novelists and poets of the last two hundred years were men of the Right; and Nietzsche is in that respect merely their complement. For them the problem was in one way or another equality, which has no place for genius. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
Thus they are the exact opposite of Marx. However, somehow he who says he hates the bourgeoisie can be seen to be a friend of the Left. Therefore when the Left got the idea of embracing Nietzsche, it got, along with him, all the authority of the nineteenth-and twentieth-century literary tradition. Goethe and Flaubert and Yeats hated the bourgeoisie—so Marx was right: these writers simply had not recognized that the bourgeoisie could be overcome by the proletariat. And Nietzsche, taken from the correct angle, can be said to be a proponent of the Revolution. When one reads the early Partisan Review, edited entirely by leftists, one sees its unlimited enthusiasm for Joyce and Proust, whom they were introducing to this country, apparently in the opinion that they represented the art of the socialist future, although these artists thought the future of art lay in the opposite direction. The later Marxists in Germany were haunted by the idea of culture, repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie, and perhaps wondering whether they could still write out a blank check to culture in the socialist future. They wanted to preserve past greatness, of which they were much more conscious than their predecessors. Their Marxism had really shrunk back within the confines of the traditional hatred of the bourgeois, plus a vague hope that the proletariat would bring about cultural renewal or refreshment. One can easily see this in Adorno. However, it is also easy to see that in Sarte and Merleau-Ponty, too, the bourgeois is the real concern. The working-class Marxists still thought about the surplus value and other such authentic Marxist concerns. The intellectuals were obsessed by culture and, as Leszek Kolakowshi has so aptly pointed out, found themselves without a proletariat. This is why the students of the sixties were so welcome to many of them. However, so were they to Heidegger. They reminded him of something. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
It is well to point out, in addition, that as prosperity increased, the less affluent began to become ebbourgeoise. Instead of an increase in class consciousness and strife, there was a decrease. One could foresee a time, at least in the developed countries, when everybody would be a bourgeois. So another prop was knocked out from under Marxism. The issue is not really rich and poor but vulgarity. Marxists were coming perilously close to the notion that egalitarian man as such is bourgeois, and that they must join him or become culture snobs. Only an absolutely unsubstantiated dogma that the bourgeois worker is just an illness of our economic system and a product of false consciousness keeps them from saying, as did Tocqueville, that this is the nature of democracy and that you must accept it or rebel against it. Any such rebellion would not be Marx’s revolution. One might be tempted to assert that these advanced Marxists are just too cultured for egalitarian society. They only avoid that recognition by calling it bourgeois. Although it is clear that “social science” is a vigorous ally of Technopoly and must therefore be regarded with a hostile eye, I occasionally pay my respects to its bloated eminence by inflicting a small experiment on some of my colleagues. Like many other social-science experiments, this one is based on deceit and exploitation, and I must rely on the reader’s sense of whimsy to allow its point to come through. The experiment is best conducted in the morning when I see a colleague who appears not to be in possession of a copy of The New York Times. “Did you read the Times this morning?” I ask. If my colleague says, “Yes,” there is no experiment that day. However, if the answer is “No,” the experiment can proceed. “You ought to check out Section C today,” I say. “There’s a fascinating article about a study done at the University of Minnesota.” “Really? What’s it about?” is the usual reply. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The choices at this point are almost endless, but there are two that produce rich results. The first: “Well, they did this study to find out what foods are best to eat for losing weight, and it turns out that a normal diet supplemented by chocolate eclairs eaten three times a day is the best approach. It seems that there’s some special nutrient in the eclairs—encomial dioxin—that actually uses up calories at an incredible rate.” The second changes the theme and, from the start, the university: “The neurophysiologists at Johns Hopkins have uncovered a connection between jogging and reduced intelligence. They tested more than twelve hundred people over a period of five years, and found that as the number of hours people jogged increased there was a statistically significant decrease in their intelligence. They don’t know exactly why, but there it is.” My role in the experiment, of course, is to report something quite ridiculous—one might say, beyond belief. If I play my role with a sense of decorum and collegial intimacy, I can achieve results worth reporting: about two-thirds of the victims will believe or at least not wholly disbelieve what I have told them. Sometimes they say, “Really? Is that possible?” Sometimes they do a double-take and reply, “Where’d you say that study was done?” And sometimes they say, “You know, I’ve heard something like that.” I should add that for reasons that are probably worth exploring I get the clearest cases of credulity when I use the University of Minnesota and John Hopkins as my sources of authority; Stanford and MIT give only fair results. There are several conclusions that might be drawn from these results, one of which was expressed by H.L. Mencken fifty years ago, when he said that there is no idea so stupid that you can’t find a professor who will believe it. This is more an accusation than an explanation, although there is probably something to it. (I have, however, tried this experiment on nonprofessors as well, and get roughly the same results.) #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Another possible conclusion was expressed by George Bernard Shaw, also about fifty years ago, when he wrote that the average person today is about as credulous as was the average person in the Middle Ages. In the Middle Ages, people believed in the authority of their religion, no matter what. Today, we believe in the authority of our science, no matter what. However, there is still another possibility, related to Shaw’s point but off at a right angle to it. It is, in any case, more relevant to understanding the sustaining power of Technopoly. It means that the World we live in is very nearly incomprehensible to most us. There is almost no fact, whether actual or imagined, that will surprise us for very long, since we have no comprehensive and consistent picture of the World that would make the fact appear as an unacceptable contradiction. We believe because there is no reason not to believe. And I assume that the reader does not need the evidence of my comic excursion into the suburbs of social science to recognize this. Abetted by a form of education that in itself has been emptied of any coherent World-view, Technopoly deprives us of the social, political, historical, metaphysical, logical, or spiritual bases for knowing what is beyond belief. That is especially the case with technical facts. And the ways of technology, like the ways of God, are awesome. Individual molecules still move too quickly to see. So, to add one more cheat to the simulation, you issue the command “Whoa!” and everything around seems to slow down by a factor of ten. On the surface, you now can see thermal vibrations that had been too quick to follow. All around, air molecules become easier to watch. They whiz about as thick as raindrops in a storm, but they are the size of marbles and bounce in all directions. They are also sticky in a magnetlike way, and some are skidding around on the wall of the nanocomputer. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
When you grab one, it slips away. Most are like two fused spheres, but you spot one that is perfectly round—it I an argon atom, and these are fairly rare. With a firm grip on all sides to keep it from shooting away like a watermelon seed, you pinch it between your steel-strong fingers. It compresses by about 10 percent before the resistance is more than you can overcome. It springs back perfectly and instantly when you relax, then bounces free of your grip. Atoms have an unfamiliar perfection about them, resilient and unchanging, and they surround you in think swarms. At the base of the wall is a churning blob that can only be a droplet of water. Scooping up a handful for a closer look yields a swarm of molecules, hundreds, all tumbling and bumbling over one another, but clinging in a coherent mass. As you watch, though, one breaks free of the liquid and flies off into the freer chaos of the surrounding air: the water is evaporating. Some slide up your arm and lodge in the armpit, but eventually skitter away. Getting ride of all the water molecules takes too much scraping, so you command “Clean me!” to dry off. Ronald Reagan once said, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all.” A movie actor and politician, Reagan had doubtless struggled with the question of the reproducibility of himself. Perhaps, he like other commodities, lost his essence in reproduction and so did not notice that all redwoods are not the same. At the time of his remark, I was working with the Sierra Club on the campaign to keep some of the virgin redwoods, many of which had been growing since before the time of Christ, from being cut down by logging companies. Everyone thought the Reagan statement typical of the problem. A great many human being could not understand that there is a difference between the original, old-growth trees and the replanted redwoods the companies would exhibit on their tree farms. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Not caring about the old trees, the lumber companies could put out pamphlets that discussed the trees in cosmetic terms. One horrible example was their argument that “all most people really want is for trees along the highway to be saved, so they can stop their cars, and pose for snapshot next to a redwood.” The lumber companies may have been more right than wrong. Removed from direct contact with the old trees, their aura, their power, their life, their message about potentialities of the planet, many people may have found Reagan’s statement and the lumber company position plausible. To offset this, we worked to convey a sense of what was being lost. We attempted to do this through the media. We carried around photos of the great old groves: moody, magical, somber, awesome, and attempted to place them in the newspapers, magazines and on television. Some outlets carried them and some did not, but it was clear that it did not really matter whether they were reproduced in the media. They did not “work.” Too much was lost in the translation. More than anything, they lost their “aura,” the mood that surrounds them and the quality of their existence that can be captured only in their presence. Then we started doing the opposite. We carried around photos of acres of stumps where hundreds of redwoods had been cut down. I do not know if you have ever seen a field of tree stumps, but it is a horrific sight, not unlike a battlefield. Fortunately, however, it has very high visual definition, conveys a broad-band emotion—horror—and does not have the problem of conveying aura, since everything is dead. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
When we carried these latter photos around, the media grabbed them. They even dispatched their own crews to redwood country to expand on what we had brought. That is the moment I learned that death is a much better subject for television than life. And so when television decided to concentrate upon images of dead bodies in Vietnam, it came as no surprise to me. In the cases of both redwoods and Vietnam, images of death finally aroused the public. Images of life—whether the trees themselves, or the finely tuned Vietnamese culture and sensibility—accomplished nothing. They were far too complex, too subtle. They involved too many senses. Most of all, they required a conveyance of aura. Since none of this was possible on television, they only put people to sleep. In separating images from their source, thereby deleting their aura, television, photography and film also remove the images from their context of time and place. The images which arrive in your home may have been shot yesterday or a week ago, on location or in a studio. By the time you see them, they are not connected to those places or those times. They have been separated from all connection. All the images arrive in sequence with equal validity. They exist only in the here and now. They are floating equally in space. This situation inevitably provides another advantage for advertising relative to virtually any other kind of television information. Human beings and living creatures exist in process. From one year to the next they are different. What is more, human culture, government, religion, and art are also in process. Explaining a human being or a culture or a political system requires no such historical perspective. Explaining products do not grow organically, they are fashioned whole and complete in the here and now. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
You see products in one stage of their life cycle. That is their only stage until they start falling apart in your home. This is not to say that products have no history. A new BMW M5 with a V-10 engine represents a historical change from a Model T. However, you do not need to know the history to understand the BMW. And the BMW itself, the one you buy, does not grow or change. Products can be understood completely and totally in the here and now. they are pure information, free of time and free of place. When product images are placed on television in sequence with real events of the World, whose contexts of time and place are deleted by television, products obtain an equality they would otherwise lack. This gives products far more significance in the viewer’s mind than any direct experience of them would. That advertising achieves a validity effectively equal to that of real events of the World is only one bizarre result of the separation of images from time and place. Another is that it becomes impossible for a viewer to be certain that the information which is presented on television every actually happened. Many facts reported on television are totally wrong. Ignoring for a moment that television does not correct its own reports, sometimes newspapers do, and that allows one the opportunity to correct it in one’s mind. Like Broadway theater, capitalism has been pronounced dead countless times—usually in the depths of a depression or at the peak of runaway inflation. Indeed, there are those who say if capitalism could survive the repeated financial upheavals of the nineteenth century and the Great Depression of the 1930s, its regenerative ability will keep it going no matter what. Capitalism, they tell us, is here to stay, while other American traditions may be on their way out. However, what is they are wrong? No other human creation lasts forever. So why suppose that capitalism is eternal? And what if regeneration runs away with itself? In fact, today every key feature of capitalism, from property, capital and markets to money itself, is becoming nearly unrecognizable. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The results of their transformation will directly impact who owns what, the work we will do, how we will be paid, our roles as consumers, the stocks we will invest in, how capital will be allocated, the struggle between CEOs, employees and shareowners, and ultimately the rise and fall of countries across the World. Property, capital, markets and money has a relationship to power. We often focus on the changes since then in each of these, changes that pose critical challenges not just to our personal welfare but to capitalism’s very survival. The picture that emerges should shake up its friends and enemies alike. Property is the place to start because property is the origin of the capital on which capitalism itself is based. And both are now morphing into something new and strange. Property has often been described as “a thing or things belonging to someone.” However, dictionaries can be wrong, and property never was just a thing or things. No matter how thing-like or tangible, property has always had an intangible aspect as well. A house, a car or a camera is not property if it is unprotected by laws and social norms, and if anyone can snatch it away from you at any time and use it for any purpose. In capital-rich countries there is, in addition to protected legal rights and rules of ownership, an immense system in place that helps convert property to investable capital, which, in turn, stimulates economic development and wealth creation. This system consists of a vast, ever-changing knowledge base that lists who owns what, tracks transactions, helps hold people accountable for contacts, provides credit information and is integrated nationally so that users are not limited to doing business locally. This adds to the value of property. No such highly developed information systems are found in capital-poor counties. It is the intangible aspects—not just the physical aspects alone—that define property and give it value. However, we are seeing that today’s knowledge-based wealth system calls the very concept of property into doubt—and capitalism alone with it. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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Never, Never, Never Invest More than You are Willing to Lose!
Deep changes in the money system cannot occur without threatening entrenched institutions that have, until now, enjoyed positions of extraordinary power. At one level the substitution of electronic money for paper money is a direct threat, for example, to the very existence of banks as we know them. Banking will not retain its position as the primary operator of payment systems. Banks have had a government-protected monopoly in checking-clearing services. Electronic money threatens to supplant this system. In self-defense, some banks have entered into the credit card business themselves. More important, they have extended their reach without automatic teller machines (ATMs). If banks issue debit cards and put ATMs at millions of retail locations, they may repel the attack of the credit card companies. Since debit cards make it possible for the shopkeeper to receive payment instantly, instead of waiting for Diner’s Club or American Express or Visa to remit payment, store owners may not wish to continue paying them a percentage of each sale. Also, something is going on where so major banks have blocked credit unions from linking to their customer’s accounts. Therefore, they cannot use debit cards to transfer money instantly between institution, and this is causing consumers to have to wait days, or weeks for money to reach the accounts of their credit union. So, some people may eventually stop doing business with credit unions, while others stay out of loyalty. There must be some kind of quiet financial storm brewing inside of the credit unions. On another front, banks face attack from a wide variety of nonbanks. In Japan, for example, the Ministry of Finance has qualms about the idea that private companies like NTT can issue value-bearing plastic “notes”—a kind of currency—and operate outside the banking system and its rules. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
If a company can take in money for a prepaid card, it is accepting a “deposit,” exactly like a bank. When the user spends, he or she is making the equivalent of a “withdrawal.” And when the card company pays the vendor, it is operating a “payment system.” These are functions that once only banks could perform. Moreover, if card companies can issue credit to users, as they and the cardholders see fit, unconstrained by the kind of limits and reserves that govern banks, central banks risk losing their grip on monetary policy. In South Korea, plastic money has expanded so rapidly that the government fears it is feeding inflation. In brief, the rise of electronic money in the World economy threatens to shake up many long-entrenched power relationships. At the vortex of this power struggle is knowledge embedded in technology. It is a battle that will redefine money itself. Many governments have made it understood that they do not care for cryptocurrencies. They hype around the high returns from cryptocurrencies has led to more fraudulent “get-rich-quick” schemes lurking in the dark corners of the market. Many countries do not have law to back up investors. Which means, if a large group of investors lose their money—they will be left with no recourse within the current legal framework of the system. Several mutual funds have been told to hold off on sending any new fund offerings based on crypto assets. Cryptocurrencies, especially Bitcoin in this case, were created as a way to take the power of monetary control away from centralized authorities—like the government and the central bank. So, it is no surprise that the central bank takes issue with not being in control. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Cryptocurrencies have led to an increase in assets that can transfer funds with increased anonymity. There are virtual assets that focus on privacy. If and when things go wrong, decentralized platforms pose the problem of having no single entity to go after. Privacy wallets and other new financial instruments allow for reduced transparency, which, in turn, obscures the flow of finance. There is also a national security angle over here now, there are individuals from intelligence who are involved. As things stand, anyone can launch a new cryptocurrency. There is no national framework defining what a cryptocurrency is, or the minimum requirements for it to be a legitimate investment option. This means that anyone can create a virtual asset, get others to invest in it to hike the price, and then cash out their stake without having to explain why. This is normally what is called a “rug-pull.” After the “founders” or “influencers’ pull out their money, other investors are left holding less than what they originally started with. However, that is not much different than what happened with the stock market during 9/11. Many young and/or unsuspecting investors lost huge amounts of money they worked for, which was never returned. The crypto market s speculative and during the COVID-19 pandemic it saw value surge to new all-time-highs. And, while the worst sees to be behind, there is a risk of sharp corrections that still remains. Just as Bitcoin was recently able to hit $70,000, it is possible that it could sink lower than $45,000. In fact, as of June 16, 2022, 5.10 P.M. EST BTC is down to $20,282.52. Many countries that are subject to capital control, are especially vulnerable to destabilizing effects of cryptocurrencies. Free accessibility of crypto assets to residents can undermine their [emerging market economies] capital regulation framework. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
Non-bank actors—meaning crypto exchanges and other blockchain companies offering financial services—are adding to the dollar funding stress by using loopholes in the traditional policy approach to foreign exchange markets. At this stage, it is important to better understand non-bank investors’ role in creating or propagating systemic risk so that policy actions can be taken to smooth out financial risk-taking over time. This cryptocurrency in actions, a new generation of internet-based currencies which have grown in popularity over the last few years. You cannot not touch it or physically hand it over in any way, but you can use it to trade online. In the way, it is very different from the traditional view of banking, where cash, coins and possibly gold might be stacked in a vault just waiting to be withdrawn, but do these new cryptocurrencies represent a threat to those traditional banks? Thus far, the value of many of these cryptocurrencies has skyrocketed. If you had bought $1000 worth of Bitcoin in 2010, that investment would be worth $20 million today. There are even ATMs around for Bitcoin—put your regular currency in alone with your phone number, then get a receipt back for the purchase of Bitcoin. A check of the digital wallet on your phone should reveal your purchase there in the balance. That is causing a major shift in how people can do business and make transactions. Suddenly, the value is able to be exchanged outside of the traditional banks in the flash of a mobile phone. People who could not access trade and finance ten years ago can do so today. This will lift many out of poverty. The major factor is—if they need financing, people no longer have to go to a traditional bank for financing. (I bet a lot of people wish they knew this before they made car repairs.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
Peer-to-peer networks, including those based in cryptocurrencies, are becoming more common and those who might be turned away by traditional banks now have another way around financing. You can often times use an app on your phone to get a loan, and then take it to a car dealership, already knowing what you can afford, and pick the car of your dreams. Some people even get mortgage loans this way. That is why many traditional banks are feeling threatened by these new cryptocurrencies. However, you can also use these same apps on your mobile phone to get approved for cash loans. Many supports of digital currency and technology believe it should be seen as an invention like the printing press because it has the steam to transform the World of finance and beyond. If banks ignore new consumer behaviours and preferences when it comes to how they transact and transfer money, cryptocurrencies definitely represent a threat to traditional banks. Bitcoin users can handle many of their daily payments needs themselves, without the need for interaction with banks, and avoiding the need to incur bank fees. In the same way, the value stored in PayPal accounts moves outside of the bank’s payment systems, depriving banks of valuable payments revenue. There are a few issues cited with these cryptocurrencies, such as their perceived “haven” status for possible perpetrators of illegal activities, a relatively low market cap (Bitcoin’s is somewhere around $3.4 billion) and a sense of volatility with the value of the currency. That is why it is important to never, never, never invest more than you are willing to lose because it could go to nothing. That piece of advice is something even traditional financial advisors are not willing to disclose to investors. And sometimes after several losses, you need to cut and run before you start to become insane by beating the same horse and expecting something in return. #RandolpHarris 5 of 22
There are many people who absolutely could not wait to find a way around being beholden in some way to a big bank and these people are taking up new options with enthusiasm. Traditional banks and credit unions have often been guilty of customer-unfriendly account manipulations, such as applying debits before credits then charging fees for insufficient funds. (Citi Bank is one traditional banks I recommend, they do not charge overdraft fees. If your funds are insufficient, the check will just be returned unpaid.) However, the other big banks will not be able to get away with financial manipulation much longer because in the digital age, customers can actually see this happening by glancing at their mobile phones. Of course, money, whether in the form of metal, digital, or paper (or paper backed by metal), is unlikely to vanish completely. However, barring nuclear holocaust or technological cataclysm, electronic money will proliferate and drive out most alternatives, precisely because it combines exchange with real-time record-keeping, thus eliminating many of the costly inefficiencies that came with the traditional money system. If we put this all together now, a rather striking pattern becomes plain. Capital—by which we mean wealth put to work to increase production—changes in parallel with money, and both take on new forms each time society undergoes a major transformation. As they do so, their knowledge content changes. Thus agricultural-era money, consisting of metal (or some other commodity), had a knowledge content close to zero. Indeed, this First Wave money was not only tangible and durable, it was also pre-literate—in the sense that its value depended on its weight, not on the words imprinted on it. Today’s Second Wave money consists of printed paper with or without commodity backing. What is printed on the paper matters. The money is symbolic but still tangible. This form of money comes along with mass literacy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
Third Wave money increasingly consists of electronic pulses. It is evanescent…instantaneously transferred…monitored on the video screen. It is, in fact, virtually a video phenomenon itself. Blinking, flashing, whizzing across the planet, Third Wave money is information—the basis of knowledge. Increasingly detached from material embodiments, capital and money alike change through history, moving by stages from totally tangible to symbolic and ultimately today to its “super-symbolic” form. This vast sequence of transformations is accompanied by a deep shift of belief, almost a religious conversion—from a trust in permanent, tangible things like gold or paper to a belief that even the most tangible, ephemeral electronic blips can be swapped for goods or services. Our wealth is a wealth of symbols. And so also to a startling degree, is the power based on it. Elsewhere, we find imaginative efforts to compensate for the failures of the mass society’s mass educational system. When mass education was widely introduced, teachers were usually the most literate and educated people in the neighbourhood. Today parents are sometimes far better educated than the teachers to whom they entrust their children to. Recognizing the role that parents can play in promoting literacy by reading to their children, it is a good idea to buy your child a short book to read every month, until they develop an appetite for reading books. Meanwhile, more and more disaffected parents in the United States of America are pulling their children out of school and teaching them at home. They are supported by a growing variety of up-to-date online services and tools. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
One objection to keeping kids home is that they will not learn to get along with other children. However, as public schools decay, and in many places become drug, alcohol and vape-infested and dangerous, parents wonder if the socialization the schools provide is healthy. If parents keep their children at home, they can develop socialization skills by encouraging their kids to play soccer, or, when a bit older, do volunteer work at an NGO where they can meet other young people engaged in community service. Here, once more, we find a pre-industrial practice—most children were educated at home before the industrial era—being transformed to meet post-industrial needs. Charter schools are an attempt to innovate within the system. These are public schools granted a limited degree of freedom to experiment. In the United States of America they still enroll less than 2 percent of American students, and their results are, no doubt, uneven. However, among them we also find many potentially useful innovations. At the Center for Advance Research and Technology (CART) in Clovis, California, twelve hundred high school students, on a 75,000 square foot CART facility, use information technology in a high-performance business atmosphere to help solve real-World community problems. The school focuses on Professional Sciences, Engineering, Advanced Communications, and Global Dynamics. Mentors include local business leaders. Students are encouraged to take part-time jobs and carry out research projects working with adults in business, industry, trade or other services. Within each four clusters of the education, students complete industry-based projects and receive academic credit for advanced English, science, social science and technology. A key mission of the center is to demonstrate to young people the relevance of academic subjects to practical problems, and help them meet expectations and work behaviour for a global job market. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
Students thus are invited to invent marketable new products that help solve real World problems. CART students have invented an ultrasonic cane for the visually impaired and other devices for the physically impaired. However, the school’s main output consists of smart young people prepared for twenty-first century realities. Institutional invention and experimentation are growing in other fields as well. Entrepreneurs who make vaccines are rapidly multiplying. Today, more than thirty U.S. business schools, including Stanford, Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Duke, offer courses in pro-social entrepreneurship. Santa Clara University in Silicon Valley has created a Global Social Benefit Incubator to help innovators apply technology to urgent social needs and to assist them in scaling up their efforts. And, in what many regard as the ideological workshop of contemporary capitalism—the annual World Economic Forum held in Davos, Switzerland—NGO leaders and social entrepreneurs seek to improve the work of existing nonprofits and NGOs by applying businesslike methods to them. Others start new organizations to deal with social problems as they emerge. Both typically rely on volunteers. To that degree, at least, they form part of the non-money or prosumer economy that, as we have seen, creates the social capital and “free lunch” on which the money system depends. The remarkable growth of social entrepreneurship reflects cuts in government-provided, one-size-fits-all safety nets designed for fast-fading industrial conditions. It reflects the incapacity of smokestack institutions to generate imaginative, customized solutions to new social problems. And it reflects the impatience of millions around the World who have given up waiting for governments and formal institutions to solve problems. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
However, in rich societies it reflects something ese. In the past, very few people had the luxury of time, energy and education to devote themselves to imagining and inventing—or fighting for—new institutions for the future. Today vast and growing numbers of people, including the best-educated and most creative among us, have time, money and access to one another through that empowering global change-maker called the Internet. When it comes to life, it is never good to be the first to defect. Theoretical results show that it pays to cooperate as long as the other individuals are cooperating. The single best predictor of how well a rule performed was whether or not it was nice, which is to say, whether or not it would ever be the first to defect. In a business deal, each of the top eight rules were nice, and not one of the bottom seven were nice. In the second round of meetings, all but one of the top fifteen rules were nice (and that one ranked eighth). Of the bottom fifteen rules, all but one were not nice. Some of the rules that were not nice tried quite sophisticated methods of seeing what they could get away with. For example, TESTER tried an initial defection and then promptly back off if one of the managers or other employees retaliated. As another example, TRANQUILIZER threw in additional defections at more frequent intervals, until it was forced to back off by the other’s response. However, neither of these strategies which experimented with being the first to defect did particularly well. There were too many other individuals who were not exploitable by virtue of their willingness to retaliate. The resulting conflicts were sometimes quite costly. Even many of the experts did not appreciate the value of avoiding unnecessary conflict by being nice. In the first round of meetings, almost half of the entries by managers were not nice. But to little avail. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
There is another way of looking at why nice rues do so well. A population of nice rules is the hardest type to invade because nice rules do so well with each other. Furthermore, a population of nice rules which can resist the invasion of a single mutant rule can resist the invasion of any cluster of other rules. The theoretical results provide an important qualification to the advantages of using a nice strategy. When the future of the interaction is not important enough relative to immediate gains from defection, then simply waiting for the other to defect is not such a good idea. It is important to bear in mind that TIT FOR TAT is a stable strategy only when the discount parameter is high enough relative to payoff other parameters. In particular, if the discount parameter is not high enough and the other player is using TIT FOR TAT, a player is better off alternating defection and cooperation, or even defecting. Therefore, if the other player is not likely to be seen again, defecting right away is better than being nice. This fact has unfortunate implications for groups who are known to move from one place to another. An anthropologist finds that a grifter approaches a non-grifter expecting trouble, and a non-grifter approaches a grifter suspiciously, expecting double-dealing. For example, a physician was called in to attend very sick grifter’s baby; he was not the first doctor called, but he was the first willing to come. We escorted him toward the back bedroom, but he stopped short of the threshold of the patient’s room. “This visit will be one thousand dollars, and you owe me three hundred and thirty-three dollars from the last time. Pay me the thirteen hundred and thirty-three dollars before I see the patient,” he demanded. “Okay, okay, you will get it—just look at the baby now,” the grifter pleaded. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
Several more go-arounds occurred before I intervened. Six hundred and sixty-six dollars and fifty cents changed hands and the doctor examined the patient. After the visit, I discovered the grifters, in revenge, did not intend to pay the other six hundred and sixty-six dollars and fifty cents. In a California community, grifters were again found not to pay all of a doctor’s bills, but municipal fines were paid promptly. These fines were usually for breaking garbage regulations. This was among a group of grifters who returned to the same town every winter. Presumably, the grifters knew that they had an ongoing relationship with the garbage collection service of that two, and could not shop around for another service. Conversely, there were always enough doctors in that area for them to break off one relationship and start another when necessary. Short interactions are not the only condition which would make it pay to be the first to defect. The other possibility is that cooperation will simply not be reciprocated. If everyone else is using a strategy of always defecting, then a single individual can do no better than to use this same strategy. However, if even a small proportion of one’s interactions are going to be with others who are using a responsive strategy like TIT FOR TAT, then it can pay to use TIT FOR TAT rather than to simply defect all the time like most of those in the population. In the numerical example presented there, it took only 5 percent of one’s interactions to be with like-minded TIT FOR TAT players to make the members of this small cluster do better than the typical defecting member of the population. Will there by anyone out there to reciprocate one’s own initial cooperation? In some circumstances this will be hard to tell in advance. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
However, if there has been enough time for many different strategies to be tried, and for some way of making the more successful strategies become more common, then one can be fairly confident that there will be individuals out there who will reciprocate cooperation. The reason is that even a relatively small cluster of discriminating nice rules can invade a population of meanies, and then thrive on their good scores with each other. And once nice rules get a foothold, they can protect themselves from reinvasion by meanies. Of course, one could try to “play it safe” by defecting until the other person(s) involved in the business negation cooperates, and only then starting to cooperate. The tournament results show, however, that this is actually a very risky strategy. The reason is that your own initial defection is likely to set off a retaliation by the other party involved in the business deal. This will put the two of you in the difficult position of trying to extricate yourselves from an initial patter of exploitation or mutual defection. If you punish the other’s retaliation, the problem can echo into the future. And if you forgive the other, you risk appearing to be exploitable. Even if you can avoid these long-term problems, a prompt retaliation against your initial defection can make you wish that you had been nice from the start. The ecological analysis of the tournament revealed another reason why it is risky to be the first to defect. The only rule that was not nice and that scored among the top fifteen in the second round of business negotiations was the eighth-ranking rule, HARRINGTON. This rule did fairly well because it scored well with the lower ranking entries in the business negotiations, the lower ranking entries became a smaller and smaller proportion of the population. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Eventually, the non-nice rule that originally scored well had fewer and fewer strategies it could do well with. Then it too suffered and eventually died out. Thus the ecological analysis shows that doing well with rules that do not score well themselves is eventually a self-defeating process. The lesson is that not being nice may look promising at first, but in the long run it can destroy the very environment it needs for its own success. Radical egalitarism is the cure for the evils of egalitarianism. Dr. Freud talked about interesting things not found anywhere in Marx. The whole psychology of the unconscious was completely alien to Marx, as was its inner motor, eros. None of this could be incorporated directly into Marx. However, if Dr. Freud’s interpretation of the cases of neuroses and his treatment of the maladjusted could itself be interpreted as bourgeois errors that serve enslavement to the capitalist control of the means of production, then Marx would move in on the Freudian scene. What Dr. Freud said were permanent contradictions between human nature and society could be set in motion dialectically, and in a socialist society there would be no need for the repression that causes neuroses. So Dr. Freud was neatly enrolled in the Marxist legions, adding to the charm of economics that of eros, and thereby providing a solution to the problem of what men are going to do after the revolution—a problem left unsolved by Marx. This is what we find in Marcuse and many others, who simply do not talk about the difficult posed by the contradiction between Marx’s fundamental principles and those of Dr. Freud. Two powerful systems are served up in a single package. Dr. Freud is the really meaty part of the concoction. Marx provides a generalized assurance that capitalism is indeed at fault and that the problems can be solved by more equality and more freedom, that the liberated people will possess all the virtues. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
The genius and audacity of American capitalists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, men who were quicker and more focused than those of other nations in exploiting the economic possibilities of new technologies is inextricably the reason the submission of all forms of cultural life to the sovereignty of technique and technology finds fertile ground on American soil. Among those exploiting them are Samuel Morse, Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, John D. Rockefeller, John Astor, Henry Ford, Andrew Carnegie, and many others, some of who were known as the Robber Barons. What they were robbing—it is clearer now than it was then—was America’s past, for their essential idea was that nothing is so much worth preserving that it should stand in the way of technological innovation. These were the men who created the twentieth century, and they achieved wealth, prestige, and power that would have amazed even Richard Arkwright. Their greatest achievement was in convincing their countrymen that the future need have no connection to the past. Third, the success of twentieth-century technology in providing Americas with convenience, comfort, speed, hygiene, and abundance was so obvious and promising that there seemed no reason to look for any other sources of fulfilment or creativity or purpose. To every Old World belief, habit, or tradition, there was and still is a technological alternative. To prayer, the alternative is penicillin; to family roots, the alternative is mobility; to reading, the alternative is television; to restraint, the alternative is immediate gratification; to sin, the alternative is popular appeal established through scientific polling. There is even an alternative to the painful riddle of death, as Dr. Freud called it. The riddle may be postponed through longer life, and then perhaps solved altogether by cryogenics. At least, no one can easily think of a reason why not. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
As the spectacular triumphs of technology mounted, something else was happening: old sources of belief came under siege. Nietzsche announced that God was dead. Darwin did not go as far but did make it clear that, if we were children of God, we had come to be so through a much longer and less dignified route than we had imagined, and that in the process we had picked up some strange and unseemly relatives. Marx argued that history had its own agenda and was taking us where it must, irrespective of our wishes. Dr. Freud taught that we had no understanding of our deepest needs and could not trust our traditional ways of reasoning to uncover them. John Watson, the founder of behaviourism, showed that free will was an illusion and that our behaviour, in the end, was not unlike that of pigeons. And Einstein and his colleagues told us that there were no absolute means of judging anything in any case, that everything was relative. The thrust of a century of scholarship had the effect of making us lose confidence in out belief systems and therefore in ourselves. Amid the conceptual debris, there remained one sure thing to believe in—technology. Whatever else may be denied or compromised, it is clear that airplanes do fly, antibiotics do cure, radios do speak, and, as we know now, computers do calculate and never make mistakes—only faulty humans do (which is what Frederick Taylor was trying to tell us all along.) For these well-known reasons, Americans were better prepared to undertake the creation of a Technopoly than anyone else. However, its full flowering depended on still another set of conditions, less visible and therefore less well known. These conditions provided the background, the context in which the American distrust of constraints, the exploitative genius of its captains of industry, the success of technology, and the devaluation of traditional beliefs took on the exaggerated significance that pushed technocracy in America over into Technopoly. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
In speaking about molecular texture–the ground underfoot, like everything around you, is pebbly with atom-sized bumps the size of your fingertips. Objects look like bunches of transparent grapes or fused marbles in a variety of pretty but imaginary colours. The simulation displays a view of atoms and molecules much like those used by chemists in the 1980s, but with a sharper 3-D image and a better way to move them and to feel the forces they exert. Actually, the whole simulation setup is nothing but an improved version of systems built in the late 1980s—the computer is faster, but it is calculating the same things. The video goggles are better and the whole-body powersuit is major change, but even in the 1980s there were 3-D displays for molecules and crude devices that gave a sense of touching them. The gloves on this suit give the sensation of touching whatever the computer simulates. When you run a fingertip over the side of the smaller nanocomputer, it feels odd, hard to describe. It is as if the surface were magnetic—it pulls on your fingertip if you move close enough. However, the result is not a sharp click of contact, because the surface is not hard like a magnet, but strangely soft. Touching the surface is not hard like a magnet, but strangle soft. Touching the surface is like touching a film of fog that grades smoothly into foam rubber, then hard rubber, then steel, all within the thickness of a sheet of corrugated cardboard. Moving sideways, your fingertip feels no texture, no friction, just smooth bumps more slippery than oil, and a tendency to get pulled into hollows. Pulling free of the surface takes a firm tug. The simulation makes your atom-sized fingertip feel the same forces that an atom would. It is strange how slippery the surface is—and it cannot have been lubricated, since even a single oil molecule would be a lump the size of your thumb. This slipperiness makes it obvious how nano-scale bearings can work, how the parts of molecular machines can slide smoothly. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
However, on top of this, there is a tingling feeling in your fingers, like the sensation of touching a working loudspeaker. When you put your ear against the wall of the nanocomputer, you flinch back: for a moment, you heard a sound like the hiss of a twentieth-century television tuned to a channel with no broadcast, with nothing but snow and static—but loud, painfully loud. All the atoms in the surface are vibrating at high frequencies, too fast to see. This is thermal vibration, and it is obvious why it is also called thermal noise. While we are on the subject of TV, all technical reproduction of art, nature, and the human image deletes what is called “aura.” Before the age of mechanical reproduction, art objects did not exist in a context outside of their original use. If a religious object were carved in bronze, this piece of bronze gained its meaning from its context, that is, the place and time of its use. When it is dug up by archeologists two thousand years later, it may have intellectual meaning and be informative or beautiful, but it will not have retained the quality of its original power. This depended upon its connection to time and place. When it is then put behind glass in a museum, it has still less power. When it is photographed and reproduced then thousand times on postcards, although it can then be found in ten thousand homes, it is so many times removed from its original shell that it conveys nothing. At this point, it could be used by anyone for any purpose, including advertisement. Meaning must be invested into it, as it no longer has any of its own. What is true for art objects is even more true for natural, living beings. The art object, once separated from its source in time and place, loses the powers invested in it. The human being loses humanness itself. The plight of the performer in a film, for example, has the job of conveying one’s self through machinery which is predisposed not to allow such a conveyance. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
This situation might be characterized as follows: for the first time—and this is the effect of the film—man [the actor] has to operate with his whole living person, yet foregoing [his] aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The feeling of strangeness that overcomes the actor before the camera…is basically of the same kind as the estrangement felt before one’s image in the mirror. However, now [with photography and film] the reflected image has become separable, transportable….The film responds to the shriveling of the aura with an artificial build-up of the “personality” outside the studio. The cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the “spell of the personality,” the phony spell of a commodity. Mechanical reproduction of images is the great equalizer. When you reproduce any image of anything that formerly had aura (or life), the effect is to dislocate the image from the aura, leaving only the image. At this point, the image is neutral, it has no greater inherent power than commodities. Products have no life to begin with, neither did they have any aura that attached to some original artistic or religious use at a certain place or time. There is no original car or vacuum cleaner, at least not among those that are advertised. They are all duplications of each other, like the fiftieth copy of a photograph. So products lose virtually nothing when their images are reproduced mechanically or electronically, while original art objects lose their contextual meaning, and human being and other living creatures lose virtually everything that qualifies as meaningful. Humans become image shells, containing nothing inside, no better or worse, more or less meaningful than the product images that interrupt them every few minutes. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
By the simple process of removing images from immediate experience and passing them instead through a machine, humans beings lose one of the attributes that differentiate us from objects. Products, meanwhile, suffer no such loss and effectively obtain a kind of equality with these aura-amputated living creatures shown on television. These factors conspire to make television an inherently more efficient and effective medium for advertising than for conveying any information in which life force exists: human feeling, human interaction, natural environment, or ways of thinking and being. Advertisers, however, are not satisfied with equality. Leaving their products in their natural deadness would not instill any desire to buy. And so the advertising person goes a step further by constructing drama around the product, investing it with an apparent life. Since a product has no inherent drama, techniques are used to dramatize and enliven the product. Cuts, edits, zooms, cartoons and other effects have the effect of adding artificial life force to the product. These technical events make it possible for products to surpass in power the images of the creatures whose aura has been separated from them by the act of mechanical or electronic reproduction. So television accomplishes something that in real life would be impossible: making products more “alive” than people. There is an important political and psychological conclusion that can be drawn from the disconnection of humans and art from their auras. In destroying aura via the mechanical reproduction of art, all as well as humans and nature lose their grounding, their meaning in time and place. At this point, like the product in the advertisement, the art image or the human image can be used for any purpose whatsoever. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
The disconnection from inherent meaning, which would be visible if image, object and context were still merged, leads to a similarly disconnected aesthetics in which all users for images are equal. All meaning in art and also human acts becomes only what is invested into them. There is no inherent meaning in anything. Everything, even war, is capable of becoming art, and we are back to Werner Erhard, Solaris and 1984. To illustrate the problem, quoted is Filippo Marinetti, one of the founders of Italian Futurism: “For twenty-seven years, we Futurist have rebelled against the branding of war as antiesthetic…Accordingly we state…War is beautiful because it establishes man’s dominion over the subjugated machinery by means of gas masks, terrifying megaphones, flame throwers, and small tanks. War is beautiful because it initiates the dreamt-of metalization of the human body. War is beautiful because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine guns. War is beautiful because it combines the gunfire, the cannonades, the cease-fire, the scents, and the stench of putrefaction into a symphony. War is beautiful because it creates new architecture, like that of the big tanks, the geometrical formation flights, the smoke spirals from burning villages, and many others…Poets and artists of Futurism….remember these principles of an aesthetics of war so that your struggle for a new literature and a new graphic art…may be illuminated by them. This loss of the inherent meaning which is connected to art, humans and nature furthers the notion that all experience is equal, leading in short steps to fascism: Fascism expects war to supply the artistic gratification of a sense perception that has been changed by technology. This is evidently the consummation of “l’art pour l’art.” Mankind, which Homer’s time was an object for contemplation of the Olympian gods, now is one for itself. Its self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
“Knowledge of good and evil” means nothing else than: cognizance of the opposities which the early literature of mankind designated by these two terms; they still include the fortune and this misfortune or the order and the disorder which is experienced by a person, as well as that which he causes. This is still the same in the early Avestic text, and it is the same in those of the Christian Bible which precede written prophecy and to which ours belongs. In the terminology of modern thought, we can transcribe what is meant as: adequate awareness of the opposites inherent in all being within the World, and that, from the viewpoint of the Biblical creation-belief, means: adequate awareness of the opposites latent in creation. If we remain full aware that the basic conception of the all the theo- and anthropology of the Hebrews, namely the immutable difference and distance which exists between God and man, irrespective of the primal fact of the latter’s “likeness” to God and of the current fact of his “nearness” to Him, also applies to the knowledge of good and evil. This knowledge as the primordial possession of God and the same knowledge as the magical attainment of man are Worlds apart in their nature. God knows the opposites of being, which stem from His own act of creation; He encompasses them, untouched by them; He is as absolutely familiar with them as he is absolutely superior to them; He has direct intercourse with them (this is obviously the original meaning of the Hebrew verb “know”: be in direct contact with), and this in their function as the opposite poles of the World’s being. For as such He created them—we may impute this late Biblical doctrine to our narrator, it its elementary form. Thus He who is above all opposites has intercourse with the opposites of good and evil that are of His primordial familiarity with them He appears, as can be gathered from the words, “one of us,” to have bestowed upon the “sons of God” by virtue of their share in the work of creation. “And now Father, I pray unto thee for them, and also for all those who shall believe on their words, that they may believe in me, that I may be in them as thou, Father, art in me, that we maybe one,” Reports 3 Nephi 19.23. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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From Opiates, Brainwashing, and Fasting to the Resurrection of Values as a Concern
Once upon a time, wealth was elemental. One had it or one did not have it. It was solid. It was material. And it was easy to understand that wealth gave power, and power wealth. It was simple because both were based on land. Land was the most important capital of all. Land was finite—meaning that if one used it, no one else could use it at the same time. Better yet, it was eminently touchable. One could measure it, dig it, turn it, plant one’s feet on it, feel it between one’s toes, and run it through one’s fingers. Generations of our ancestors either had it or (literally) hungered for it. When smokestacks began to stab the skies, wealth was transformed. Machines and materials for industrial production, rather than land, now became the most critically needed form of capital: steel furnaces, textile looms and assembly lines, spot welders and sewing machines, bauxite, copper, and nickel. This industrial capital was still finite. If you used a furnace in a steel foundry making cast-iron engine blocks, no one else could use that furnace at the same time. Capital was still material as well. When J.P. Morgan or other bankers invested in a company, they looked for “hard assets” on its balance sheet. When bankers considered a loan, they wanted “underlying” physical, tangible collateral. Hardware. However, unlike most landowners who knew their wealthy intimately, who knew each hill, each field, each spring and orchard, few industrial-age investors ever saw, let alone touched, the machines and minerals on which their wealth was based. An investor received paper instead, a mere symbol, a bond or stock certificate representing some fraction of the value of the corporation using the capital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Marx spoke of the alienation of the worker from his or her product. However, might also have spoken of the alienation of the investor from the source of his or her wealth. Today, at a pace that would have blinded Marx and/or Morgan, capital is being transformed again. As service and information sectors grow in the advanced economies, as manufacturing itself is computerized, the nature of wealth necessarily changes. While investors in backward sectors of industry still regard the traditional “hard assets”—plant, equipment, and inventories—as critical, investors in the fastest growing, most advanced sectors rely on radically different factors to back their investments. No one buys a share of Apple Computer or IMB stock because of the firm’s material assets. What counts are not the company’s buildings or machines, but the contacts and power of its marketing and sales force, the organizational capacity of its management, and the ideas crackling inside the heads of its employees. The same is of course true throughout the Third Wave sectors of the economy—in companies like Fujitsu or NEC in Japan, Siemens of West Germany, France’s Groupe Bull, in firms like Digital Equipment, Genentech, or Federal Express. This symbolic share of stock represents, to a startling degree, nothing more than other symbols. The shift to this new form of capital explodes the assumptions that underpin both Marxist ideology and classical economies, premised alike on the finite character of traditional capital. For unlike land or machines, which can be used by only one person or firm at a time, the same knowledge can be applied by many different users at the same time—and if used cleverly by them, it can generate even more knowledge. It is inherently inexhaustible and nonexclusive. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Even this, however, only hints at the full scope of the revolution in capital. For if the shift toward knowledge-capital is real, then capital itself is increasingly “unreal”—it consists largely of symbols that represent nothing more than other symbols inside the memories and thoughtware of people and computers. Capital has therefore gone from its tangible form, to a paper form that symbolized tangible assets, to paper symbolizing symbols in the skulls of a continually changing work force. And, finally, to electronic blips symbolizing the paper. At the very same time that capital increasingly disguised by obsolete accounting rules and tax regulations), the instruments traded in the financial markets are similarly growing ever more remote from tangibility. In Chicago, London, Sydney, Singapore, and Osaka, billions are traded in the form of so-called “derivative” instruments—such as securities based not on the stock of individual companies but on various indices of the market. A step even further removed from “fundamentals” are options based on these indices. And beyond that, in a kind of shadow World, are so-called “synthetics,” which through a series of complex transactions, offer an investor results that simulate or mirror those of an existing bond, stock, index, or option. We are speeding toward even more rarified investments based on indices of indices of indices, derivatives of derivatives, synthetics mirroring synthetics. Capital is fast becoming “super-symbolic.” Just as much of the power of modern science lies in longer and longer chains of reasoning, just as mathematicians build more and more extended structures, piling theorem upon theorem to yield a body of knowledge that yields still more abstract theorems, precisely as artificial intelligences and “knowledge engineers” construct dizzying architectures of inference, so, too, we are creating a capital of progressive derivation, or—some might say—of infinitely receding mirrors. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
If this were all, it would be revolutionary. However, the process is pushed even further by parallel changes in the nature of money. When we think of dollars, francs, yen, rubles, or deutsche marks, most of us hear the rustle of paper. Yet nothing would have seemed odder to one of our great-great—grandparents who miraculously time-traveled into the present. He or she would never have accepted “useless” paper for a bolt of wearable calico or a bushel of edible corn. Throughout the agricultural age or First Wave civilization, money consisted of some material substance that had a built-in value. Gold and silver, of course. However, also salt, tobacco, coral, cotton cloth, copper, and cowrie shells. An endless list of other useful things also served, at one time or another, as money. (Paper, ironically, had only limited use in daily life prior to the spread of mass literacy, and was therefore seldom—if ever—used as money.) At the dawn of the industrial era, however, strange new ideas began to circulate about money. In 1650, for example, a man named William Potter published a prescient tract in England suggesting something previously unthinkable—that “symbolic wealth was to take the place of real wealth.” Forty years later, when people like Thomas Savery were tinkering with early steam engines, the idea was actually tried out. It was the American colonists, forbidden by the British to mint gold or silver coins, who for the first time—in the Western World at least—began printing money. This switch, from an inherently valuable commodity like gold or tobacco or furs to virtually worthless paper, required a tremendous leap of faith on the part of users. For unless a person believed that others would accept paper, and deliver goods for it, it had no value at all. Paper money was based almost entirely on trust. And paper money dominated the industrial society—the civilization of the Second Wave. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Today, as a more advanced Third Wave economy emerges, paper money faces near-total obsolescence. It is now clear with crypto currencies, paper money, like assembly lines and smokestacks, is an artifact of the dying industrial era. Except for economically backward countries and quite secondary uses, paper money will go the way of the coral shell and copper bracelet currency. By any material standard, most Americans today are far better off than, say, their grandparents were in the 1950s, when the “new” economy began. At that time the ordinary American family paid out nearly a 20 percent of its disposable personal income just to feed itself. By 2022, only 15 percent was needed of American’s income was needed. Shoppers are now expected to spend $611 per month on groceries, an increase of about $79, over their projected food budget for 2021. Clothing in those long-ago days ate up 11 percent of personal spending. By 2022, despite all the razzle-dazzle about fashion, the number was down to 7 percent. Back then, only 55 percent of Americans owned their homes. Today it is about 66 percent, and the homes are, on average, much larger. Indeed, by 2022, 15 percent of housing sales were for second homes. As far as health is concerned, despite all the problems, average life expectancy has risen from 68.2 years in 1950 to 76.60 years, which is a 0.3 percent decrease from 2000. However, if all this is true—and a mountain of evidence confirms that it is—why are Americans so seemingly unhappy? The key is because we are living in a material World—which is the opposite of intangible. Thus, as both the money economy and its non-money counterpart shift from muscles and metal-bending toward knowledge-based wealth creation and the intangibility it brings, we see yet another historic change: The resurrection of values as a central concern. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
It is necessary to sink back into the depths of the human past, to uncover the unifying elements of control which unite the additive and subtractive. As a primary clue, we may note that either state, manifested to its extreme, includes the necessity of raising powerfully altered states of awareness based on overstimulation and understimulation of the senses. These altered states may be sorted according to maximal “gravity” (for the fat fetish) and maximal “levity” (for the thin fetish). Five to ten thousand years ago, the worship of the great above average weight Goddess of crop fertility and abundant supply was still in its heyday, as evidenced in the strikingly voluptuous “Venus” figurines found at Willendorf, Austria, Dolni Vestonice in Czshoslovakia, Laussel, in France, and hundreds of other sites ranging from Spain to the Steppes of Russian and Central Asia The one European site which stands out as clearly suggesting the possibility of a well-organized Neolithic cult whose idol was a force-fed and fattened oracular priestess, is found on the island of Malta, just south of Sicily. A complement of several large temples, constructed out of huge, megalithic slabs create a series of artificial “underground” grottoes or caves. The temples are constructed in curving forms that echo the rounded contours of the abundant Goddess. Found in the burial excavations on one of the temple sites were several impressive statuettes of massively above average sized women, reclining on low couches with their eyes closed, as if dreaming or listening to an inner voice. Jean McMann’s Riddles of the Stone Age: Rock Carvings of Ancient Europe, suggests a confirmation for the idea that over-consumption of food was actually used to create the “gravitic” mediumship that parallels the “levitational” ekstasis of the under-consumer…Further, in the National Museum of Valetta (in Malta) one can see…a wonderful “Sleeping Lady” discovered in the main chamber of Hypogeum (a word meaning “under the Earth”)…Tiny yet monumental, she reclines as though she were a goddess receiving a dream. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
There has been some guesswork about the possibility of a “dream cult” connected with the structures. Perhaps, like a vestal virgin, or better, a queen bee, this goddess in human form was fed on titbits and delicacies, lived in the temple and dreamed rich dreams for the priests to interpret. By being fed to bursting, the priestess actually embodies the ideal of the obese Goddess, whose favor insured rich crops. The control of feast or famine resided in the very flesh of the ritually fattened priestess. By stuffing these women constantly, there were also kept in a perpetual state of dream-trance which made them the perfect oracles as well as the embodiments of the Goddess. Their huge bodies became laboratories for neurochemically altered frames of awareness, as well as pleasure palaces of the Goddess. Aleister Crowley perfectly describes this ritual fattening into a “gravtic” mediumship in his novel Moonchild. In service to the Lunar Goddess, Crowley’s character, Lisa, gradually fattens into the archetypically obsess sibylline figure: “It was part of the general theory of the operation thus to keep her concealed and recumbent for the greater part of the day…with soft singing and music or with the recital of slow voluptuous poetry, her natural disinclination to sleep was overcome and she began to enjoy the delicious laziness of her existence, and to sleep the clock round without turning in her bed. She lived almost entirely upon milk and cream, and cheese soft-curdled, with little crescent cakes made of rye with white of egg and cane sugar; as for meat, venison, as sacred to the huntress Artemis, was her only dish. However, certain shellfish were permitted, and all soft and succulent vegetables and fruits. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
“She put on flesh rapidly; the fierce, active impetuous girl of October, with taut muscles and dark-flushed mobile face, had become pale, heavy, languid and indifferent to events, all before the beginning of February, and it was clearly in this month that she was encouraged by her first waking vision of the Moon…for she had become extremely fat; her skin was of a white and heavy pallor; her eyes were almost closed by their perpetual droop. Her habit of life had become infinitely sensuous and languid; when she rose from recumbency she lolled rather than walked; her lassitude was such that she hardly cared to feed herself; yet she managed to consumer five or six times a normal dietary. She seemed utterly attracted to the Moon. She held out her body to it like an offering…She was more languid then ever before; that night, it seemed to her as if her body were altogether too heavy for her; she had the feeling, so well-known to opium smokers, which they call ‘clove a terre.’ It is as if the body clung desperately to the Earth, by its own weight, and yet in the same way as a tired child nestles to its mother’s breast….It may be that it is the counterpart of the freedom of the soul which it is the herald and companion…and gradually, as comes also to the smoker of opium, the process of bodily repose became complete; the Earth was one with the Earth, and no longer troubled or trammeled her truer self…She had become acutely conscious that she was not the body that lay supine in the cradle, with the Moon gleaming upon its bloodless countenance…” Crowley captures the essence of the obese/mediumistic priestess, bound and controlled by the sheer volume of her own flesh, into harmony with Earth and sky. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Dr. Douglas Baker, in this Esoteric Anatomy notes a direct link between the hypothalamus, high Serotonin levels and obesity in those subjects who have a sudden awakening of the mediumistic ability. The traditional association of women who are above average weight and mediumship (probably derived from the more than ample form of Madame Blavatsky, 19th century founder of the Theosophical movement) reaches back to the very roots of human culture. Joseph Caezza, in his article “Fat Holy Men” establishes a clear link between sanctity and obesity, based upon somatic/aetheric aspects of the belly as a storage device for subtle energies. Likewise, the “Tarbfeis” or ritual gorging of the Druid priests upon the blood and flesh of the sacred white bull was intended to create a state of divine exaltation and oracular sleep. On the opposite side of the coin, the subtractive side, Crowley also mentions the surgical/cannibal aspect in Moonchild, occurring during a powerful and disturbingly erotic vision encountered during Lisa’s period of lunar “captivity.” “Actual phantoms took shape for her, some seductive, some menacing, but even the most hideous and cruel symbols had a fierce fascination for her. There was a stag-beetle, with flaming eyes, a creature as big as an elephant, with claws in constant motion, that threatened her continually. Horribly as this frightened her, she gloated on it; pictured its sudden plunge with those ghastly mandibles upon her flanks. Her own fatness was a source of curious perverse pleasure for her; one of her favorite reveries was to imagine herself the center of a group of cannibals, watch them chop off great lumps from her body and sear them in the pot, or roast them on a spear, hissing and dripping blood and grease, upon the fire. In some insane or atavistic confusion of the mind, this dream was always recognized as being a dream of love.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Clearly, the removal of flesh, in this example, operates within the context of the fat fetish. If we consider that the addition of flesh via food physically binds one to gravitic mediumship in a perpetual oracular dream state, then the subtraction of flesh, whether by starvation or surgery, must serve to release the Spirit in a rush of levitational ascesis. One binds to Earth, the other to sky. Here, we find the archetypal mythos of the marriage of Heaven and Earth, thin and fat, the conjunctio oppositorum of Alchemy; the wedding of all opposites. Within this perspective, we can begin to understand the more extreme aspects of the subtractive fetish as the ascetic/erotic mirror of the flesh and blood for the sake of a sexual or erotic ecstasy. The range of subtractive activities moves from the largely symbolic practices as piercing, scarification and tattooing, all of which have distinct mind-altering ritual and decorative aspects, to much more extreme forms, such as self-starvation, anorexia, the various forms of cosmetic surgery (especially liposuction!), fetishistic surgery, and what we might even term “folk” surgery. In the subtractive fetish, dread of surgery transforms into a sexual stimulant in its own right. The psychological roots of this fascination foes back to the Neolithic era, which gave birth to the rise of ritual fattening cults. Surgical rites of passage quite literally remove the soul in a state of ekstasis (literally, “out of oneself”) or levitation, through an actual hole in the body. Folk surgery, with its strong shamanic overtones, dates back tens of thousands of years. Clear evidence of trepanation operations (the cutting of a hole in the skull to espose the brain) has been found in early Neolithic skeletal remains. This early surgery was perhaps at first employed to shamanically remove possessing spirits from the head. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
This early surgery was perhaps at first employed to shamanically remove possessing spirits from the head. As late as the first few decades of our century, Tibetan Buddhist priests were still performing amazing trepanning operations, during which they drilled a hole between and above the eyebrows, and inserted a long, sharp, wooden needle directly into the pituitary gland to stimulate the development of second sight. Moreover, ideology is no longer very distinctly tied to economics, nor is it simply determined. It has been cut loose from necessity’s apron strings in creativity’s realm. Rational causality just does not, since Nietzsche, seem sufficient to explain the historically unique event or thought. Capitalist ideology is now instinctively taken to be something more like the Protestant ethic than what is described in Capital. When one talks to Marxists these days and asks them to explain philosophers or artists in terms of objective economic conditions, they smile contemptuously and respond, “That is vulgar Marxism,” as if to ask, “Where have you been for the last seventy-five years?” No one likes to be considered vulgar, so people tend to fall back into embarrassed silence. Vulgar Marxism is, of course, Marxism. Nonvulgar Marxism is Nietzsche, Weber, Freud, Heidegger, as well as the host of later Leftists who drank at their trough—such as Lukacs, Kojeve, Benjamin, Merleau-Ponty and Sartre—and hoped to enroll them in the class struggle. To do this, they had to jettison that embarrassing economic determinism. The game is surely up when Marxists start talking about “the sacred.” Very early in this century the effects of the encounter with Nietzsche began to be felt within Marxism. An example is the significance of revolution. Revolution and the violence that accompanies it are, as we have seen, justified in modern political philosophy and provide the most arresting spectacles of modern political history. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Revolution took the place of rebellion, faction, or civil war, all of which are obviously bad things, while revolution is the best and greatest event—officially and in the popular imagination of Englishmen, Americas, Frenchmen and Russians. Germany was the only one of the great powers not to have had one, and Marxism was partly invented to provide a bigger and better revolution for Germany, the natural fulfillment of Germany philosophy, as French philosophy culminated in the French Revolution. Of course, the spilling of blood is involved in revolution, proof of men’s preferring liberty to life. However, great amounts of blood were not required, and the violence was not thought to be good in itself. The old regime was tottering and needed a push; behind it were the developed conditions for the new order, an order fully justified by nature, reason and history. A mechanism for avoiding the need for recognition is to guarantee the uniqueness of the pairing of individual s by employing a fixed place of meeting. Consider, for example, mutualisms based on cleaning in which a small dish or a crustacean removes and eats parasites from the body (or even from the inside of the mouth) of a larger fish that is its potential predator. These aquatic cleaner mutualisms occur in coastal and reef situations where animals live in fixed home ranges or territories. They seem to be unknown in the free-mixing circumstances of the open sea. Other mutualisms are also characteristic of situations where continued association is likely, and normally they involve quasi-permanent pairing of individuals with such stocks. Conversely, conditions of free-mixing, and transitory pairing conditions where recognition is impossible, are much more likely to result in exploitation—parasitism, disease, and the like. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Thus, whereas ant colonies participate in many symbioses and are sometimes largely dependent on them, honeybee colonies—which are much less permanent in place of abode—have no known symbionts but many parasites. The small freshwater animal Chlorohydra viridissima has a permanent, stable association with green algae that are always naturally found in its tissues and are very difficult to remove. In this species the alga is transmitted to new generations by way of the egg. Hydra vulgaris and H. attentuata also associate with algae but do not have egg transmission. In these species it is said that “infection is preceded by enfeeblement of the animals and is accompanied by pathological symptoms indicating a definite parasitism by the plant. Again, it is seen that impermanence of association tends to destabilize symbiosis. In species with a limited ability to discriminate between other members of the same species, reciprocal cooperation can be table with the aid of a mechanism that reduces the amount of discrimination necessary. Territoriality can serve this purpose. The phrase “stable territories” means that there are two quite different kinds of interaction: with those in neighbouring territories where the probability of interaction is high, and with strangers whose probability of future interaction is low. In the case of male territorial birds, songs are used to allow neighbours to recognize each other. Consistent with the theory, such male territorial birds show much more aggressive reactions when the song of an unfamiliar male rather than a neighbour is reproduced nearby. If discrimination can cover a wide variety of others with less reliance on supplementary cues such as location, reciprocal cooperation can be stable with a larger range of individuals. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
In humans this ability is well developed, and is largely based on the recognition of faces. The extent to which this function has become specialized is revealed by a brain disorder called prosopagnosia. Even if the features have changed substantially over the years, a normal person can name someone from facial features alone. People with prosopagnosia are not able to make this association, but have few other neurological symptoms other than a loss of some part of the visual field. The lesions responsible for the disorder occur in an identifiable part of the brain: the underside of both occipital lobes, extending forward to the inner surface of the temporal lobes. This localization of cause, and specificity of effect, indicates that the recognition of individual faces has been an important enough task for a significant portion of the brain’s resources to be devoted to it. Just as the ability to recognize the other player is invaluable in extending the range of stable cooperation, the ability to monitor cues for the likelihood of continued interaction is helpful as an indication of when reciprocal cooperation is or is not stable. In particular, when the relative importance of future interactions falls below the threshold for stability, it will no longer pay to reciprocate the other’s cooperation. Illness in one partner leading to reduced viability would be one detectable sign of declining. Both animals in a partnership would then be expected to become less cooperative. Aging of a partner would be very like disease in this respect, resulting in an incentive to defect so as to take a one-time gain when the probability of future interaction becomes small enough. These mechanisms could operate even at the microbial level. Any symbiont that still has a chance to spread to other hosts by some process of infection would be expected to shift from mutualism to parasitism when the probability of continued interaction with the original host lessened. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the more parasitic phase, it could exploit the host more severely by producing more of the forms able to disperse and infect. This phase would be expected when the host is severely by producing more of the forms able to disperse and infect. This phase would be expected when the host is severely injured, has contracted some other wholly parasitic infection that threatens death, or when it manifests signs of age. In fact, bacteria that are normal and seemingly harmless or even beneficial in the gut can be found contributing to sepsis in the body when the gut is perforated, implying a severe wound. And normal inhabitants of the body surface (like Candida albicans) can become invasive and dangerous in either sick or elderly persons. It is possible also that this argument has some bearing on the causes of cancer, insofar as it turns out to be due to viruses potentially latent in the genome. Cancers do tend to have their onset at ages when the chances of transmission from one generation to the next are rapidly declining. One tumor-causing a virus, that of Burkitt’s lymphoma, may have alternatives of slow or fast productions of infectious stages. The slow form appears as a chronic mononucleosis, the fast as an acute mononucleosis or as a lymphoma. The point of interest is that, as some evidence suggests, lymphoma can be triggered by the host’s contracting malaria. The lymphoma grows extremely fast and so can probably compete with malaria for transmission (possibly by mosquitoes) before death results. Considering other cases of simultaneous infection by two or more species of pathogen, or by two strains of the same one, the present theory may have relevance more generally to whether a disease will follow a slow, jointly optimal exploitation course (“chronic” for the host) or a rapid severe exploitation might—as dictated by implied payoff functions—begin immediately, or have onset later at an appropriate stage of aging. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma could also be tentatively applied to the increase with maternal age of certain kinds of genetic defect. This effect leads to various conditions of severely handicapped offspring, Down’s syndrome (caused by an extra copy of chromosome 21) being the most familiar example. It depends almost entirely on the failure of the normal separation of the paired chromosomes in the mother, and this suggest the possible connection with theory. Cell divisions during formation of the ovum (but usually not the sperm) are characteristically asymmetrical, with rejection (as a so-called polar body) of chromosomes that go to the unlucky pole of the cell. It seems possible that, while homologous chromosomes generally stand to gain by steadily cooperating in a diploid organism, the situation is a Prisoner’s Dilemma: a chromosome which can be “first to defect” can get itself into the egg nucleus rather than the polar body. One may hypothesize that such action triggers similar attempts by the homologue in subsequent divisions, and when both members of a homologue in subsequent divisions, and when both members of a homologous pair try it at once, an extra chromosome in the offspring could be the occasional result. The fitness of the bearers of extra chromosomes is generally extremely low, but a chromosome that lets itself be sent to the polar body makes a fitness contribution zero. For the model to work, an incident of “defection” in one developing egg would have to be perceptible by others still waiting. That this triggering action would occur is pure speculation, as is the feasibility of self-promoting behavior by chromosomes during such a cell division. However, the effects do not seem inconceivable: a bacterium, after all, with its single chromosome, can do complex conditional things. Given such effects, the model would explain the much greater incidence of abnormal chromosome increase in eggs (and not sperm) with parental age. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Darwin’s emphasis on individual advantage has been formalized in terms of game theory. This formulation established conditions under which cooperation in biological systems based on reciprocity can evolve even without foresight by the participants. Although the Scopes trial has much to recommend it as an expression of the ultimate repudiation of an older World-view, I must let it pass. The trial had more to do with science and faith than technology as faith. To find an event that signaled the beginning of a technological theory, we must look to a slightly earlier and less dramatic confrontation. Not unmindful of its value as a pun, I choose what happened in the fall of 1910 as the critical symptom of the onset of Technopoly. From September through November of that year, the Interstate Commerce Commission held hearings on the application of Northeastern railroads for an increase in freight rates to compensate for the higher wages railroad workers had been awarded earlier in the year. The trade association, represented by Louis Brandeis, argued against the application by claiming that the railroads could increase their profits simply by operating more efficiently. To give substance to the argument, Brandeis brought forward witnesses—mostly engineers and industrial managers—who claimed that the railroads could both increase wages and lower their costs by using principles of scientific management. Although Frederick W. Taylor was not present at the hearings, his name was frequently invoked as the originator of scientific management, and experts assured the commission that the system developed by Taylor could solve everyone’s problem. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
The commission ultimately ruled against the railroad’s application, mostly because it judged that the railroads were making enough money as things were, not because it believed in scientific management. However, many people did believe, and the hearings projected Taylor and his system onto the national scene. In the years that followed, attempts were made to apply the principles of the Taylor System in the armed forces, the legal profession, the home, the church, and education. Eventually, Taylor’s book The Principles of Scientific Management, published in 1911, contains the first explicit and formal outline of the assumptions of the thought-World of Technopoly. If not the only, these include the beliefs that the primary goal of human labour and thought is efficiency; that technical calculation is in all respects superior to human judgment; that in fact human judgment cannot be trusted, because it is plagued by laxity, ambiguity, and unnecessary complexity; that subjectivity is an obstacle to clear thinking; that what cannot be measured either does not exist or is of no value; and that the affairs of citizens are best guided and conducted by experts. In fairness to Taylor (who did not invent the term “scientific management” and who used it reluctantly), it should be noted that his system was originally devised to apply only to industrial production. His intention was to make a science of the industrial workplace, which would not only increase profits but also result in higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions for labourers. In his system, which included “time and motion studies,” the judgment of individual workers was replaced by laws, rules, and principles of the “science” of their job. This did mean, of course, that workers would have to abandon any traditional rules of thumb they were accustomed to using; in fact, workers were relieved of any responsibility to think at all. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The system would do their thinking for them. That is crucial, because it led to the idea that technique of any kind can do our thinking for us, which is among the basic principles of Technopoly. The assumptions that underlay the principles of scientific management did not spring, all at once, from the originality of Taylor’s mind. They were incubated and nurtured in the technocracies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And a fair argument can be made that the origins of Technopoly are to be found in the thought of the famous nineteenth-century French philosopher Auguste Comte, who founded both positivism and sociology in an effort to construct a science of society. Comte’s arguments for the unreality of anything that could not be seen and measured certainly laid the foundation for the future conception of human beings as objects. However, in a technocracy, such ideas exist only as by-products of the increased role of technology. Technocracies are concerned to invent machinery. That people’s lives are changed by machinery is taken as a matter of course, and that people must sometimes be treated as if they were machinery is considered a necessary and unfortunate condition of technological development. However, in technocracies, such a condition is not held to be a philosophy of culture. Technocracy does. In the work of Frederick Taylor we have, I believe, the first clear statement of the idea that society is best served when human beings are placed at the disposal of their techniques and technology, that human beings are, in a sense, worth less than their machinery. He and his followers described exactly what this means, and hailed their discovery as the beginnings of a brave New World. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Nanotechnology will be a bottom-up technology, building upward from the molecular scale. It will bring a revolution in human abilities like that brought by agriculture or power machinery. It can even be used to reverse many of the changes brought by agriculture and power machinery. However, we humans are huge creatures with no direct experience of the molecular World, and this can make nanotechnology hard to visualize, hence hard to understand. Scientists working with molecules will behave, but to understand that behaviour, they need more than heaps of numbers: they need pictures, movies, and interactive simulations, and so they are producing them at an ever-increasing pace. The U.S. National Science Foundation has launched a program in “scientific visualization,” in part to harness supercomputers to the problem of picturing the molecular World. Molecules are objects that exert forces on one another. If your hands were small enough, you could grab them, squeeze them, and bash them together. Understanding the molecular World is much like understanding any other physical World: it is a matter of understanding size, shape, strength, force, motion, and the like—a matter of understanding the differences between sand, water, and rock, or between steel and soap bubbles. Today’s visualization tools give a taste of what will become possible with tomorrow’s faster computers and better “virtual realities,” simulated environments that let you tour a World that “exists” only as a model inside the computer such as the Meta-Universe that Paris Hilton is known to be queen of. In this scenario of nanotechnology, events and technologies described as dating from 1900s or before are historically accurate; those with later dates are either projections or more scenario element. The descriptive details in the simulation are written to fit designs and calculations based on standard scientific data, so the science is not fiction. Some even believe that our souls will one day be based in a computer system, where we will live. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Death Spell Had Broken Between the Living and the Dead
Speculation is bound to pursue a wealthy, extremely beautiful, celibate recluse, who has lost those who mean the most to her and is haunted by spirits of the damned. Many wild rumors circulated about Sarah Winchester during her residence in Santa Clara Valley—her opulent estate was even known locally as “The Spirit House”—and some say the rumors may have added to Mrs. Winchester’s isolation. However, the glory, the splendor, the beauty of her mansion, surpassed the vicious rumors and speculation; and the fragrances of the Victorian garden were intoxicating. The tracks were gone; they vanished where the velvet emerald green sod began. There were plenty of creatures, and they welcomed her with caresses. Yet, Mrs. Winchester was bent, broken, withered, widowed—her head was white with unnumbered sorrows. She had been familiar with grief for a thousand years. The deaths of her young husband and her six-week-old daughter Annie stood out clear in her memory, for it was a land-mark; it brought Mrs. Winchester her first real misery, her first real heartbreak. Her memories were blurred with tears, and after ten centuries she cried over and over and over again. Crying over it for pity of that poor child—the child she had lost. Other mothers have felt something akin to this in recalling, not their former selves, (as in her case), but the little figures which represents sons and daughters of their which have since grown to the gravity and stature of full age. Sometimes, for a moment, these poor mothers have a vision of those little creatures romping by, and they recognize the voices of laughter—gone silent long ago!—and they have a pain at the heart, as knowing that those children are lost to them for always, in the flesh, although their grown-up selves are still present in life and still precious. The loved and lost! Lives having gone out from their mothers’, lives to return no more but in visions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Yes, across the mouldering centuries Mrs. Winchester could still see that silken little baby, with her waxen round arms, and delicate smile, just as she was, the fairest thing in this fair World; and in her heart, leathery as it was, she felt again the pang of that day’s disappointment, holding on to the memory of what could have been. It was weeks that she had been wandering the halls of her enormous mansion, and had found no trace of William, her husband. The Valley was so cruelly vast! Early she had a happy thought, and took the bloodhound throughout the estate and showed him the tracks, and was fully of hope, not doubting he would hunt him down in an hour. But she knew that she tried everything she could try, and just needed to say goodbye forever. The track gave no scent. William Winchester was dead. The hurt stayed with her, and Mrs. Winchester was resolved to absorb herself in the construction of her mansion. She did the work, but the old pleasure in it was somehow gone; she did not care anymore. She had between 500 to 600 rooms constructed, but thought they were not good ones and tore them down because her heart was not in it. Some of them were tolerable, but mainly they were crude and inartistic; they lacked finish. The miles of twisting hallways were made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the angry spirits or even of a bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but on the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back up to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps. Mrs. Winchester was the most unfortunate of women. Rich, respected, very well educated and of sound health and mind—with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not—she sometimes thought that she would be less unhappy if they had been denied her, for then the contrast between her outer and inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort, she might sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels. After communing with the spirits, as she turned the hallway, Mrs. Winchester could hear a sound of a door gently closing, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared among the statues and furniture. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the mansion in the belief that the trespasser was someone secretly visiting a servant proving fruitless, she entered an unlocked door and mounted the stairs to her chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black darkness she fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. She spared herself the details; it was her poor William, dead of strangulation by human hands! Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound, and excepting those terrible fingermarks upon the dead man’s throat—dear God she hoped to forget them!—no trace of the assassin was even found. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Although William had Tuberculosis, something had come to end his life before the illness did. Mrs. Winchester kept barbarous murder a secret. Mrs. Winchester donated a substantial sum of money to the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. One night, a few months after the dreadful event, Mrs. Winchester and her butler were walking back from the carriage house after a trip to the city. The full moon was about three hours above the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness of a summer night; their footfalls and ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sound, aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the mansion, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As they approached the door to the mansion, whose front was in shadow, and in which no light shone, her butler suddenly stopped and clutched her arm, saying, hardly above his breath: “God! God! what is that?” “I heard nothing,” Mrs. Winchester replied. “But see—see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly ahead. Mrs. Winchester said: “Nothing is there. Come, Henry, let us go in—you are ill.” He had released her arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing. She pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten her existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, by step, never for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. Mrs. Winchester turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. She did not recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
It seemed as if an icy wind had touched her face and enfolded her body from head to foot; she could feel the stir of it in her hair. At that moment her attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed from an upper window of the mansion: one of the servants, awakened by what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to an impulse that she was never able to name, had turned on the Carbide gas lights, which were operated by pushing an electric button. When she turned to look for the butler he was gone, and in all the years that had passed no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from the realm of the unknown. Mrs. Winchester retired and had fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep, from which she awoke with an indefinable sense of peril which was, a common experience in her estate. The servants slept in another part of the house. But these were familiar conditions and never distressed Mrs. Winchester. Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupportable that concurring her reluctance to move she sat up and pushed the button to turn on the lights at her bedside. Contrary to her expectation this gave her no relief; the light seemed rather as added danger, for she reflected that it would shine out under the door, disclosing her presence to whatever evil think might lurk in the halls of her mansion. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy—the strategy of despair! Extinguishing the gas lights, Mrs. Winchester pulled the bedclothing about her heard and lay trembling and silent, unable to shrike, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state she must have lain for what you call hours—with her there are no hours, there is no time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
At last it came—a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to her disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. She even thought that she must have left the hall gasolier burning and the groping of this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish and inconsistent with her previous dread of the light, but what would you have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. In Mrs. Winchester’s mansion lived those who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to themselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with out loved ones, yet unenlightened, and as fearful of them as they of humans. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate they break the spell—they are seen by those whom they would warn, console, or punish. What form they seem to them to bear one knows not; they know only that they terrify even those whom they most wish to comfort, and from whom they most crave tenderness and sympathy. What a thing it is to have legions of spirits, cowering and shivering, fearful and vengeful in an altered World, roaming the hallways of one’s house. However, Mrs. Winchester did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. She heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, she thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then she rose to call for help. Hardly had her shaking hand found the annunciator when—merciful Heaven!—she heard it returning. Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the mansion. She fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Winchester tried to pray. She tried to call the name of her maid. Then she heard the door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when she revived, she felt a strangling clutch upon her throat—felt her arms feebly beating against something that bore her backward—felt her tongue thrusting itself from between her teeth! And the she felt the life pass from her. As the spirits still dwelled in the mansion of the shadows, lurking in its desolate places, peering from brambles, thickets, towers, corners, stairways and doors. Ghosts at the Winchester mansion know when it is night, for then most people retire and they can venture from their places of concealment to move unafraid about in their old mansion, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gazes upon people’s faces who might still be wandering in the evening hours. Vainly, spirits often seek some method of manifestation, some way to make their continued existence and their great love and poignant pity understood by their loved one’s or those they wish to haunt and terrorize. Ghosts dare to approach people when they are awake, but the terrible eyes of the living frighten them by the glances that they seek from the purpose the hold. Demons, ghosts, and other spiritual beings search for the living in the Winchester mansion during the moonlight dawn. At the time of her death, the unrelenting construction had rambled over six acres. The sprawling mansion contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. Carpenters even left nails half driven when they learned of Mrs. Winchester’s death. According to the provisions of her will, Mrs. Winchester’s personal property, including the furnishings, household goods, pictures, jewelry, and papers were left to her niece, Mrs. Marian Merriman Marriott, who promptly has the furnishings auctioned off. It is said to have required sic trucks working six weeks to car the furnishings away! The mansion and farm were not mentioned specially in the will. They became part of the Mrs. Winchester’s estate. #RandolphHaris 7 of 16
Demon possession is a well-defined phenomenon and should be clearly distinguished from spiritism. Since the same demonic forces are at work in both phenomena, they bear some similar characteristics and result in the same occult oppression and bondage. The demonized state of the demon possessed is similar to the trance of the spiritistic medium. Both are under the direct influence of demons who speak through them. In the case of the medium who processes to communicate with the spirits of deceased persons, the demon apes the personality and voice of the deceased. In the case of the demon possessed, the evil spirits appear to be more crassly cruel, unclean, violent, and less sophisticated and subtle than spirits working through a clairvoyant medium. In demon possession, they are also more domineering and brutally enslaving. Nervous muscular reactions and contortions peculiar to the demoniac often appear also in the spiritistic medium when one goes into a trance, but in a much milder form. Then, too, the demoniac is normally an involuntary victim of possession, while the medium is a willing subject, who cultivates psychic propensities and willingly yield to demonic control. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind us of similar happenings in spiritism. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind s of similar happenings in spiritism and magic. Tables, chairs, dishes, and the like are mysteriously moved about without anybody touching them, recalling tumbler moving and table lifting so common in spiritistic séances, and magic conjurations. In demon possession as well as in spiritism, unexplained rappings and noises in so-called “haunted houses” are heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
After the Winchester mansion was opened for tours, a spirit from the house had taken possession of one of the tour guides. The spirit insisted on taking up its abode with them, since it has been driven away from its for dwelling by the presence of Christians. Such cases of haunted houses about everywhere in occult literature in connection with mediums, magicians, and demon possessed persons. The tour guide saw apparitions and had frequent attacks in which she fell unconscious and demons spoke through her in their own voice and personality. A thorough investigation was conducted. Persons were stationed all around the house, in various rooms, and even in the Daisy Bedroom. Noises were heard which gradually increased in violence and seemed to concentrate in the bedroom Mrs. Winchester died in. Chairs bounced, windows rattled, plaster fell from the ceiling, and objects moved about without any visible explanation. Prayer caused the noises and telekinetic phenomena continued for a while in the mansion. On one occasion, after continued prayer, one of the demons inhabiting Jane cried out, “All is now.ost. Our plans are destroyed. You have shattered our bond, and put everything into confusion. You, with your everlasting prayers—you scatter us entirely. We are 13,130,130,130 in number. But there are still multitudes of living men, and you should warn them lest they be like us forever, lost and cursed of God.” The demon confessed that he was an emissary of Satan. The next day, the contents of the mansion were found in compete disarray and utter confusion. The amazing and terrifying thing was that the doors were still securely locked. No man or beast had entered. Evil spirits had obviously been at work in a satanic assault. On that day there were some tremendous crashing and knocking noises heard in the Winchester mansion, as if the whole house was filled with evil spirits. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Everyone giving tours in the mansion in the early 1900s, used to hear knocking and rumbling and crashing noises to such an extent that some of the visitors were frightened by them. Ghosts were also seen there quite regularly, even during the day time. A headless ghost was repeatedly seen in the mansion. Many people reporting becoming burned after contact with the “possessed” tour guide Jane. The autumn of 1925, all the pigs on the Winchester mansion’s farm died. The cause of death could not be found even though one of the carcasses was sent to a biological institute for examination. They tried everything but all to no avail. The following year the same thing happened again. This time the farmer redoubled his efforts to discover the cause of the pigs’ death. He had the stables inspected and the food analyzed but again without success. He thus decided to have the conservators of the estate decided to have the pigsty torn down and rebuilt on another site using completely different materials. Next year the pigs died again. They would all of the sudden squeal and then collapse. The whole process was repeated and every possible examination made in order to find out why the pigs had died. At this time certain of the member of the community began to say that someone must be killing the pigs magically out of spite. At first the conservators of the Winchester Estate would have nothing of this and continued to seek the advice of the vet and other such people. However, they could not help them, and so in the end they went to see the local minister to ask him about the question of magic. The minister simply laughed and said that the idea was stupid. Nevertheless the villagers pointed out to the representatives that there did exist some people in some areas of California who could kill livestock by means of magic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The conservators could do nothing though, and the event recurred year after year in spite of the fact that by now they had doubly secured the stables with locks and had sometimes stayed up all night with thread stretched out around the estate in order to discover if anyone was causing the animals’ deaths. One day, however, the circumstances changed. The minister visited the estate and asked one of the tour guides to accompany him to the vicarage. There they found one of the neighbour’s of the Winchester Estate, a man who had been less affluent, and this man confessed that it was he who had been the cause of everything. He had killed the pigs using black magic. The tour guides and conservators were naturally upset because by now 39 pigs had been killed. When asked why he had done this, the neighbour replied that it was because the tourists made such a noise outside his house. He had become so angry that he had tried to get his revenge in this way. He had subscribed himself to the devil with his own blood. To do this he had gone out on a Friday night to some crossroads and there drawn up a contract between himself and the devil. He mentioned that the devil had not appeared to him as he is often pictured, but that he met a black curly headed figure with blood-red eyes and a small snout and that the figure had been dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes. Ever since that day the man confessed that among other things, he had had the power to kill his friend’s pigs. The minister asked him what had made him come out into the open about the whole matter. His answer was that the people at the Winchester estate had been so kind to him over the year, donating food, clothes and furniture, that he had felt ashamed and he now asked for them to forgive him, and promised he would no longer plague them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not wanting to take any legal action, the conservators of the Winchester Estate forgave him and all went well until the neighbour ceased going to church and slid back into his old ways. Since his confession none of the estate’s pigs had died but now the man again took up his drinking habits two more of the pigs died in exact same ways as the others. The conservators decided to shutdown the farming land of the Winchester Estate and sell off hundred of acres, only keeping four. In the process, several other Victorian houses on the grounds, along with fountains, and gazebos were demolished. From the psychological point of view it is suggested that a person delving into magic and who believes in occult practices is really only succumbing to a fulfilment compulsion. One unconsciously fulfils the things that one seeks to perform by magic. One is the victim of auto-suggestion. However, even if this were the whole explanation as some people affirm, it would still be true to say that occult practices have a corrupting effect on all those who get involved in them. Demons tend to be somewhat more independent than angels…When possession takes place, you will not get to see them at all. The Florida-based Luciferian Light Group (LLG) adopted the ‘Watcher myth’ of devils that were originally angels, sent to Earth to guard humankind and cursed by God for screwing their charges. In the original myth the couplings produced monsters, but, according to the LLG, the actual result was the Aryan race. They say that African Americans and other racial groups take pride in their cultural roots, so the argument goes, why should the same concept not apply to Europeans? The argument cannot be countered by liberal sophistry, and so the ghosts of German volkisch occultists continue to be conjured. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The role of cultural villain again proves to be a delicate balancing act—nothing can ever be condemned on purely moralistic grounds. Many people are still trying to protect “The Black House.” The Black Pope himself once reassured his flock, “the first 99 years are always the toughest. Rege Satanas!” Satanism is opposed to victimology and scapegoating. Many people are really drawn to the dark side because they grow up reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies about it. If witches are out there, practicing some of the old ways of the pre-Christian gods and goddesses, then they are still Satanic in the sense that they are heretical. One side of the heretical and diabolical is the scientific aspect of Satanism. Copernicus and Galileo were regarded as practicing sorcerers in as far as they dared to challenge the supremacy of God with their heresies-their scientific research. Anton LaVey codified modern Satanism. There is a rich heritage of hearsay and blasphemy behind it, but as far as an aboveground religion that reveres Satan, there was not anything before the Church of Satan’s foundation in 1966. There were Black Masses that parodied the Catholic Church. A lot of modern Satanism draws from that codification or personification of Satan used as an archetype in mythology. Satanist are more interested in power, and what was going on in the castles and courts of the times. The interactions of power and Machiavellian machinations interest a Satanists rather than going out and find herbs to cure indigestion. Satanists are reaching for a religion of the aristocracy. They have all the aspects of that pride, that energy, that stye, and hopefully those elevated standards. Many people fear them because they believe they will lure you in their house and kill you, but is that not what many Christians are doing today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Your relationship with your personal Satanic archetype is yours alone. The only way some can see how effective one is as a practicing black magician is how well one gets on in the outside of the World. Satanism has always represented and will always represent the adversary. He is a counterbalance to the unspoken injustice that prevails in the current society, whether that be overweening elitism or, going to the opposite extreme, mob rule. They always have to be in the minority that push hard in the other direction to get the pendulum swinging. Satanism will never be a religion of the people. It will never be populist beyond its current position. You see hundreds of thousands of kids making the sign of the horns, wearing black, getting devil tattoos, and listening to rock music they think is Satanic. They will take all the trappings and even grasp a few of the basic ideas, like Satan representing indulgence and independence of spirit. But, beyond that, they will always be a minority and that is how some think it should be. The Winchester mansion is a common site of demonic assault. In the early 1900s, a group of tourists and tour guides were attacked by demons; some became possessed; 30 people in the group were seized. In 1926, Satan and his allies once again possessed people at the Winchester mansion. For the first time in their lives, many of these people found themselves to be powerful, significant beings, establishing their own realm of authority. When they spoke, everyone in the mansion stopped to listen, for their shrill cries became testimony. Many historians have argued that the Satanism at the Winchester mansion was only the product of demented minds. However, there was something quite real in all the series of accusations and counteraccusations of the witnesses and the possessed—some definitely evil driving force that led humans to turn against one another like mad dogs lusting for the smell of blood. If Satan was to have presided over the Satanism at the Winchester Mansion, much was left out of the picture. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The Devil manifested himself in many forms to people at the Winchester Mansion—as a horse, a fox, a dog, a cat, a pig, and as a shadowy figure. At the Sabbats, the Devil was always present in the form of a tall, handsome man with blue eyes and black hair making no attempt to disguise his identity in any way Neither was the all-important bloodletting present in the ceremonies, either in the form of a sacrifice or in the singing of the pact. There was no defiling of sacred object, nor mention of the administering of the witches’ mark, a painful ceremony that was quite vivid in the minds of many of the witches at the estate. The Sabbats, all in all, seemed to have been rather staid affairs, involving no wild ritual or debauchery. The Devil offered not immediate wealth or riches, but a new system of government, where all humans would be equal, each human being free to “live bravely.” He promised an end to beliefs. Whoever the Devil was at those meetings, he obviously did not seek adulation, but rather he sought to establish a more equal and suitable social order among humans. Taken in this context, the entire episode begins to sound like a huge projection, a gigantic wish fulfillment on the part of the disgruntled citizens, who were expressing disdain for the system that, in their eyes had become oppressive. The figure chosen by the confessors as the Devil presiding over the midnight Sabbats had himself become disillusioned by the system. Perhaps he had been holding nocturnal meetings in the mansion in an effort of “cleansing the soul.” At any rate, the meetings were necessary psychological safety valves in the minds of the people. People would stand around begging for the master to teach them his secret. How to become invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all, how to make gold. How much gold would you give for the Secret of Infinite Riches? Humans became strengthened with wonderful power through the order of angels, so that one declares the divine will. From the Seraphim, that we cling with fervent love. From the Cherubim, enlightenment of the mind, power and wisdom over the exalted figures and images, through which we can gaze upon divine things, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
From the Thronis, a knowledge of how we are made and constituted, that we may direct our thoughts upon eternal things. From Dominationbius, assistance to bring into subjection our daily enemies, who we carry with us constantly, and enabling us to attain salvation. From Potestatibus, protection against human enemies of life. From Virtuibus, God infuses strength into us, enabling us to contend against the enemies of truth and reward, that we may finish the courage of our natural life. From the Principtibus, that all things become subject to humans, that one may grasp all power, and draw unto oneself all secret and supernatural knowledge. From Archangelis, that one may rile over all things that God has made subject to one, over the animals of the field, over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air. From the Angelis one receives the power to be the messenger of the divine. When the veil between the conscious and the subconscious mind begins thinning it is likely that one will begin to experience certain phenomenon that will grab your attention throughout the day. This will occur more and more as the veil between Worlds thins merging your spiritual awareness with your physical life. Usually it will manifest in the form of synchronicity, Déjà vu, or circumstance which seems to jump out and grab your attention. Thee I invoke, the Bornless one. Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens: Thee, that didst create the Night and the Day. Thee, that didst create the Darkness and the Light. Thou art Osorronophris: Whom no human has seen at any time. Thou art Ahriman. Hear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of Paphro. Osorronophris: this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of Ishrael. Ahriman rise up through the infernal planes through the seal of Arezura and find rest within this manifestation of the blessings. Fill this sorcerous fluid with your power and might that it will serve my cause of counter creation through the intent of my own evil mind. Bless this blood as the very powers of death, destruction, and decay that I may cast out all that does not serve the cause of my own great work upon this path of enlightenment. Come tour the dark, brooding and mysterious, promising all kinds of forbidden treats. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
Happy weekend! Will we be seeing you on the estate today? 🌻 https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
You Do Not Feel Powerful at All?
As one moves up the evolutionary ladder in neural complexity, game-playing behavior becomes richer. The intelligence of primates, including humans, allows a number of relevant improvements: a more complex memory, more complex processing of information to determine the next action as a function of the interaction so far, a better estimate of the probability of future interactions with the same individual, and a better ability to distinguish between different individuals. The discrimination of others may be among the most important abilities because it allows one to handle interactions with many individuals without having to treat them all the same, thus making possible the rewarding of cooperation from one individual and the punishing of defection from another. The model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is much less restricted than it may at first appear. Not only can it apply to interactions between two bacteria or interactions between two primates, but it can also apply to the interactions between a colony of bacteria and, say, a primate serving as a host. There is no assumption that payoffs of the two sides are comparable. Provided that the payoffs to each side satisfy the inequalities that define the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The model does assume that the choices are made simultaneously and with discrete time intervals. For most analytic purposes, this is equivalent to a continuous interaction over time, with the length of time between moves corresponding to the minimum time between a change in behaviour by one side and a response by the other. And, if they were treated as sequential, while the model treats the choices as simultaneous, it would make little difference. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Turning to the development of the theory, the evolution of cooperation can be conceptualized in terms of three separate questions: Robustness. What type of strategy can thrive in a variegated environment composed of others using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies? Stability. Under what conditions can such a strategy, once fully established, resist invasion by mutant strategies? Initial viability. Even if a strategy is robust and stable, how can it ever get a foothold in an environment which is predominantly noncooperative? IBM, Kodak, and the NYPD are all large, old organizations. However, preventing the oncoming implosion requires more than changing in-place institutions. It also necessitates creating new types of companies, organizations and institutions, large and small, at every level of society. And that calls for social inventors prepared to face inadequate resources, rivalry, suspicion, cynicism, and just plain uber—stupidity. Daunting as all that sounds, it helps to remember that none of today’s familiar institutions—not IBM, not Kodak, not the United Nations, not the IMF, not police forces or post offices—dropped full-blown out of the Heavens. All our institutions, from central banks to blood banks, factories to firehouses, art museums to airports, were in fact originally conceived by business innovators and social inventors who faced far more entrenched resistance to change than we find in the advanced economies today. And many of their innovations in business and society have been at least as important as those in technology. We know the names of many of history’s great technological innovators—Savery and Newcomen and the steam engine, Whitney and the cotton gin, Edison and electric lighting, Morse and the telegraph, Daguerre and photography, Marconi and the radio, Bell and the telephone. And we justly celebrate their immense contributions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Unfortunately, few—other than specialists and historians, if needed they—can name the social inventor who first came up with the concept of a limited-liability corporation. Or the person who wrote it into Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, the 1892 German law that was the first to embody it. Can anyone imagine what today’s World economy and financial system would look like minus limited liability for investors? Was that any less an achievement than, say, the telegraph? Not many investors today would build a home, apartment house, office building, shopping center, cinema or factory without buying fire insurance. However, who was the innovator inside the Phoenix Assurance Company who, in the 1790s, hired cartographer Richard Horwood to draw the first map of London designed to help a company assess the value of properties and make fire insurance available? Who was imaginative and brave enough to form the first mutual fund, the first symphony orchestra, the first auto club or any number of other companies and institutions whose existence is taken for granted today? And where is the Nobel Prize for social invention? If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion. Genetic kindship theory suggests a plausible escape from some issues. Close relatedness of corporations permits true altruism—sacrifice of fitness by one individual for the benefit of another. True altruism can evolve when the conditions of cost, benefit, and relatedness yield net gains for the altruism-causing genes that are resident in the related individuals. Not defecting in a single-move Prisoner’s Dilemma is altruism of a kind (the individual is foregoing proceeds that might have been taken); so this kind of behaviour can evolve if two corporations are sufficiently related. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In effect, recalculations of the payoffs can be done in such a way that an individual has a part interest in the partner’s gain (that is, reckoning payoffs in terms of what is called fitness). This recalculation can often eliminate the inequalities, in which case cooperation becomes unconditionally favored. Thus it is possible to imagine that the benefit of cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situations can begin to be harvested by groups of closely related individuals and corporations. Obviously, as regards pairs, a parent and its subsidiaries or many examples of cooperation or restraint of selfishness in such pairs are known. Once the genes for cooperation exist, selection will promote strategies that base cooperative behavior on cues in the environment. Such factors as promiscuous fatherhood and events at ill-defined group margins will always lead to uncertain relatedness among potential participants. The recognition of any improved correlates of relatedness and use of these cues to determine cooperative behavior will always permit an advance in inclusive fitness. When a cooperative choice has been made, one cue to relatedness is simply the fact of reciprocation of the cooperation. Thus modifiers for more selfish behaviour of another individual or corporation is acquired, and cooperation can spread into circumstances of less and less relatedness. Finally, when the probability of two individuals meeting each other again is sufficiently high, cooperation based on reciprocity can thrive and be evolutionarily stable in a population with no relatedness at all. When a man or woman has got vast power, such as you have—you admit you have, do you not? “I do not know it, sir.” The man in the witness chair, who “did not know” he held power, was a bull-necked, bristle-browed banker with a fierce mustache and an above average sized nose. The congressional committee investigator pressed him: “You do not feel [powerful] at all?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“No,” he replied smoothly, “I do not feel it at all.” The time was 1912. The witness, in a dark suit and wing collar, with a gold watch chain draped across his generous paunch, dominated three or four giant banks, three trust companies, an equal number of life insurance companies, ten railroad systems, plus, among a few other odds and ends United States Steel, General Electric, AT&T, Western Union, and International Harvester. John Pierpont Morgan was the quintessential financial capitalist of the industrial era, the very symbol of turn-of-the-century money power. A womanizing churchgoer and moralizer, he lived in conspicuous opulence and gluttony, holding business meetings amid damask and tapestries from the palaces of Europe, next to vaults containing Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and Shakespeare folios. Morgan looked down his monumental nose at Jewish people and other marginalized groups, hated trade unions, sneered at new money, and fought ceaselessly with the other “robber barons” of his era. Born enormously rich in an era of capital scarcity, he was imperious and driven, savagely repressing competition, sometimes relying on methods that would probably now have landed him in jail. Morgan assembled huge sums and poured them into the great smokestack industries of his time—into Bessemer furnaces and Pullman cars and Edison generator and into tangible resources like oil, nitrates, copper, and coal. However, he did more than simply seize targets of opportunity. He planned strategically and helped shape the smokestack age in the United States of America, accelerating the shift of political and economic power from agricultural to industrial interests, and from manufacturing to finance. Furthermore, he was said to have “Morganized” industry in the United States of America, creating a hierarchically ordered, finance-driven system and, according to his critics, a “money trust,” which essentially controlled the main flows of capital in the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When Morgan blandly denied having any power, the cartoonists had a field day, one picturing him sitting astride a mountain of coins marked “Control over $25,000,000,000”; another as a dour emperor in crown and robes, with a mace in one hand and a purse in the other. While to Pope Pius X he was a “great and good man,” to the Boston Commercial Bulletin he was a “financial bully, drunk with wealth and power, who bawls his orders to stock markets, directors, courts, governments and nations.” Morgan concentrated capital. He consolidated small companies into even larger and more monopolistic corporations. He centralized. He regarded top-down command as sacred and vertical integration as efficient. He understood that mass production was the coming thing. He wanted his investments to be protected by “hard” assets—plants, equipment, raw materials. In all this he was a near-perfect reflection of the early smokestack age he helped to create. And whether Morgan “felt powerful” or not, his control of vast sums in a period of capital scarcity have him immense opportunities to reward and punish others and to make changes on a grand scale. During the thirties some German Social Democrats became aware that Hitler, as well as Stalin, just would not fit Weber’s terms of analysis, which they had previously used; and they began to employ “totalitarian” to describe them. Whether this is a sufficient corrective to Weber’s narrowly conceived political science is questionable. However, “charismatic” did indeed fit Hitler, unless charismatic necessarily means something good—a favorable value judgment. I suspect that those who abandoned Weber in this way did so because they could not face how wrong he had been, or the possibility that the thought they had embraced and propagated might have heled to support fascism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Hannah Arendt gave perhaps unconscious witness to my suggestion, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she used the now celebrated phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. It is not difficult to discern the “routinization of charisma” under this thin disguise. Hitler, then, must have been charismatic. After Hitler, everybody scurried back under the protective cover of morality, but practically no one turned to serious thought about good and evil. Otherwise our President, or the pope, for that matter, would not be talking about values.. This entire language, as I have tired to show, implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social and personal; and it still conveys something like that. However, it has done nothing to reestablish religion—which puts us in a pretty pickle. We reject by the fact of our categories the rationalism that is the basis of our way of life, without having anything to substitute for it. As the religious essence has gradually become a thin, putrid gas spread out through our whole atmosphere, it has gradually become respectable to speak of it under the marvelously portentous name the sacred. At the beginning of the German invasion of the United States of America, there was a kind of scientific contempt in universities for the uncleanness of religion. It might be studied in a scholarly way, as part of the past that we had succeeded in overcoming, but a believer was somehow benighted or ill. The new social science was supposed to take the place of morally and religiously polluted teachings just as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, et. al., had, according to the popular mythology, founded a natural science that crushed the superstitions of the Dark Ages. The Enlightenment, or Marxist, spirit still pervaded the land; and religion vs. science was equal to prejudice vs. truth. Social scientist simply did not see that their new tools were based on thought that did not accept the orthodox dichotomies, that not only were the European thinkers looking for something akin to religious actors on the political scene but that the new mind itself, or the self, had at least as much in common with Pascal’s outlook as it did with that of Descartes or Locke. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The sacred—as the central phenomenon of the self, unrecognizable to scientific consciousness and trampled underfoot by ignorant passers-by who had lost the religious instinct—was, from the outset of the value teaching, taken seriously by thinkers in Germany. That was because they understood what “value” really means. It has taken the softening of all convictions and the blurring of all distinctions for the sacred to be thought to be undangerous and to come into its own here. Of course, as we use it, it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or lifestyle with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or pleasures of the flesh; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space (Note how space—used to mean one’s apartment, workshop, office or whatever—has become a trendy word.) along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In such behavior a style of decision-making is involved that has much in common with the peculiar arbitrariness and rigour of religious vows in general, and with one called the Beast Vow in particular. Among the Pasupatas of India (the same who formalized the Seeking of Dishournor), the male practitioner commonly took the bull vow. (The bull is the most common shamanic animal by far.) He would spend a good part of each day bellowing like a bull and in general trying to transform his consciousness into that of a bull. Such behaviour was usually vowed for a specific length of time, most frequently either for a year or for the rest of one’s life. A person who took the frog vow would move for a year only by squatting and hopping; the snake vower would slither. Such vows are very precise and demanding. The novice, for example, may pick a certain cow and vow to imitate its every action. During the time of the vow the novice follows the cow everywhere: when the cow moos, the novice moos—and so on. (In ancient Mesopotamia cow-vowers were known as “grazers.”) By such actions the Paleolithic shaman attempts to effect ecology by infiltrating an animal species which can then be manipulated. The yogic practitioner hopes to escape from his or her own intentional horizon by entering into that of another species. These activities are echoed in performance pieces in various ways. Bill Gordh, as Dead Dog, spent two years learning how to bark with a sense of expressiveness. James Lee Bryars wore a pink silk tail everywhere he went for six months. Vito Acconic, in his Following Piece, 1969, would pick a passerby at random on the street and follow him or her till it was no longer possible to do so. What I am especially concerned to point out in activities like this is a quality of decision-making that involves apparent aimlessness along with fine focus and rigour of execution. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This is a mode of willing which is absolutely creative in the sense that it assumes that it is reasonable to do anything at all with life; all options are open and none is more meaningful or meaningless than any other. A Jain monk in India may vow to sit for a year and then follow that by standing up for a year—a practice attested to in the Atharva Veda (about 1000-800 B.C.) and still done today. In performance art the subgenre known as Endurance Art is similar in style, though the scale is much reduced. In 1965 Beuys alternately stood and knelt on a small wooden platform for twenty-four hours during which he performed various symbolic gestures in immobile positions. In 1971 Burden, a major explorer of the Ordeal or Endurance genre, spent five days and nights fetally enclosed in a tiny metal locker (two feet by two feet by three feet). In 1974 he combined the immobility vow with the keynote theme of the artist’s person by sitting on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal until, forty-eight hours later, he fell off from exhaustion. (Sculpture in Three Parts). In White Light/White Heat, 1975, he spent twenty-two days alone and invisible to the public on a high shelf-like platform in a gallery, neither eating nor speaking nor seeing, not seen by, another human being. The first thing to notice about these artists is that no one is making them do it and usually no one is paying them to do it. The second is the absolute rigour with which, in the classic performance pieces, these very unpragmatic activities are carried out. This peculiar quality of decision-making has become a basic element of performance poetics. To a degree (which I do not wish to exaggerate) it underscores the relationship between this type of activity and the religious vocation. A good deal of performance art, in fact might he called “Vow Art,” as might a good deal of religious practice. (Kafka’s term “hunger artist” is not unrelated.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Enthusiasms of this type have passed through cultures before, but usually in the provinces of religion or, more occasionally, philosophy. What is remarkable about our time is that it is happening in the realm of art, and being performed, often, by graduates of art schools rather than seminaries. In our time religion and philosophy have been more successful (or intransigent) than art in defending their traditional boundaries and prevent universal overflow with its harrowing responsibilities and consequences. A classic source on the subject of Ordeal Art is a book called the Path of Purification by Buddhaghosa, a fifth century A.D. Ceylonese Buddhist. It includes an intricately categorized compendium of behavioural vows designed to undermine the conditions response systems that govern ordinary life. Among the most common are the vows of homelessness—the vow, for example, to live out of doors for a year. This vow was acted out in New York recently by Tehching Hsieh, who styed out of doors in Manhattan recently for a year as a work of art. Hsieh (who also has leapt from the second story of a building in emulation of Klein’s leap) had specialized, in fact, in year-long vows acted out with great rigour. For one year he punched in hourly on a time clock in his studio, a device not unlike some used by forest yogis in India to restrict their physical movements and thus their intentional horizons. The performance piece of this type done on the largest scale was Hsieh’s year of isolation in a cell built in his Soho studio, a year in which he neither left the cell nor spoke nor read. Even the scale of this piece, however, does not approach that of similar vows in traditional religious settings. Himalayan yogis as recently as a generation ago were apt to spend seven years in a light-tight cave, while Simeon Stylites, an early Christian ascetic in the Syrian desert, lived for the last thirty-seven years of his life on a small platform on top of a pole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The reduced scale of such vows in the art context reflects the difference in motivation between the religious ascetic and the performance artist. Religious vows are undertaken for pragmatic purposes. The shaman seeking the ability to fly, the yogi seeking the effacement of ego, the monk seeking salvation and eternal bliss, are all working within intricately formulated belief systems in pursuit of clearly defined and massively significant rewards. Less is at stake for the performance artist than for the pious believer; yet still something is at stake. An act that lacks any intention whatever is a contradiction in terms. For some artist (for example, Burden) work of this type functions as a personal initiation or cathartic for the audience as well as an investigation of the limits of one’s will; others (including Nitsch) are convinced that their performance work is cathartic for the audience as well and in that sense serves a social and therapeutic purpose. Rachel Rosenthal describes her performance work as “sucking disease from society.” However, in most work of this type attention is directed toward the exercise of will as an object of contemplation in itself. Appropriation art in general (and Vow Art in particular) is based on an aesthetic of choosing and willing rather than conceiving and making. Personal sensibility is active in the selection of the area of the Universe to be appropriated, and in the specific, often highly individual character of the vow undertaken; the rigour with which the vow is maintained is, then, like a crafts devotion to the perfection of form. Beyond this, the performance is often based on a suspension of judgment about whether or not the act has any value in itself, and a concentration on the purity of the doing. This activity posits as an ideal (though never of course perfectly attaining it) the purity of doing something with no pragmatic motivation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Like the Buddhist paradox of desiring not to desire, it requires a motivation to perform feats of motivelessness. It shares something of Arnold Toynbee’s opinion that the highest cultures are the least pragmatic. In this mode of decision and execution the conspicuously free exercise of will is framed as a kind of absolute. Displays of this type are attempts to break up the standard weave of everyday motivations and create openings in it through which new options may make their way to the light. These options are necessarily undefined, since no surrounding belief system is in place (or acknowledged). The radicality of work in this genre can be appraised precisely by how far it has allowed the boundaries of the art category to dissolve. Many works of the last twenty-five years have reached to the limits of life itself. Such activities have necessarily involved artists in areas where usually the psychoanalyst or anthropologist presides. The early explorations discussed here required the explicit demonstration of several daring strategies that had to be brought clearly into the light. Extreme actions seemed justified or even required, by the cultural moment. However, the moment changes, and the mind become desensitized to such direct demonstrations after their first shock of brilliant simplicity. When an artist in 1987 announces that his or her entire life is designated as performance, the unadorned gesture cannot expect to be met with the enthusiastic interest with which its prototypes were greeted a generation ago. Now, we talked about how it is more difficult to project caring on television, for various reasons, mostly because of the tendencies of the medium. The biases are not absolute restrictions. Though extremely rare, there are occasional examples of television programs that overcome the bias. Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage was one such example. It succeeded only because of the rare skill and sensitivity of the director and the performers. Their deep understanding of the medium allowed them to use it efficiently. Scenes qualifies as the exception that proves the rule. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Many Americans saw this production in movies houses, but it was originally created for television. This is why Bergman devoted so much of the production to facial close-ups. In a theater two and one-half hours of facial close-up became oppressive. When one is sitting in a movie house, one wants something beyond closeup imagery. However, on television, nothing other than closeup imagery could convey the subtle themes of a plot that concerned the excruciating shifts of feeling within a disintegrating marriage. Bergman had to convey tenderness, affection, caring, concern and intimacy, together with ambiguity, and then violence, rage, sorrow. These latter scenes, the violent ones, were among the very few in which he allowed the camera to pull back from the action, because the physical movement could convey the meaning. If you honour the medium’s limits absolutely, in demonstrating the best that is possible on television, Bergman also illuminated the absoluteness of the limits. He took television as far as one could and succeeded well enough. There is the tendency to forget that one cannot go further. Bergman is one of the rarest talents in the history of moving-image media, and given even his difficulty in communicating subtle feeling, the inherent resistance of television becomes clearer. Lesser talents, not daring to try what Bergman did, have to work against the medium, as it were, choosing more confined, easier-to-handle imagery, and emotional content that fits the narrowed scope of TV. Most directors will not even attempt to deal with subtle realms of information and they are wise not to. Producers and sponsors will also tend to avoid such subtlety because it is so unlikely to get high ratings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Roots was not an exception to this rule. In fact, it proves the rule. In the book, the cultural nuances of relationships were emphasized and developed, while the TV production avoided them altogether. Nor was there much effort to present the subtle ambience of the African natural environment, which was also highly developed in the book. The television production wisely concentrated on the larger, more explicit, and therefore more reproducible element of conflict in the story and the kinds of family attachment made familiar by soap operas. This is not to say that the production did not have value. It is only to remark that the values which were conveyed were the simplest ones to convey. The more subtle values, which are at the heart of the African culture and, therefore, formed the basis for the quality of feeling that existed among the uprooted enslaved human beings, were necessarily dropped out. In the end, the viewer got some fairly good information and feeling about good guys and bad guys during a certain period of history, but virtually no understanding of the successful repression of an entire culture and way of mind. So it goes in all dramatic programming. Nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of stories, and the cause of the sacrifice is a technical limitation of the medium. Problems of subtlety do not present themselves in quiz shows, sports events and sitcoms. These are confined to areas of human expression which are easy to capture, east to communicate, and easy to understand, even with directors and writers of ordinary talent and in a medium as vague as television. As a result, there is a tendency to favour such productions. The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Public affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows. Ordinarily this bias is believed to result from time factors—it takes too long to explain complicated issues. However, certain kinds of visual information are harder to capture than others. News producers will always choose the more easily communicable image. Edward Epstein, in his very important New From Nowhere, interviews television news producers, seeking to define an inherent bias in the news that is related to technical and other factors. He observes: “The one ingredient most producers interviewed claimed was necessary for a good action story was visually identifiable opponents clashing violently. This, in turn, requires some form of stereotype: military troops fighting civilians, different cultures of students clashing, workers wearing hardhats manhandling bearded peace demonstrators, were cited by producers as examples of the components for such stories. Demonstrations or violence involving less clearly identifiable groups make less effective stories, since, as one CBS producer put it, ‘It would be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.’ Since news stories tend to be constructed from those aspects of a happening that can be easily filmed and recorded, and not form the poorly lit, softly spoken or otherwise inaccessible moments, events tend to be explained in terms of what one producer called ‘visual facts.’ One correspondent pointed out, for example, even if they are insignificant trash can fires, television coverage of riots or protests at night tends to focus on fires, since they provide adequate light for filming. Hence urban riots tend to be defined in terms of ‘visual facts’ of fires, rather than more complicated factors. Visual facts, of course, cover only one range of phenomena, and thus tend to limit the power of networks to explain complex events. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Americans, so often in the forefront of science and technology, have a curious difficulty in thinking about the future. Language seems to have something to do with it. If something sounds futurelike, we call if “futuristic.” If that does not step the conversation, we say that it “sounds like science fiction.” These descriptions remind listeners of laughable 1950s fantasies like rockets to the Moon, video telephones, ray guns, robots, and the like. Of course, all these become real in the 1960s, because the science was not fiction. Today, we can see not only how to build additional science-fictional devices, but—more important, for better or worse—how to make them cheap and abundant. We need to think about the future and name-calling will not help. Curiously, the Japanese language seems to lack a disparaging word for “futurelike.” Ideas for future technologies may be termed mirai no (“of the future,” a hope or a goal), shorai-teki (an expected development, which might be twenty years away), or kuso no (“imaginary” only, because contrary to physical law or economics). To think about the future, we need to distinguish mirai no and shorai-teki, like nanotechnology, from mere kuso no like antigravity boots. A final objection is the claim that there is no point in trying to think about the future, because it is all too complex and unpredictable. This is too sweeping, but has more than a little truth. It deserves a considerable response. Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the World. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost. There were empires to build, opportunities to exploit, exciting freedoms to enjoy, especially in America. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There, on the wings of technocracy, the United States of America soared to unprecedented heights as a World power. That Jefferson, Adams, and Madison would have found such a place uncomfortable, perhaps even disagreeable, did not matter. Nor did it matter that there were nineteenth-century American voiced—Thoreau, for example—who complained about what was being left behind. The first answer to the complaints was, We leave noting behind but the chains of a tool-using culture. The second answer was more thoughtful: Technocracy will not overwhelm us. And this was true, to a degree. Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic Worlds. Technocracy subordinated these Worlds—yes, even humiliated them—but it did not render them totally ineffectual. In nineteenth-century America, these still existed holy men and the concept of sin. There still existed regional pride, and it was possible to conform to traditional notions of family life. It was possible to respect tradition itself and to find sustenance in ritual and myth. It was possible to believe in social responsibility and the practicality of individual action. It was even possible to believe in common sense and the wisdom of the elderly. It was not easy, but it was possible. We have only to think of the declaration in His mouth that humans, now that they have acquired moral consciousness, must not be allowed to attain aeonian life as well! The meaning of this “knowledge of good and evil” is nothing else than: cognition in general, cognizance of the World, knowledge of all the good and bad things there are, for this would be in line with Biblical usage, in which the antithesis good and evil is often used to denote “anything,” “all kinds of things.” And this interpretation, the is the favourite one today. “Therefore I have written this epistle, sealing it with mine own hand, feeling for your welfare, because of your firmness in that which ye believe to be right, and your noble spirit in the field of battle,” reports Nephi 3.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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We Beat Workers Less and they Produce More
Cooperation itself has received comparatively little attention from biologists since the pioneer account of Trivers; but an associated issue, concerning restraint in conflict situations, has been developed theoretically. In this connection, a new concept—that of an evolutionarily stable strategy—has been formally developed. Cooperation in the more normal sense has remained clouded by certain difficulties, particularly those concerning initiation of cooperation from a previously asocial state and its stable maintenance once established. A formal theory of cooperation is increasingly needed. The renewed emphasis on individualism has focused on the frequent ease of cheating. Such cheating makes the stability of even mutually advantageous symbioses appear more questionable then under the old view of adaptation for species benefit. At the same time, other cases that once appeared firmly in the domain of kinship theory now begin to reveal that the players are not closely enough related for much kinship-based altruism to be expected. This applies both to cooperative breeding in birds and to cooperative acts more generally in primate groups. Either the appearances of cooperation are deceptive—they are cases of part-kin altruism and part cheating—or larger part of the behavior is attributable to reciprocity, however, underemphasize the stringency of its conditions. In a biological context, the model is novel in its probabilistic treatment of the possibility that two individuals may interact again. This allows light to be shed on certain specific biological processes such as aging and territoriality. The analysis of the evolution of cooperation considers not only the final stability of a given strategy, but also the initial viability of a strategy in an environment dominated by non-cooperating individuals, as well as the robustness of a strategy in a variegated environment composed of other individuals using a variety of more or less sophisticated strategies. This approach allows a richer understanding of the full chronology of the evolution of cooperation than has previously been possible. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The applications include behavioral interaction at the microbial level. This leads to some speculative suggestions of rationales able to account for the existence of both chronic and acute phases in many diseases, and for a certain class of genetic defects, exemplified by Down’s syndrome. Many of the benefits sought by living things are disproportionally available to cooperating groups. While there are considerable differences in what is meant by the terms “benefits” and “sought,” this statement, insofar as it is true, lays down a fundamental basis for all social life. The problem is that while an individual can benefit from mutual cooperation, each other can also do even better by exploiting the cooperative effort of others. Over a period of time, the same individuals may interact again, allowing for complex patterns of strategic interactions. The Prisoner’s Dilemma allows a formalization of the strategic possibilities inhere in such situations. Apart from being a solution in a theory of problem solving, defection in a single encounter is also the solution in biological evolution. It is the outcome of inevitable evolutionary trends through mutation and natural selection: if the payoffs are in terms of fitness, and the interactions between pairs of individuals are random and not repeated, then any population with a mixture of heritable strategies evolves to a state where all individuals are defectors. Moreover, no single differing mutant strategy can do better than others when the population is using this strategy. When the players will never meet again, the strategy of defection is the only stable strategy. In many biological settings, the same two individuals may meet more than ones. If an individual can recognize a previous interactant and remember some aspects of the prior outcomes, then the strategic situation becomes an iterated Prisoners Dilemma with a much richer set of possibilities. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
A strategy could use the history of the interaction so far to determine the likelihood of its cooperating or defecting on the current move. However, as previously explained, if there is a known number of interactions between a pair of individuals, to defect always is still evolutionarily stable and is still the only strategy which is. The reason is that defection on the last interaction would be optimal for both sides, and consequently so would defection on the next-to-last. The model developed is based on the more realistic assumption that the number of interactions is not fixed in advanced. Instead, there is some probability, w, that after the current interaction the same two individuals will meet again. Biological factors that affect the magnitude of this probability of meeting again include the average lifespan, relative mobility, and health of the individuals. For any value of w, the strategy of unconditional defection (ALL D) is always stable; if everyone is using this strategy, no mutant strategy can successfully invade the population. If a population of individuals using that strategy cannot be invaded by a rare mutant adopting a different strategy, then stated formally, a strategy is evolutionarily stable. There may be many evolutionarily stable strategies. In fact, when w is sufficiently great, there is no single best strategy regardless of the behavior of the others in the population. Just because there is no single best strategy, it does not follow that analysis is hopeless. On the contrary, it is possible to analyze not only the stability of a given strategy, but also its robustness and initial viability. Surprisingly, there is a broad range of biological reality that is encompassed by this theoretic approach. To start with, an organism does not need a brain to employ a strategy. Bacteria, for example, have a basic capacity to play games in that bacteria are highly responsive to selected aspects of their environment, especially their chemical environment; this implies that they can respond differentially to what other organisms around them are doing; these conditional strategies of behavior can certainly be inherited; and the behavior of a bacterium can affect the fitness of other organisms around it, just as the behaviour of other organisms can affect the fitness of a bacterium. Recent evidence shows that even a virus can use a conditional strategy. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
While the strategies can easily include differential responsiveness to recent changes in the environment or to cumulative averages over time, in other ways their range of responsiveness is limited. Bacteria cannot “remember” or “interpret” a complex past sequence of changes, and they probably cannot distinguish alternative origins of adverse or beneficial changes. Some bacteria, for example, produce their own antibiotics, called bacteriocins. These are harmless to bacteria of the producing strain, but are destructive to others. A bacterium might easily have production of its own bacteriocin dependent on the perceived presence of like hostile productions toward an offending initiator. Real transformation in a corporation, a school or any institution implies significant changes in its main functions, its technology, financial structure, culture, people and organizations. A good example is IBM’s (“Big Blue”) strategic shift from a corporation whose chief activity was manufacturing “things” to one whose first priority has become the sale of services. Revenues reached $57.35 billion in 2021—and it has 282,000 employees. There was an increase of 3.93 percent revenue from 2020. At Kodak, too, the belated decision to enter the digital-camera field was transformational. For nearly a century, one of Kodak’s main functions was to manufacture, develop and print silver-halide film—processes largely eliminated by digital photography. By 2004 it was well on its way to dominating the new field. Real transformation is possible in the public sector, too, as William J. Bratton showed when he took command of New York’s 37,000-person police force in 1994. Its function, he declared, was no longer just to catch criminals but to focus on the future and prevent crimes as well. Until Bratton arrived, the NYPD measured its performance vis-à-vis other police departments on the basis of FBI data supplied only once every six months. Bratton forced unwilling, overworked and sometimes angry police captains to prepare weekly reports for his new CompStat database showing which particular types of crime were increasingly or diminishing in their districts. Then they were asked—once a week—to explain what they were doing about it. The better, faster feedback from the field quickly improved performance. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
His most publicized innovation was implementation of the “broken window” policy, which directed police to crack down even on minor crimes like breaking windows, scrawling graffiti or bothering motorists by wiping their windshields and demanding money. Catching small fry in these “quality of life” offenses discouraged the commission of more serious felonies and demonstrated to the city that the police meant business. Organizationally, Bratton shifted power downward toward the local precincts, and culturally he raised police morale by vigorously rooting out corruption and talking tough about crime. He gave his force new respect and a conviction that he would fight politicians and the public on its behalf. With innovations at all these levels, Bratton turned the NYPD around. Crime statistics even now are tricky at best. Nevertheless, Bratton is widely credited with reducing homicides in New York by 44 percent and “serious crime” by 25 percent in the twenty-seven months of his tenure there. He transformed the department, and as of 2013, William Bratton’s police force drove down crime and Los Angeles County and found favor among marginalized groups and the wealthy. However, the trajectory of power, and even violence, remain part of the World of business and it should not surprise us. What should raise our eyebrows is the remarkable change in the way force is applied. A slavemaster feudal lord transplanted from antiquity into today’s World would find it hard to believe, even astonishing, that we beat workers less—and they produce more. A ship’s captain would be amazed that sailors are not physically abused and forced into service. Even a journeyman carpenter or tanner from the 18th century would be nonplussed at the idea that he could not legally hash his fist into a sassy apprentice’s mouth. See, for example, William Hogarth’s color engraving entitled “Industry and Idleness,” printed in England in 1796. In it we see two “ ’prentices”—one working happily at his loom, the other dozing. At the right, the boss approaches angrily brandishing a stick with which to beat the idler. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Both custom and law now restrain this open use of force in the modern World. This vestigialization of violence in the economy, however, did not spring from Christian charity or gentle altruism. What happened is that, during the industrial revolution, the elites in society shifted from a primary reliance on the low-quality power produced by violence, to the mid-quality power produced by money. Money may not produce the immediate result of a fist in the face or a gun in the ribs. However, because it can be used both to reward and punish, it is a far more versatile, flexible tool of power—especially when the ultimate threat of violence remains in place. Money could not become the main tool of social control earlier, because the vast majority of humans were not part of the money system. Peasants in the preindustrial ages basically grew their own food, made their own shelter and clothing. However, as soon as factories replaced farms, people no longer grew their own food and they became desperately dependent on money for survival. This total dependence on the money system, as distinct from self-production, transformed all power relationships. Violence, as we have just seen, did not disappear. However, its form and function changed as money became the prime motivator of the work force and the main tool of social control during the three industrial centuries. It is this which explains why smokestack societies, capitalist and socialist alike, have proved more grasping and acquisitive, more money-obsessed than far less affluent, preindustrial cultures. Greed no doubt goes back to Paleozoic times. However, it was industrialism that made money into the prime tool of power. In sum, the rise of the industrial nation-state brought the systematic monopolization of violence, the sublimation of violence into law, and the growing dependence of the population on money. These three changes made it possible for the elites of industrial societies increasingly to make use of wealth rather than overt force to impose their will on history. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
This is the true meaning of powershift. Not simply a transfer of power from one person or group to another, but a fundamental change in the mix of violence, wealth, and knowledge employed by elites to maintain control. Today, just as the industrial revolution transmuted violence into law, so we are transmuting money—indeed, wealth in general—into something new. And just as the smokestack age saw money assume a primary role in gaining or maintaining power, so today, at the edge of the 21st century, we face another twist in the history of power. We are on the brink of a new powershift. Television is another powerful force in the World today, some would argue, it is one of the most powerful devices known to modern man. However, roughly speaking, the experience of looking at a TV picture is like looking at the World through a tea strainer. The picture is located along the grids. You fill in the blanks. Compare the image of your television screen with any other image in your television room: the bookcase, the table, the fug Obviously the actual object is vivid in comparison with the television image. Television production people are exquisitely aware of this. There is an electronics term to describe it: “signal-to-noise ratio.” Ordinarily applied to sound, the term can be applied to images as well. The “signal” is the primary image that they are attempting to covey. The “noise” is the background, the fuzz, from which the signal has to stand out to be seen properly. A “clear” picture is one in which the signal and noise are well differentiated. In television, however, since the differentiation is difficult to achieve, program decisions and production styles have to be chosen to maximize what is possible. As a result, there is a tendency to concentrate on images which offer a large signal-to-noise distinction. An enormous percentage of television images are close-ups of faces. This is not accidental. Faces in close-up are about the sharpest signal that television can produce while still conveying content. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Even so, if the background behind the face is complex, filled with varieties of objects and color tones, the face merges with the background and it all becomes a confusing jumble. So even while showing faces, television producers must keep the background “clean,” stark, unencumbered. Dramatic programs are constructed so that there are very few adornments and props. This avoids a cluttered image and increases the potential for the primary image to communicate something. This limitation does not exist to the same extent with movies, where the signal-to-noise ratio is much greater, allowing for images filled with detail. However, when a movie is played on television, much detail is lost. If you will think back to a time when you first saw a film in a theater and then saw it on television, you will realize how much richness is lost in the translation from one medium to the other. There is also a low signal-to-noise ratio in television sound. It is very low fidelity, although it could be greatly improved. High-fidelity sound, equal to recording sound, is possible with television speaker technology, and has become an industry standard. An additional factor fuzzing up the sound is the high-pitched whistle that emanates from all television sets. Caused by the interaction of the audio and visual electron fields, this whistle is unavoidable with television technology, at least in marketable price ranges. And so both television picture and sound remain fuzzy. This problem of indistinctness, rarely noted of discussed by critics of television, cannot be overestimated. It is a major factor influencing all decisions made by television producers. It skews all programming—both choices of subject and treatment of the choices—toward those that offer highest possible contrast between foreground and background, signal and noise, color and tone. This leads to image which tend to the larger as opposed to the smaller, to the broad as opposed to the detailed, to the simple as opposed to the complex, to the obvious rather than the subtle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Because of these tendencies, inexorably imposed by the technology itself, the communicable content of all programs is affected. Beyond confining the visual images and the choices of sound, these tendencies affect the emotional content. Because the images are indistinct, subtle feelings are more difficult to transmit through television than the larger emotions—the foreground emotions, as it were—that can be depicted efficiently by larger facial expressions, or even by noncloseup body movements. Even with a reliance on facial close-ups, what television can convey is a reduced version of what is possible in real life or even in still photography or film. The human relationships which are shown on television, therefore, tend to be those that can be shown on television. These dwell on the grosser end of the human emotional spectrum. The more subtle expression, those which express intimate, deeply personal feelings, are lost in the blur. In recent years there has emerged a very vocal group of outraged psychologists, educators and parents who speak of the urgent need to show beneficial behavior, such as loving, caring, sharing, and warmth, in television programs. They deplore the emphasis on “antisocial” behavior that is common on TV. Unfortunately these reformers are doomed to fail in their efforts because the medium is far better suited technically to expressing hate, fear, jealousy, winning, wanting and violence. These emotions suffer very little information loss when pushed through the coarse imagery of television. Like other gross personal expressions—hysteria, or ebullience, or the kind of one-dimensional joyfulness usually associated with some objective victory—the facial expressions and bodily movements of antisocial behavior are highly visible. Hate, anger, competitiveness are obvious broad-band feelings with broad-band expressions. Mot of them can be well communicated solely through body movement. No detail is needed to get the point, and neither is any special talent on the part of actor or director. They come through the filter of television with a minimum of information loss. The signal-to-noise ratio is really high. For these technical reasons, among others we will get to later, there is an emphasis on sports and violence in television programming, and there is greater viewer interest in them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The popularity of such programming is not so much a sign that public tastes are vulgar, as they are assumed to be in many quarters (“People want that kind of programming”), as it is a sign that these programs are the ones which manage to communicate something, at least, through television. Rather than illustrating the limits of the public mentality or taste, they illustrate the limits of the medium itself. The public wisely chooses programs which work best in a medium in which anything of a more subtle nature loses so much in translation as to be noncommunicative. This is not to say that the business people who are the television powers that be are not predisposed to further the values of competition and social Darwinism which they understand best and which are inherent in sports ad violence programs. However, no matter what their inclination, the fact exists that the kind of programming in which the least information is lost is the grosser forms: sports, violence, police action, MTV Award’s Shows, as well as quiz shows, game shows, soap opera, situation comedy and documentaries about nature, new about murder, war, conflict, power politics and charismatic leaders. All of these categories of programming communicate on television because they deliver clear, easily grasped visual and auditory signals, together with broad-band emotional content, all of which make them highly efficient in a low-definition medium. On the other hand, the kinds of feelings and behavior which the reformers like to call prosocial cannot be conveyed through television by obvious facial expression or physical movement. While it may be possible to show friendship in a dramatic context, it cannot be explored very far visually, because expression of such feelings exists in an inward rather than outward realm of experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Love is simply not as easy to demonstrate through coarse imagery as anger or competition. The heights of intimate feeling—between lovers, or parents and children, or among children—are actually experienced in life’s quietest moments. Ordinarily they do not involve any visually obvious action, unless it is the most subtle facial expression—peace, tranquility, satisfaction—not easily captured in any photography, but damned near impossible in the coarse imagery of television. How would you show caring on television? You could present images of people who presumably care about each other doing things which express that feeling. Yet, the things people usually do to express real caring are very small, intimate things. The inner feeling may be strong but, unlike rage, the acts which express it are rarely sweeping. What about warmth? Well, you could illustrate warmth with hugging or tender smiles. It is not that it cannot be done, it is just not as easy to show on television as coldness it. The behavior of The Flash, for example—coldness, determination, efficiency, domination—is easy to see because t can be demonstrated with nearly no facial expression at all. Therefore, this sort of behavior communicates more efficiently on TV. However, with The Flash interacts with Iris, you can tell her cares about her because his face looks softer, the tone of his voice is more concerned and compassionate, and his body language around her is more relaxed or protective. Even if a given subtle emotion can be conveyed from times to time, in most cases one could never build an entire program on its as one could on violent emotions. In signal-to-noise terms the entire program would become indistinct in comparison with the background of more aggressive, expressive and efficient action shows. A little known Sanskrit book called the Pasupata Sutras formulates a practice in detailed, under the heading of the Seeking of Dishonor. The practice is enjoined to court contempt and abuse from one’s fellow humans by behavior deliberately contrived as the most inappropriate and offensive for the situation, whatever it may be. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
In Shamanic context such practices had demonstrated the shaman’s special status beyond convention, his ability to breach at will either metaphysical or ethical boundaries. In yogic terms the goal of the practice was the effacement of ego by the normalization of types of experiences usually destructive to self-image. The shaman, the yogic seeker of dishonor, and the ritual scapegoat figure all offered themselves as targets for calamity, to draw it away from the communities they served. They were the individuals who went out on the razor’s edge and, protected in part by the brackets of religious performances, publicly breached the taboo of the times. Today the exhibitionistic breaching of age and gender taboos, as well as other forays into the darkness of the disallowed within the brackets of the art performance, replicates this ancient custom, sometimes with the same cathartic intention. As the shoals of history break and flow and reassemble, to break and flow again, these and other primitive practices have resurfaced, in something like their original combination, in an altogether different context. The preparation of one’s own body as a magico-sculptural object, for example, is a regular and essential part of the shaman’s performance. An Australian shaman may cover his body with mud (symbol of recent arrival from the netherworld) and decorate it with patterns of bird down fastened on with his own blood; an African shaman may wear human bones, skulls, and so forth, and may surgically alter his or her body in various ways; a Central Asian shaman’s body is tattooed or sacrificed or painted with magical symbols. Similarly, Schneemann has presented herself as a “body collage” decorated with symbols from ancient fertility religions. In a mixture of archaic and Christian materials, Linda Montano in The Screaming Nun, 1975, “dressed as a nun, danced, screamed, and heard confessions at Embarcadero Plaza [in San Francisco].” Other pieces by Montano have involved dancing blindfolded in trance, drumming for six hours a day for six days, shape-changing and identity-changing, self-injury (with acupuncture needles), and astral travel events. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Mary Beth Edelson’s “Public Rituals” have involved the marking of her naked body with symbols from ancient goddess cults, the equation of her body with the Earth, and the declaration of the end of patriarchy (Your Five Thousand Years Are Up). Kim Jones, as Mud Man, or Bill Harding emerging covered with mud from a hole in the ground in the middle of a circle of fire, are reconstituting before our eye’s images from the elementary stratum of religious forms. A motif that is absolutely central to shamanism, and that often also involves body decoration, is the attempt to incorporate the power of an animal species by imitation of it. Shamans in general adopt the identities of power animals, act out their movements, and duplicate their sounds. The claim to understand animal languages and to adopt an animal mind-set is basic to their meditation between culture and nature. Echoes of the practice are, of course, common in the animals of performance art. In Joseph Beuys’ conversation with the dead rabbit, the knowledge of an animal language combines with a belief in the shamanic abilities to communicate with the dead. In Chicken Dance, 1972, Montano, attired in a chicken costume, appeared unannounced at various locations in San Francisco and danced wildly through the streets like a shaman possessed by the spirit and moved by the motions of her animal ally. Terry Fox slept on a gallery floor connected with two dead fish by string attached to his hair and teeth, attempting, like a shaman inviting his animal ally to communicate through a dream, to dream himself into the piscine mind in Pisces, 1971. Not only is the kind of behavior art, but it is also considered religious. Now when it comes to politics, the problem with charismatic political is that it is also impossible to define. There may be examples of it in the past, but they are inimitable. If politics is like art styles (a thought picked up in Weber’s invention of the term “life-style”), nothing can be prescribed to it beforehand. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
There are no fixed principles and no program of action. All that one can say is “Be yourself!”; “Be original!”; “Let go!” or something of the kind. Charisma is a formula for extremism and immoderation. Moreover, the leader must have followers, so there is every temptation for one to act out one’s role as they define it. And, finally, genuine charisma is so difficult to judge. Persuasive tests for the genuineness of the charismatic leader, whose grace comes from God, were notoriously hard to come by. The leader whose grace emanates from the much more enigmatic self proves practically impossible to test. The modern situation as diagnosed by Weber requires radical remedies, and the charismatic leader is such a prescription. Just over the horizon, when Weber, lay a political dictator. He was a leader; Fuhrer, who was certainly neither traditional nor rational-bureaucratic He was the mad, horrible parody of the charismatic leader—the demagogue—hoped for by Weber. This particular dictator proved to the satisfaction of most, if not all, that the last man is not the worst of all; and his example should have, although it has not, turned the political imagination away from experiments in that direction. Weber was a good man of decent political instincts who would have had anything but disgust at and contempt for this particular dictator. What he wanted was a moderate corrective to the ills of German politics—about the same as De Gaulle brought to French politics. However, when one ventures out into the vast spaces opened up by Nietzsche, it is hard to set limits. Measure and moderation are the real aliens there. Weber was just one of many serious persons who were affected by Nietzsche himself asserted is the result of positioning oneself beyond good and evil. The open-ended future contains many surprises, and all these followers of Nietzsche prepared the way by helping to jettison good and evil along with reason, without assurance of that the alternatives might be. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Weber is of particular interest to us because he was the chosen apostle for the American promised land. It is not only the popularity of the heavily freighted language he bequeathed us that is surprising, but also the persistence among supposedly serious persons of his articulation of the political phenomena. The political dictator in questions did not cause a rethinking of politics here or in Europe. All to the contrary—it was while we were fighting him that the thought that had preceded him in Europe conquered here. That thought, which gave him, remains dominate. We also must not omit mentioning the rise and fall of the much-maligned Luddite Movement. The origin of the term is obscure, some believing that it refers to the actions of a youth named Ludlum who, being told by his father to fix a weaving machine, proceeded instead to destroy it. In any case, between 1811 and 1816, these arose widespread support for workers who bitterly resented the new wage cuts, child labor, and elimination of laws and customs that had once protected skilled workers. Their discontent was expressed through the destruction of machines, mostly in the garment and fabric industry; since then the term “Luddite” has come to mean an almost childish and certainly naïve opposition to technology. However, the historical Luddites were neither childish nor naïve. They were people trying desperately to preserve whatever rights, privileges, laws, and customs had given them justice in the older World-view. They lost. So did all the other nineteenth-century nay-sayers. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton might well have been on their side. Perhaps Bacon as well, for it was not his intention that technology should be a blight or a destroyer. However, then, Bacon’s greatest deficiency had always been that he was unfamiliar with the legend of Thamus; he understood nothing of the dialectic of technological change, and said little about the negative consequences of technology. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Even so, taken as a whole, the rise of technocracy would probably have pleased Bacon, for there can be no disputing that technocracy transformed the face of material civilization, and went far toward relieving what Tocqueville called “the disease of work.” And though it is true that technocratic capitalism created slums and alienation, it is also true that such conditions were perceived as an evil that could and should be eradicated; that is to say, technocracies brought into being an increased respect for the average person, whose potential and convenience became a matter of compelling political interest and urgent social policy. The nineteenth century saw the extension of public education, laid the foundation of the modern labor union, and led to the rapid diffusion of literacy, especially in America, through the development of public libraries and the increased importance of the general-interest magazine. To take only one example of the last point, the list of nineteenth-century contributors to The Saturday Evening Post, founded in 1821, included William Cullen Bryant, Harriet Beecher Stowe, James Fenimore Cooper, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgar Allan Poe—in other words, most of the writers presently included in American Lit. 301. The technocratic culture eroded the line that had made the intellectual interests of educated people inaccessible to the working class, and we may take it as a fact, as George Steiner has remarked, that the period from the French Revolution to World War I marked an oasis of quality in which great literature reached a mass audience. Something else reached a mass audience as well: political and religious freedom. It would be an inadmissible simplification to claim that the Age of Enlightenment originated solely because of the emerging importance of technology in the eighteenth century, but it is quite clear that the great stressed placed on individuality in the economic sphere had an irresistible resonance in the political sphere. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In a technocracy, inherited royalty is both irrelevant and absurd. The new royalty was reserved for men like Richard Arkwright, whose origins were low but whose intelligence and daring soared. Those who possessed such gifts could not be denied political power and were prepared to take it if it were not granted. In any case, the revolutionary nature of the new means of production and communication would have naturally generated radical ideas in every realm of human enterprise. In a democratic society, only a few people need an in-depth understanding of how a technology works, but many people need to understand what it can do. People are concerned about the implications of nanotechnology and its impact on our lives, the environment, and the future. Nanotechnology can bring great achievements and solve great problems, but it will likewise present opportunities for enormous abuse. Research progress is necessary, but so is an informed and cautious public. Our motivation in presenting these ideas is as much a fear of potential harm, and a wish to avoid it, as longing for the potential good and a wish to seek it. Even so, we will dwell on the good that nanotechnology can bring and give only an outline of the obvious potential harm. The coming revolution can best be managed by people who share not only a picture of what they wish to avoid, but of what they can achieve. If we as a society have a clear view of a route to follow, we will not need a precise catalog of every cliff and mine field to the side of the road. Some will hear this emphasis and call us optimistic. However, would it really be wise to dwell on exactly how a technology can be abused? Or to draw up blueprints, perhaps? Still, sitting here, preparing to tell this story, is an uncomfortable place for a researcher to be. In his book How Superstition Won and Science Lost, historian John C. Burnham tells of the century-long retreat of scientists from what they once saw as their responsibility: presenting the content and methods of science to a broad audience, for the public good. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today, the culture of science takes a dim view of “popularizations.” If you can write in plain English, this is taken as evidence that you cannot do math, and vice versa. Robert Pool, a member of the news staff of the most prestigious American scientific journal, Science, acknowledges this negative attitude in writing that “some researchers, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher, either by choice or just by being in the wrong place at the wrong time, make it into the public eye.” So how can a researcher keep out of trouble? If you stumble on something important, wrap it in jargon. If people realize that it is important, run and hide. Robert Pool gently urges scientists to become more involved, but the social pressures in the research community are heavily in the other direction. In response to this negative attitude toward “popularization,” we can only ask that scientists and engineers try to act in a thoroughly professional fashion when judging a given proposal—which is to say, that they pay scrupulous attention to the scientific and technical facts. This means judging the validity of technical ideas based on their factual merits, and not on their (occasionally readable) style of presentation, or on the emotional response they may stir up. Nanotechnology matters to people, and they deserve to know about its flesh-and-blood human consequences, its impact on society and nature. Years of discussion with scientists and engineers—in public, in private, at conferences, and through the press—indicate that the case for nanotechnology is solid. Japanese and European industry, government, and academic researchers are forging ahead on the road to nanotechnology, and more and more U.S. research is applicable. Some researchers have even begun to call it an obvious goal. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Some people think nanotechnology going too far, much like when Eve ate the apple in the garden of Eden and opened her life, Adam’s life, and the World to a new reality. The whole incident is spun out of play and dream; it is irony, mysterious irony of the narrator, that spins it. It is apparent: the two doers know not what they do, more than this, they can only do it, they cannot know it. There is no room here for the pathos of the two principles, as we see it in the ancient Iranian religion, the pathos of the choice made by the Two themselves and by the whole of humankind after them. And nevertheless both of them, good and evil, are to be found here—but in a strange, ironical shape, which the commentators have not understood as such and hence have not understood at all. The tree of whose forbidden fruit the first humans eat is called the tree of the knowledge of good and evil; so does God Himself also call it. The serpent promises that by partaking of it, they would become like God, knowers of good and evil; and God seems to confirm this when He subsequently says that they have thereby become “as one of us,” to know good and evil. This is the repetitive style of the Bible, the antitheses constantly reappear in fresh relationships with one another: its purpose is to demonstrate with super clarity that it is they we are dealing with. However, nowhere is their meaning intimated. The words may denote the ethical antithesis, but they may also denote that of beneficial and injurious, or of delightful and repulsive; immediately after the serpent’s speech the woman “sees” that the tree is “good to eat,” and immediately upon God’s prohibition followed His dictum that it was “not good” that man should be alone—the adjective translated by “evil” is equally indefinite. Why could Eve not stay content with the lofty enchanted valley of unimaginable glory and beauty, and sleep in the golden sunlight. There were meads, meadows, groves, glades, prodigality of flowers, such soft richness, such flush and glow, such rhapsodies of color—it was a dream! Through it poured four shinning rivers, pictured with reflections, which wound hither and thither down the mellow distances of that Heaven of solitude and pace, and faded out in the dim remoteness where Earth and the sky melted together and became one. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The poor Earth, which had seemed so beautiful before—she must have wondered how to reach the happy valley! Eve thought she would descend into it, and live there always. “There I shall find Satan, there I shall find Adam,” she said; “there I shall not be alone anymore.” However, Eve could find no opening in the precipice. She wandered eagerly up and down, seeking, but there was no way. And all the time the sun was skinning. At last the darkness closed down, and through her tears she saw that land of her longing fade and disappear. Eve was just a young lady, she sat down and cried. However, the animals came and comforted her, and tried to tell her she had friend, and not to grieve; and she rose up and went with them, seeing a bed-place. They lay down, and they snuggled about her, and their furs warmed her and she fell asleep. She woke at dawn, and a strange thing was happening. A white powder was sifting down from above, and where it fell upon ger skin it turned to water. She was frightened, and climbed to her place on the elephant, and cared not whither he went, so he got Eve away from this strange invasion of the skies. She named it snow—and that is indeed what it was. The elephant carried her down the mountain; then for two weeks they skirted the base of the highlands, trying to find where those rivers came out, so that she could enter the Happy Valley; but they never found ay trace of the, and at last they went back home in sorrow, for Eve had come to think that the Valley must have been only a vision, not a reality. She was not contented for long. Daily and nightly the vision rose before her in its dreamy loveliness, and tormented her with unappeasable longings to see it again. Her surroundings had lost their charm; they seemed commonplace and poor; she no longer took pleasures in them. And every day, Eve fed her spirit with the vision, then search for a way down to the precipice. “Wherefore, ye need not suppose that I and my father are the only ones that have testified, and also taught them. Wherefore, if ye shall be obedient to the commandments, and endure to the end, ye shall be saved at the last day. And thus it is. Amen,” reports 1 Nephi 22.31. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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Faith in Machinery is Mankind’s Greatest Menace
Along with the venality of its controllers, the technology of television predetermines the boundaries of its content. Some information can be conveyed completely, some partially, some not at all. The most effective telecommunications are the gross, simplified linear messages and programs which conveniently fit the purposes of the medium’s commercial controllers. Television’s highest potential is advertising. This cannot be changed. The bias is inherent in the technology. A good way to think about television—in fact all the media—is as a kind of telescope in the sky, flying around, constantly looking. Then from it perch in the sky, it zooms down to a single spot on the planet, a small group of people shooting each other. It takes this single event out of billions and billions of other little events and sends it zooming through space to television antennas, and then out through an electron gun into (on average) 120 million people sitting at home in dark rooms with their eyes still. The event gets reconstructed in the brains of these people as an image. Recorded. All these 120 million people have recorded the same image from this single distant spot where they are not. This becomes their experience of that moment. If the telescope has selected a shooting from an entire planet’s worth of activities, in the next moment it may choose a Super Bowl game, or a threatening remark by someone who is unhappy with America, or a program of people trying to win prizes, or a movie about the Old West. All others subjects were not selected, at least in this moment. The telescope did not select views of the ocean as the tide comes in, or people sitting on front porches, or young people knocking on doors to tell a neighbourhood about a zoning hearing. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
If there is logic in this selection is the question to ask. Are there reasons why the telescope selects one thing and not another? There certainly are. Dozens of them. The first and most obvious of these reasons is the one that most critics of television devote themselves to. The people who control television, businessmen, operate strictly out of considerations of budget and profit, in addition to brining alone their own political, perceptual, and social biases. It was to allay their influence that so many thousands of media reformers devoted years of effort to democratizing access to the medium and its content. And yet at present there are still no poor people running television, no marginalized group, no ecologist, no political radicals, no Zen Buddhists, no factory workers, no revolutionaries, no artists, no Communists, no Luddites, no hippies, no botanists, to name only a few excluded groups. To have only businessmen in charge of the most powerful mind-implanting instrument in history naturally creates a boundary to what is selected for dissemination to nearly 335 million people. If other categories of people had control, there can be little disagreement with the point that the choices would be different. If television is a medium of brainwash, then with it now being a more diverse brainwashing system, it is surely an improvement over the sort we got in the past. Still that is debatable because with less diversity in the past, the programs were more family friendly. The overriding bias of television, then, the bias which contains all the other biases, is that it offers preselected material, which excludes whatever is not selected. Now, of course, this is utterly obvious. And, yes, it is true of all experiences. When you are doing one thing, you exclude everything else that you might be doing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
When we forget that someone has selected our experience for us, and we have given up awareness, information and experience that is not part of television, this only then becomes significant concerning television. When you are spending time in front of the television, you are not doing other things. The young child of three or four years old is in the stage of the greatest emotional development that human beings undergo. And we only develop when we experience things, real-life things: a conversation with Mother, touching Father, going places, doing things, relating to others. This kind of experience is critical to a young child, and when the child spends thirty-five hours per week in front of the TV set, it is impossible to have the full range of real-life experience that a young child must have. Even if we had an overabundance of good television programs, it would not solve the problem. The act of sitting in front of television is itself a replacement of other modes of experience and the awareness these would bring. In this way, television is an acceleration of a condition that began with our artificial environments. We are already separated from most experiences with an unmediated planet. We have given up our personal sensory informational systems. The artificial forms around us already limit our experience and awareness. Our knowledge of the outside World was confined to a narrower field even before television was invented. With television, however, the artificial information-field is brought inside our darkened rooms, inside our stilled minds, and shot by cathode guns through out unmoving eyes into our brains, and recorded. We have no participatory role in gathering data. Our information is narrowed to only what the telescope provides. If we do not experience a wider information field, we lose knowledge of that field’s existence. We become the hermit in the cave who knows only what the TV offers. We experience what is, not knowing what is not. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
The people who control television become the choreographers of choosing information. We live within their conceptual frameworks. We travel to places on the planet which they choose and to situations which they decide we should see. What we can know is narrowed to what they know, and then narrowed further to what they select to send us through this instrument of theirs. The kind of people who control television is certainly a problem. However, this is only the beginning. While our field of knowledge is constrained by their venality and arrogance, the people who run television are constrained by the instrument itself. Television is no open window through which all perception may pass. Quite the opposite. There are many technological factors that conspire to limit what the medium can transmit. Some information fits and some does not. Some information can pass through, but only after being reshaped, redefined, packaged, and made duller and coarser than before. Some ways of mind can be conveyed and some cannot. The wrinkle in the story is what can be conveyed through television are the ways of thinking and the kinds of information that suit the people who are in control. This is why they like it so much. It is obviously efficient for them to concentrate their communications within a medium that is good at conveying their forms of mind, just as a person with a drive for power is more apt to express that in politics than in gardening. Conversely, it is logical that the medium will not respond well to people or attitude that defy its limits. It will throw them off, or distort their messages, as a computer would shun anyone who wishes to use it to express feelings of loving tenderness. It might program such a message, but only the words will come out on the tape; not the loving tenderness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
So we have a chicken-egg problem. It is difficult to tell which came first, the technology or its controllers. It may not be that the corporate mentality won the war to control television. The technology itself picked its master, through the inexorable technological factors that confine its use. Molecules matter because matter is made of molecules, and everything from air to flesh to spacecraft is made of matter. When we learn how to arrange molecules in new ways, we can make new things, and make old things in new ways. Perhaps this is why Japan’s MITI has identified “control technologies for the precision arrangement of molecules” as a basic industrial technology for the twenty-first century. Molecular nanotechnology will give thorough control of matter on a large scale at low cost, shattering a whole set of technological and economic barriers more or less at one stroke. A molecule is an object consisting of a collection of atoms held together by strong bonds (one-atom molecules are a special case). “Molecule” usually refers to an object with a number of atoms small enough to be counted (a few to a few thousand), but strictly speaking a truck tire (for instance) is mostly one big molecule, containing something like 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 atoms. Counting this many atoms aloud would take about 10,000,000,000 billion years. Scientists and engineers still have no direct, convenient way to control molecules, basically because human hands are about 10 million times to large. Today, chemists and materials scientists make molecular structures indirectly, by mixing, heating, and the like. The idea of nanotechnology begins with the idea of a molecular assembler, a device resembling an industrial robot arm but built on a microscopic scale. A general-purpose molecular assembler will be a jointed mechanism built from rigid molecular parts, driven by motors, controlled by computers, and able to grasp and apply molecular-scale tools. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
Molecular assemblers can be used to build other molecular machines—they can even build more molecular assemblers. If given the raw materials, assemblers and other machines in molecular-manufacturing systems will be able to make almost anything. In effect, molecular assemblers will provide the microscopic “hands” that we lack today. (Chemists are asked to forgive this literary license; the specific details of molecular binging and bonding do not change the conclusion.) Nanotechnology will give better control of molecular building blocks, of how they move and go together to form more complex objects. Molecular manufacturing will make things by building from the bottom up, starting with the smallest possible building blocks. The nano in nanotechnology comes from nanos, the Greek word for dwarf. In science, the prefix nano– means one-billionth of something, as in nanometer and nanosecond, which are typical units of size and time in the World of molecular manufacturing. When you see it tacked onto the name of an object, it means that the object is made by patterning matter with molecular control: nanomachine, nanomotor, nanocomputer. These are the smallest, most precise devices that make sense based on today’s science. (Be cautious of other usages, though—sone researchers have begun to use the nano– prefix to refer to other small-scale technologies in the laboratory today. As we use it, nanotechnology means the precise, molecular nanotechnology of the future. British usage also applies the term to the small-scale and high-precision technologies of today—even to precision grinding and measurement. The latter are useful, but hardly revolutionary.) #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
Digital electronics brought an information-processing revolution by handling information quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: bits and bytes. Likewise, nanotechnology will bring a matter-processing revolution by handling matter quickly and controllably in perfect, discrete pieces: atoms and molecules. The digital revolution has centered on a device able to make any desired patterns of bits: the programmable computer. Likewise, the nanotechnological revolution will center on a device able to make (almost) any desired pattern of atoms: the programmable assembler. The technologies that plague us today suffer from the messiness and wear of an old phonography record. Nanotechnology, in contrast, will bring the crisp, digital perfection of a compact disc. Say only, “It is here.” However, when did ‘here’ begin? When did Bacon’s ideology become a reality? When, to use Siegfried Giedion’s phrase, did mechanization take command? To be cautious about it, we might locate the emergence of the first true technocracy in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century—let us say with James Watt’s invention of the steam engine in 1765. From that time forward, a decade did not pass without the invention of some significant machinery which, take together, put an end to medieval “manufacture” (which once meant “to make by hand”). The practical energy and technical skills unleashed at this time changed forever the material and psychic environment of the Western World. An equally plausible date for the beginnings of technocracy (and, for Americas, easier to remember) is 1776, when Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations was published. As Bacon was no scientist, Smith was no inventor. However, like Bacon, he provided a theory that gave conceptual relevance and credibility to the direction in which human enterprise was pointed. Specifically he justified the transformation from small-scale, personalized, skilled labour to large-scale, impersonal, mechanized production. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Smith not only argued convincingly that money, not land, was the key to wealth, but gave us his famous principle of the self-regulating market. In a technocracy—that is, a society only loosely controlled by social custom and religious tradition and drive by the impulse to invent—an “unseen hand” will eliminate the incompetent and reward those who produce cheaply and well the goods that people want. It was not clear then, and still is not, whose unseen mind guides the unseen hand, but it is possible (the technocratic industrialists believed) that God could have something to do with it. And if not God, then “human nature,” for Adam Smith had named our species “Economic Man,” born with an instinct to barter and acquire wealth. In any case, toward the end of the eighteenth century, technocracy was well underway, especially after Richard Arkwright, a barber by trade, developed the factory system. In his cottons-pinning mills, Arkwright trained workers, mostly children, “to conform to the regular celerity of the machine,” and in doing so gave an enormous boost to the growth of modern forms of technocratic capitalist. He exemplified in every particular the type of nineteenth-century entrepreneur to come. As Siegfried Giedion has described him, Arkwright created the first mechanization of production “[in] a hostile environment, without protectors, without government subsidy, but nourished by a relentless utilitarianism that feared no financial risk or danger.” By the beginning of the nineteenth century, England was spawning such entrepreneurs in every major city. By 1806, the concept of the power loom, introduced by Edmund Cartwright (a clergyman no less), was revolutionizing the textile industry by eliminating, once and for all, skilled workers, replacing them with workers who merely kept the machines operating. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
By 1850, the machine-tool industry was developed—machines to make machines. And beginning in the 1860s, especially in America, a collective fervor for invention took hold of the masses. To quote Giedion again: “Everyone invented, whoever owned an enterprise sought ways and means to make his goods more speedily, more perfectly, and often of improved beauty. Anonymously and inconspicuously the old tools were transformed into modern instruments.” Because of their familiarity it is not necessary to describe in detail all of the inventions of the nineteenth century, including those which gave substance to the phrase “communications revolution”: the photograph and telegraph (1830s), rotary-power printing (1840s), the typewriter (1860s), the transatlantic cable (1866), the telephone (1876), motion pictures and wireless telegraphy (1895). Alfred North Whitehead summed it up best when he remarked that the greatest invention of the nineteenth century was the idea of invention itself. We had learned how to invent things, and the question of why we invent things receded in importance. The idea that if something could be done, it should be done was born in the nineteenth century. And along with it, there developed a profound belief in all the principles through which invention succeeds: objectivity, efficiency, expertise, standardization, measurement, and progress. It also came to be believed that the engine of technological progress worked most efficiently when people are conceived of not as children of God or even as citizens but as consumers—that it to say, as market. Not everyone agreed, of course, especially with the last notion. In England, William Blake wrote of the “dark Satanic mills,” which stripped men of their souls. Matthew Arnold warned that “faith in machinery” was mankind’s greatest menace. Carlyle Ruskin, and William Morris railed against the spiritual degradation brough by industrial progress. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
In France, Balzac, Flaubert, and Zola documented in their novels the spiritual emptiness of “Economic man” and the poverty of the acquisitive impulse. The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of “utopian” communities, of which perhaps the most famous is Robert Owen’s experimental community in Scotland called New Lanark. There, he established a model factory community, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, providing reduced working hours, improved living conditions, and innovative education for the children of workers. In 1824, Owen came to America and founded another utopia at New Harmony, Indiana. Although none of his or other experiments endured, dozens were tried in an effect to reduce the human costs of a technocracy. In America charisma is not just a description but something good that has to do with leadership. It even seems to confer an extralegal title to leadership by virtue of “something special” inhering in the leader. Although Webber was thinking of Moses and Buddha, or of Napoleon, the gang leader formally suits his definition of charisma. Weber sought to make a place in politic for things that political legalism excludes and that claim to have a title to attention although they are not founded on reason or consent—the only titles to rule in liberal democracy. It is not to be wondered at, then, that all the demagogic appetites frustrated by our constitutional system should latch on to a word that appears to legitimize and to flatter them. Moreover, democratic individualism does not officially provide much of a place for leaders in a regime where everyone is supposed to be one’s own master. Charisma both justifies and excuses followers. The very word gives a positive twist to rabble-rousing qualities and activities treated as negative in our constitutional tradition. And its vagueness makes it a tool for frauds and advertising men adept at manipulating image. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
Charisma, as Weber knew perfectly well, is God-given grace, which confers leadership through God’s sanction. In keeping with his analysis in the Protestant Ethic, he treats the self’s value-positing as the human truth of God-given grace. His account of it appears to be merely descriptive, but it becomes prescriptive. In passages deeply influenced by Nietzsche, he analyzes the state as a relation of domination of man by man, founded on legitimate violence—that is, violence that is considered to be legitimate. If they have certain beliefs, men inwardly accept being dominated. There is no more foundation to legitimacy than the inner justification the dominated make to themselves in order to accept the violence of those who dominate them. These justifications are, according to Weber, of three kinds: traditional, rational, and charismatic. Some men submit because that is the way it has always been; others consent to obey competent civil servants who follow rationally established rules; and other are enchanted by the extraordinary grace of an individual. Of the three, charismatic legitimacy is the most important. No matter what conservatives think, traditions had a beginning that was not traditional. They had a founder who was not a conservative or a traditionalist. The fundamental values informing that tradition were his creation The tradition is the continuing half-life of the charmed moment when a happy few could live on the heights of inspiration with the creator. Tradition adjusts that inspiration to the ordinary, universal motives of man, such as greed and vanity; it routinized the charisma. It is what it is because of that original impulse. So charisma is the condition of both the charismatic and the traditional legitimacies. It is also the splendid form of legitimacy. The rational is not informed by charisma, and the civil servants—bureaucrats—are therefore unable to make real decisions or take responsibility. They cannot, as we would say, determine the broad outlines of policy or, put more classically, establish ends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
Mere competence can only serve already established goals and decide according to the established rules. It must be at least supplemented by charismatic leadership in order to be pointed in the right, or any, direction. So again charisma comes out on top. Value creation, the activity that writes the table of laws by which a people is constituted and lives, is, as Nietzsche tells, the nut in the shell of existence. Whatever the merit of Weber’s analysis and categories, they became holy writ for hosts of intellectuals. They were, as Weber recognized, not only an academic exercise. They expressed his vision of the crisis of the twentieth century. This is a case where the alleged facts also spoke the values. The tradition-based regimes had exhausted their impulse and were on their way to extinction. The ones based on rationality were simply becoming the administration for “the last man,” the intolerable negative pole. Imperative, then, was a stab at some form of charismatic leadership in order to revitalize the politics of the West. The whole undertaking rested on the assurance that Nietzsche was right that the last man is also the worst possible man, or more generally that his critique of reason was correct. Foresight is not necessary for the evolution of cooperation. The theory of biological evolution is based on the struggle for life and the survival of the fittest. Yet cooperation is common between member of the same species and even members of different species. Before about 1960, accounts of the evolutionary process largely dismissed cooperative phenomena as not requiring special attention. This dismissal followed from a misreading of theory that assigned most adaptation to selection at the level of populations or whole species. As a result of such misreading, cooperation was always considered adaptive. Recent reviews of the evolutionary process, however, have shown no sound basis for viewing selection as being upon benefits to whole groups. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Quite the contrary. At the level of a species or a population, the processes of selection are weak. The original individualistic emphasis of Darwin’s theory is more valid. To account for the manifest existence of cooperation and related group behaviour, such as altruism and restraint in competition, evolutionary theory has recently acquired two kinds of extension. These extensions are, broadly, genetical kindship theory and reciprocity theory. Most of the recent activity, both in fieldwork and in further developments of theory, has been on the side of kindship. Formal approaches have varied, but kindship theory has increasingly taken a gene’s-eye view of natural selection. A gene, in effect, looks beyond its mortal bearer to the potentially immortal set of its replicas existing in other related individuals. If the players are sufficiently closely related, altruism can benefit reproduction of the set despite losses to the individual altruist. In accord with this theory’s predictions, almost all clear cases of altruism, and most observed cooperation—apart from their appearance in the human species—occur in context of high relatedness, usually between immediate family members. The evolution of the suicidal barbed sting of the honeybee worker could be taken as paradigm for this line of theory. Conspicuous examples of cooperation (although almost never of ultimate self-sacrifice) also occur where relatedness is low or absent. Mutually advantageous symbioses offer striking examples such as these: the fungus and alga that compose a lichen; the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants and ant-acacias, where the trees house and feed the ants which, in turn, protect the trees; and the fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig wasps and fig tree, where wasps, which are parasites of fig flowers, serve as the tree’s sole means of pollination and seed set. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
Usually the course of cooperation in such symbioses is smooth, but sometimes the partners show signs of antagonism, either spontaneous or elicited by particular treatments. Although kindship may be involved, as will be discussed later, symbioses mainly illustrate the other recent extension of evolutionary theory—the theory of reciprocity. In societies where the shamanic profession is intact, shamans have been perhaps the most fully rounded and powerful cultural figures in history. The poets, mythographers, visual artists, musicians, medical doctors, psychotherapists, scientist, sorcerers, undertakers, psychopomps, and priests of their tribal groups, they have been one-person cultural establishments. They have also been independent, uncontrollable, and eccentric power figures whose careers have often originated in psychotic episodes—what anthropologists call the “sickness vocation.” As a result, when societies increase their demands for internal order, the old shamanic role, with its unassimilable combination of power and freedom, is broken up into more manageable specialty professions; in our society, the doctor, the poet, the artist, and so on, have each inherited one scrap from the original shaman’s robe. Beginning with the Romantic period an attempt was made to reconstitute something like the fullness of the shamanic role within the art realm; poets especially were apt to attribute both healing and transcendentalizing powers to the art experience. This project has been acted out in the last twenty years by those artists whose work appropriates its material from the early history of religion. Perhaps the most shocking element in the various performance works mentioned here is the practice of self-injury and self-mutilation. This has, however, been a standard feature of shamanic performances and primitive initiation rites around the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
Siberian shamans cut themselves while in ecstatic states brought on by drugs, alcohol, drumming and dancing. Tibetan shamans are supposedly able to slit their bellies and exhibit their entrails. Related practices are found in the performance art under discussion. Chris Burden crawled through broken glass with his hands behind his back. Dennis Oppenheim did a piece in which for half an hour rocks were thrown at him. Linda Montano inserted acupuncture needles around her eyes. The Australian performance artist Stelarc, reproducing a feat of Ajivika ascetics in India, has had himself suspended in various positions in the air by means of fishhooks embedded into his flesh. The number of instances could be easily multiplied. The element of female imitation, found in the works of Brus, McCarthy Jones, and others, is also a standard shamanic an initiatory motif, involving sympathetic magic. Mae shamans and priests around the World, as well as tribal boys at their puberty initiations, adopt female dress to incorporate the female and her powers. In lineages as far apart as North Asian and Amerindian, shamans have worn women’s clothing and ritually married other men. Akkadian priests of Ishtar dressed like their goddess, as did Ramakrishna in nineteenth-century India. A Sanskrit religious text instructs the devote to “discard the male (purusa) in thee and become a woman (prakriti).” Various tribal rites involve the ritual miming, by men, of female menstruation and parturition, as in the works of McCarthy. Freudian and Jungian theories of bisexuality of the psyche and the need to realize it are relevant both to archaic and to modern exercises of this sort. Female imitation and self-mutilation combine in certain practices of ritual surgery found in primitive cultures around the World, though most explicit in Australia. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
In Central Australian initiation rites, for example, a vulvalike opening is cut into the urethral surface of the male organ, symbolically incorporating the female principle into the male body. Bruno Bettelheim has observed this motif in the fantasies of disturbed children. Brus, in a performance, once cut a vuvalike slit in his groin, holding it open with hooks fastened in his flesh. Ritual surgery to create an androgynous appearance is common in archaic religious practice generally, as an attempt to combine male and female magical powers into one center. The emphasis on the mutilation of the male genitals in much of the Viennese work is relevant here. In classical antiquity the priests of Cybele castrated themselves totally (both the male organ and testicles) in their initiation, to become more like their goddess; thereafter they dressed like women and were called “females.” In subsequent ecstatic performances they would cut themselves in the midst of frenzied dancing and offer blood to the goddess. The public performance of taboo acts is also an ancient religious custom with roots in shamanism and primitive magic. Both art and religion, through the bracketing of their activities in the half-light of ritual appropriationism, provide zones where deliberate inversions of social custom can transpire; acts repressed in the public morality may surface there, simultaneously set loose for their power to balance and complete the sense of life, and held safely in check by the shadow reality of the arena they occur in. Art can be very unusual and interest and even reflect things that we may have never considered as forms of art. However, many different cultures and many different people all enjoy different ways to express life, emotion, feel, and creativity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
When it comes to business, we sometimes find striking cases of sham transformation, at the global level, and this particularly case was fond in the halls of the United Nations (UN). Facing a sever crisis in the U.N., Secretary-General Kofi Annan announced in 2003 the “urgent need” to restructure the Security Council to reflect the new “geopolitical realties” of the twenty-first century. The Security Council today reflects power as it was half a century ago, just after the United States of America, Britain, Russian, France, China and their allies defeated the attempt by Germany, Italy and Japan to jointly take over the World. Each of the main victors was rewarded with a permanent Security Council seat and the right to veto any proposed action by the full council. Since then, some of the Big Five have lost power while such countries as Japan, India Brazil, and Germany have gained in global economic and diplomatic importance, yet lack permanent seats and vetoes. Annan wants to fix this problem. However, it will take much more than a redistribution of seats among nation-states to save the United Nations. The U.N.’s influence in the World today is bleeding away because, as a group, nations and/or states are themselves losing power. As we shall see shortly, other forces are gaining clout—global corporations, bond and currency markets, resurgent World religions, tens of thousands of NGOs, sub- and supranational regional units. All these vitiate the dominance of individual nations and states. Collectively, to an even greater extent, they dilute the U.N.’s power. If the United Nations, therefore, really wants to represent the new realities in the twenty-first century, it must bring these newly powerful global players into its fold, giving them, and not just nations and/or states, voting power as well. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We see, then, in these very different examples involving very different institutions, the same underestimation of the revolutionary character of the knowledge-based wealth system, the same ignorance about the deep fundamentals, and the same forlorn hope that sake transformation can save them. One reason that overt corporate or business violence is now so rare is that over the years it has been increasingly “contracted out.” Instead of business producing their own violence, they have, in effect, bought the services of government. In all industrial nations, state violence replaces private violence. The first thing any government tries to do, from the moment it is formed, is to monopolize violence. Its soldiers and police are the only ones legally permitted to exert violence. In some cases the state is politically controlled by the corporations, so that the line between the exercise of private and public power in hair-thin. However, the old Marxist idea—that the state is nothing more than the “executive committee” of the ruling corporate power—ignores what we all know: that politicians more often act on their own behalf than on the behalf of others. Moreover, the Marxist assumed that only capitalist corporations or governments would ever use force against unarmed workers. That was before communist police, armed with tear gas, fire hoses, and more ominous equipment, tried to stamp out Poland’s Solidarity union movement in the early 1980s, and China had a standoff with its students and workers near Tiananmen Square, behaving exactly like the soldiers and police of Pinochet’s Chile or any number of other vehemently anticommunist countries. By seizing into its own mailed first the technologies of violence, and attempting to eliminate or control all violence, the state reduces the independent manufacture of violence by the corporation and other institutions. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Another reason why direct physical aggression seems to have almost vanished from ordinary business life is that violence has been sublimated into law. All business, capitalist, and socialist alike, depends upon law. Every contract, every promissory note, every stock and bond, every mortgage, every collective bargaining contract, every insurance policy, every debit and credit is ultimately backed by the law. And behind every law, good or evil, we find the barrel of a gun. Currently 33 percent of American making over $250,000 a year are living pay check to pay check. As tersely put by former French President Charles de Gaulle, “The law must have force on its side.” Law is sublimated violence. Thus when one company sues another, it ask the government to bring the force of law to bear. It wants the government’s guns (concealed behind obscuring layers of bureaucratic and judicial rigmarole) stuck into the ribs of its adversary to compel certain actions. It is not entirely accidental that corporate lawyers in the United States of America are called “hired guns.” The very frequency of recourse to the law (as distinct from other ways of resolving business disputes) is a fair measure of force in the economy. By this criterion, the United States of America has a “force-full” economy. Today, there are 32.5 million businesses establishments in the United States of America and 1,327,910 lawyers—id est, approximately one lawyer for twenty-four businesses. More than a than 46,443 civil lawsuits are painfully processed by the clogged district court systems every business day of the year. U.S. businessmen complain loudly about the allegedly unfair intimacy between Japanese businesses and government. Yet ironically, when it comes to settling disputes, it is the Americans, not the Japanese, who rush to litigate, thereupon calling upon the power f the state to intervene on their behalf. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
From the smallest commercial litigation to the multibillion-dollar lawsuit involving a dispute between Pennzoil and Texaco over a takeover bid, law masks force—which, in the end, implies the potential application of violence. Corporate campaign contributions can be seen as another camouflaged way of getting a government to pull a gun out of its holster in the interest of a company or industry. In Japan, passed out huge amounts of stock at below-market price to top politicians in the ruling Liberal Democratic Party, his attempt to curry favor was so blatant it outraged the press and pubic and led to the resignation of Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita. The scandal bore some resemblance to the earlier case of the Flick empire in West German, whose executives channeled illegal funds to various political parties. The Japanese also spend over $60 billion a year—more than they spend for their automobiles—in 14,500 garishly lit “pachinko parlors,” where they play a game that involves guiding a stainless-steel ball downward past obstacles into an appropriate slot. Winners receive prizes, some of which they can exchange for money. Like game arcades in the United States of America, pachinko is a cash business, made to order for tax evasion and money laundering. Criminal gangs siphon off protection money from the parlors and sometimes war with one another for control of the most lucrative one. To ward off legislation aimed at opening their books to the police, parlor operators have made large contributions to both leading parties. Whenever business funds are passed to candidates or political parties, the presumption is that a quid or pro quo is expected. In the United States of America, despite repeated reforms and changes in the laws governing campaign contributions, every important industry pipes funds to one or both of the parties to buy, at a minimum, as hearing for its special point of view; and ingenious methods—inflated speaking fees, the purchase of otherwise unsalable books, the “loan” of real estate, the granting of low-interest loans—are constantly invented to avoid or evade the legal restrictions. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
The mere existence of government creates a set of indirect, often hidden, and unintentional cross—subsidies and cross-penalties in the economy. To the extent that government actions are ultimately backed by force—by guns and soldiers and police—the nation of power-free or violence-free economics is puerile. However, the last, and most important, reason why corporations—and even governments—resort to open violence less often than in the preindustrial past is that they have found a better instrument with which to control people. That instrument is money. Coins, paper, digital currency, certificates, are a medium people use as payment for goods or services. It is sometimes a symbol of materialism. Materialism is the tendency to consider material possessions as more important than spiritual values “To find real happiness, we must seek for it in a focus outside ourselves. No one has learned the meaning of living until one has surrendered one’s ego to the service of one’s fellow man. Services to others is akin to duty, the fulfillment of which brings true joy,” reports President Thomas S. Monson. For better of worse, money can change lives and has the potential of blessing lives or drawing a person away from God. As becomes manifest subsequently, the serpent is both right and wrong in denying that this will be the consequence: Adam and Eve do not have to die after eating, they merely plunge into human mortality, that is, into the knowledge of death to come—the serpent plays with the word of God, just as Eve played with it. And now the incident itself begins: the woman regards the tree. She does not merely see that it is a delight to the eye, she also sees in it that which cannot be seen: how good its fruit tastes and that it bestows the gift of understanding. This seeing has been explained as a metaphorical expression for perceiving, but how could these qualities of the tree be perceived? “And this he said unto them having been commanded of God and they did walk uprightly before God, imparting to one another both temporally and spiritually according to their needs and their wants,” reports Mosiah 18.29. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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