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Is the Soul’s Health More Important than All the Powers of this World?
I cannot say that truth is stranger than fiction, because I have never had acquaintance with either. Whoever is without guile, let one lie down with the lion and the lamb and be not ashamed of one’s nakedness; for they shall put a ring upon one’s hand and shoes upon one’s feet; and all that was one’s father’s shall be one’s and also all that one’s mother and one’s sister hath, and likewise the mote that is in one’s brother’s eye. For it is easier for a rich man to go through the eye of a camel than for another man to break the Sabbath day and keep it holy. If this astonishing conquest itch were limited to intellectual postures, it would be one thing. However, of course the contemporary mining and polluting of the industrial lands bring forward far more concrete realities. Our Faustian pact with Mephistophelian “sci-tech” goes back a long way. It is an insufficiently realized fact that the contemporary scientific attitude was first nurtured in the bosoms of mystical societies of seventeenth-century England, as the contemporary British scholar Frances Yates has pointed out in a number of valuable studies. Long before this, the pioneering philosopher of the specifically modern cast of organized inquiry, Francis Bacon, had called in his “Fable of Proteus” for a virtually sadistic approach to the natural World: If any skillfull minister of nature shall apply force to nature, and by design torture and vex it in order to its annihilation, it on the contrary, being brought to this necessity, changes and transforms itself into a strange variety of shapes and appearances; for nothing but the power of the Creator can annihilate it or truly destroy it…And that methods of torturing or detaining will prove the most effective and expeditious which makes use of manacles and fetters; id est lays hold and works upon matter in the extremist degree. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
That is an amazing attitude, and one quickly discernible in every aspect of modern life. However, suppose that nature, or at least the Earth as a whole, may not be entirely inert. Can we assume that it would be completely in accord with many of the things we are doing in it? Supposed that, in future generations, the most gifted minds were to find their soul’s health more important than all the powers of this World; suppose that, under the influence of the metaphysic and mysticism that is taking the place of Rationalism today, the very elite of intellect that is now concerned with the machine comes to be overpowered by a growing sense of its Satanism (it is the step from Roger to Bacon to Bernard of Clairvaux)—then nothing can hinder the end of this grand drama that has been a play of intellects, with hands as mere auxiliaries. It is a good thing that in some cases stupidity is not painful because more of us would be in pain and have to admit we need help. As the 1960s faded into the more staid 1970, lurid media accounts of Satanic activity and ritualistic murders became sporadic. However, in 1975, the wire services began to pick up stories that cattle ranchers in Colorado and other western sates were increasingly concerned about the safety of their herds, large numbers of animals having been bizarrely slaughtered. And these are very similar crimes, it would be similar to owning a car dealership and someone stealing all of your cars and no insure to reimburse the loss. So, the cattle were apparently not being killed for food, as little of the meat had been touched, but, in many cases, the blood had apparently been drained and the “private” organs and lips had been surgically removed. To add to the mystery, no footprints, animal or human, were found around the carcasses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Speculation about the identity of the culprits ranged from UFOs to secret government experiments. A movie Endangered Species, was even produced, postulating the latter theory. Then in Arkansas, several head of cattle were found dead near sites that exhibited evidence of ritualistic activity—and Satanic cultists, who from the beginning were suspected villains, supplanted extraterrestrials and Uncle Sam as the most popular explanation for the rash of killings. As reports of the number of mutilations increased and alarm among ranchers spread, animal pathologists were called in to investigate. Not only did they find the cattle mortality rate no higher than normal, but autopsies on the animals determined that in almost all cases the cattle had died from natural causes, or by predatory attack, and that the mutilation had been the postmortem work of scavengers, not cultists. Teeth, not knives, had been used to remove “private” organs and lips, those parts being attacked because they were the softest and most accessible. Then, amid hundreds of similarly discredited reports, several mutilations in Idaho and Montana were determined to have indeed been the work of a knife-wielder. There, evidence gathered by law enforcement officials implicated several Satanic cults operating in those states. The cults, which up to that time had allegedly preferred dogs and cats as sacrificial victims, had read about the mutilations in the papers and decided to add cattle to their ritual list. The work of the copycat cultists turned out to be truly a case of life imitating art. An astrologer named Dan Fry, host of Minneapolis radio program called Cosmic Age, admitted on a Texas talk show that he had made up the cattle mutilation rumor as a joke, but things had snowballed when the story was repeated as fact by the Huston Post and picked up from there by the wire services. Thus had Fry created an “urban legend.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
An “urban legend” is a term coined by contemporary folklorists to describe a popular story that spreads swiftly by word of mouth and is soon accepted as truth. These folk tales are always reported as having actually happened, often to the friend of a friend, which is what keeps them “immediate.” When the media picks up such stories and prints them as fact, as it did with the cattle mutilation stories, they acquire a further stamp of truth, which is why people point out that the news is not always true and is someone’s perspective and viewers should be advised to use critical thinking and ask question and do their own research. However, once again, cattle mutilations are baffling law enforcement and ranchers. FOX News published a story August 11, 2022 about the serial crime spree leaving a dozen cattle mutilated. “Mutilations differ from typical livestock deaths because the carcasses are found with body parts removed in an unusual fashion,” states Charles Couger of FOX News. In San Luis more than 10,000 mutilations have betwixt ranchers and investigators across the United States of America for decades. Nonetheless, a recent study by Psychology Today of reported “trick or treat poisonings on Halloween failed to turn up one serious injury and found that, in almost every case, the tamperings were the work of the child victim himself, in an attempt to get attention from parents and friends. Yet every Halloween, newspapers print warnings about tampered treats. And, in the mid-1980s, tales of Satanic animal mutilations have began to resurface from California to Alabama, despite the protests of investing game and animal control officials who have said that, in almost all the cases, the animal deaths were the work of predators or poachers. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The Devil, after all, has been an old favorite subject of urban legends. In 1977, for instance, the rumor was widely circulated in fundamentalist circles that the secret of McDonald’s success was that the chain donated portion of its profits each year to the Church of Satan. Corroboration of the Satanic tithing allegedly came from no less a personage than McDonald’s owner, Ray Kroc, who was reputed to have admitted to the diabolic connection while appearing on the Phil Donahue shows. In Fact, Kroc had been a guest on the Donahue show in May of 1977, but his most startling admission had been his intention to introduce the McDonald’s “Filet o’ Fish” in Cincinnati. The idea of a Satanic “pact”—trading one’s soul for Earthly wealth—is an ancient one, and it cropped up again in 1980 when rumors surfaced that the Proctor & Gamble moon-and-starts trademark was in reality a Satanic symbol, and that the company was run by Satanists. The story went that the owners of Proctor & Gamble long ago made a pact with the Devil that ensured the company’s success in exchange for putting Satan’s logo on all its products. “Proof” cited for this ludicrous claim was that a company executive had revealed the demonic truth on Donahue or 60 Minutes, depending on the version. It mattered little that Donahue and spokesmen for 60 Minutes denied any such interview ever took place. Neighbors told neighbors that they had talked to someone who saw the show, or heard it from someone who heard it from someone, etcetera. By mid-1982, Proctor’s consumer services department was getting 15,000 calls a month from people wanting to know about the company’s Satanic connections. Eventually, a counter-publicity campaign was launched, but in the end, the company wound up changing its logo. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A serious argument about what is most profoundly modern leads inevitably to the conclusion that the study of the problem of Socrates is one thing most needful. It was Socrates who made Nietzsche and Heidegger looks to the pre-Socratics. For the first time in four hundred years, it seems possible and imperative to begin all over again, to try to figure out what Plato was talking about, because it might be the best thing available. The history of classics since the Renaissance has consisted in momentary glimpses of the importance of Greece for man as man, everywhere and always, followed by long periods of merely scholarly study without any sufficient reason for it, living off the gradually dying energy provided by the original philosophic dynamos. Up to Nietzsche, the neglect of and contempt for Plato and Aristotle was the result of a belief that what they tried to do could be done much better. That is why Socrates was always in good repute. He was the skeptical seeker after the way to knowledge by means of unaided reason. He was not tired to any solution or system and thus could be seen s the originator and the inspirer who did not constrain the freedom of posterity. The current contempt for Plato and Aristotle is of an entirely different kind, for it is allied to contempt for Socrates. He corrupted them; they did not pervert him. We did not progress from Socrates, but he marked the beginning of the decline. Reason itself is rejected by philosophy itself. Thus the common thread of the whole tradition has been broke, and with it the raison d’etre od the university as we know it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Thus is was no accident that Heidegger came forward just after Hitler’s accession to power to address the university community in Freiburg as the new rector, and urged commitment to National Socialism. His argument was not without subtlety and its own special kind of irony, but in sum the decision to devote wholeheartedly the life of the mind to an emerging revelation of being, incarnated in a mass movement, was what Heidegger encouraged. That he did was not a result of his political innocence but a corollary of his critique of rationalism. That is why I have entitled this section “From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede.” The university began in spirit from Socrates’ contemptuous and insolent distancing of himself from the Athenian people, his refusal to accept any command from the Athenian people, his refusal to accept any command from them cease asking, “What is justice? What is knowledge? What is a god?” and hence doubting the common opinions about such questions, and in his serious game (in the Republic) of trying to impose the rule of philosophers on an unwilling people without respect for their “culture.” The university may have come near to its death when Heidegger joined the German people—especially the youngest part of that people, which he said had already made an irreversible commitment to the future—and put philosophy at the service of German culture. If I am right in believing that Heidegger’s teachings are the most powerful intellectual force in our times, then the crisis of the German university, which everyone saw, is the crisis of the university everywhere. It may be thought that I have devoted too much space to this idiosyncratic history of the university. However, the university, of all institutions, is most dependent on the deepest beliefs of those who participate in its peculiar life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Our present educational problems cannot seriously be attributed to bad administrators, weakness of will, lack of discipline, lack of money, insufficient attention to the three R’s, or any of the common explanations that indicate things will be set aright if we professors would just pull up our socks. All these things are the result of a deeper lack of belief in the university’s vocation. One cannot say that we must defend academic freedom when there are grave doubts about the principles underlying academic freedom. To march out to battle on behalf of the university may be noble, but it is only a patriotic gesture. Such gestures are necessary and useful for nations, but they do little for universities. Thought is all in all for universities. Today there is precious little thought about universities, and what there is does not unequivocally support the university’s traditional role. In order to find out why we have fallen on such hard times, we must recognize that the foundations of the university have become extremely doubtful to the highest intelligences. Our petty tribulations have great causes. What happened to the universities in Germany in the thirties is what has happened and is happening everywhere. The essence of it all is not social, political, psychological or economic, but philosophic. And, for those who wish to see, contemplation of Socrates is our most urgent task. This is properly an academic task. Some technologies come in disguise. Rudyard Kipling called them “technologies in repose.” They do not look like technologies, and because of that they do their work, for good or ill, without much criticism or even awareness. This applies not only to IQ tests and to polls and to all systems of ranking and grading but to credit cards, accounting procedures, and achievement tests. It applies in the educational World to what are called “academic courses,” as well. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
A course is a technology for learning. I have “taught” about two hundred of them and do not know why each one lasts exactly fifteen weeks, or why each meeting lasts exactly one lasts exactly one hour and fifty minutes. If the answer is that this is done for administrative convenience, then a course is a fraudulent technology. It is put forward as a desirable structure for learning when in fact it is only a structure for allocating space, for convenient record-keeping, and for control of faculty time. The point is that the origin of a raison d’etre for a course are concerned from us. We come to believe it exists for one reason when it exists for quite another. One characteristic of those who live in a Technopoly is that they are largely unaware of both the origins and the effects of their technologies. Perhaps the most interesting example of such lack of awareness is the widespread belief that modern business invented the technology of management. Management is a system of power and control designed to make maximum use of relevant knowledge, the hierarchical organization of human abilities, and the flow of information from bottom to top and back again. It is generally assumed that management was created by business enterprises as a rational response to the economic and technological demands of the Industrial Revolution. However, research by Alfred Chandler, Sidney Pollard, and especially Keith Hoskin and Richard Macve reveals a quite different picture and leads to a startling conclusion: modern business did not invent management; management invented modern business. The most likely place for management to have originated is, of course, in Great Britain in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. However, there is no evidence that British industry knew anything about management as late as 1830, nor did there exist anything approximating a “managerial class.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Management was created in the United States of America “out of the blue,” as Hoskin and Macve say. It was not a creation of any obvious needs of American industry, which was only a marginal force in the World economy in the mid-nineteenth century. The roots of management may be traced to a new educational system, introduced in 1817 to the United States Military Academy by the academy’s fourth superintendent, Sylvanus Thayer. Thayer made two innovations. The first, borrowed from the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, was to grade examinations by giving numerical marks. As I have previously noted, the grading of student papers originated in Cambridge University towards the end of the eighteenth century, and the practice was taken up by several schools on the Continent. Thayer’s use of this technology is probably the first instance of it in America. As every teacher knows, the numerical mark changes the entire experience and meaning of learning. It introduces a fierce competition among students by providing sharply differentiated symbols of success and failure. Grading provides an “objective” measure of human performance and creates the unshakable illusion that accurate calculations can be made of worthiness. The human being becomes, to use Michel Foucault’s phrase, “a calculable person.” Thayer’s second innovation, apparently his own invention, was a line-and-staff system. He divided the academy into two divisions, each organized hierarchically. As Hoskin and Macave describe it: “Daily, weekly and monthly reports were required, all in writing. There were continual relays of written communication and command, going from the bottom to the top of each line, before being consolidated and passed to the central ‘Staff Office.’” #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Thayer rejected the traditional leader’s role of direct, visible command. He ruled indirectly through the medium of written reports, charts, memos, personnel files, etcetera, not unlike the way a modern CEO functions. We do not know how most of the two hundred cadets at the academy reacted to Thayer’s new system (which Hoskin and Macve term the “grammatocentric principle,” meaning that everything was organized around the use of writing). However, we do know that two of them, Daniel Tyler and George Whistler, were impressed. Both were in the graduating class of 1819, and took with them their lieutenant’s rank and Thayer’s general approach to organizations. Desert Rose Industries and other manufacturers can make almost anything quickly and at low cost. That includes the tunneling machines and other equipment that made the subway system they use for shipping. Digging a tunnel from coast to coast now costs less than digging a single block under New York City used to. It was not expensive to get a deep-transit terminal installed in their basement. Just as the tents are not mere bundles of canvas, these subways are not slow things full of screeching, jolting metal boxes. They are magnetically levitated to reach aircraft speeds—as experimental Japanese trains were in the late 1980s—making it easy for Carl and Maria to give their customers quick service. There is still a road leading to the plant, but nobody’s driven a truck over it for years. They only take in materials that they will eventually ship out in products, so there is nothing left over, and no wastes to dump. One corner of the plant is full of recycling equipment. There are always some obsolete parts to get rid of, or things that have been damaged and need to be reworked. These get broken down into simpler molecules and out back together again to make new parts. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The gunk in the manufacturing ponds is water mixed with particles much finer than silt. The particles—fasteners, computers, and the rest—stay in suspension because they are wrapped in molecular jackets that keep them there. This uses the same principle as detergent molecules, which coat particles of oily dirt to float them away. Though it would not be nutritious or appetizing, one could drink the tent mix and be no worse for it. To one’s body, the parts and their jackets, and even the nanomachines, would be like so many bits of grit and sawdust. (Grandma would have called it roughage.) Carl and Maria get their power from solar cells in the road, which is the only reason they bothered having it paved. In back of their plant stands what looks like a fat smokestack. All it produces, though, is an updraft of clean, warm air. The darkly paved road, baking in the New Mexico sun, is cooler than one might expect: it soaks up solar energy and makes electricity, instead of just heat. Once the power is used, it turns back into heart, which has to go somewhere. So the heat rises from their cooling tower instead of the road, and the energy does useful work on the way. Some products, like rocket engines, are made more slowly and in a single piece. This makes them stronger and more permanent. The tents, though, do not need to be superstrong and are just for temporary use. A few days after the tents go up, the earthquake victims start to move out into new housing (permanent, better-looking, and very earthquake-resistant). The tents get folded and shipped off for recycling. Recycling things built this way is simple and efficient: nanomachines just unscrew and unsnap the connectors and sort the parts into bins again. The shipments Desert Rose gets are mostly recycled to begin with. There is no special labeling for recycled materials, because the molecular parts are the same either way. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
For convenience (and to keep the plant small), Carl and Maria get most of their parts prefabricated, even those they can make almost anything. They can even make more production equipment. In one of their manufacturing ponds, they can put together a new cabinet full of special-purpose assemblers. They do this when they want to make a new type of part in-house. Like parts, the part-assemblers are made by social-purpose assemblers. Carl even can make big vats in medium-size vats, unfolding them like tents. If Desert Rose Industries needed to double capacity, Carl and Maria could do it in just a few days. They did this once for a special order of stadium sections. Maria got Carl to recycle the new building before its shadow hurt their cactus garden. Now, let us focus on mining knowledge. Even these changes, however, are dwarfed by China’s ravenous pursuit of wealth-relevant know-how. China has become a World leader in the creation, purchase—and theft—of data, information and knowledge. As far back as the winter of 1983, soon after Deng Xiaoping shut the door on the Maoist past, we personally witnessed Chinese scientists in Beijing reverse-engineering computers and carrying out the country’s earliest experiments with fiber optics in Shanghai. The available facilities were primitive, dirty, and freezing. China was still wretchedly not very well-off financially. However, its leaders, even then, understood the importance of technology—and piracy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Today the picture is dramatically different. Up-to-date research labs are proliferating, the country’s total expenditure on research and development (R&D) amounted to about 2.79 trillion yuan (about $441.13 billion) in 2021, which is 14.2 percent year-on-years. After deducting price factors, China’s R&D spending in 2021 rose 9.4 percent year-on-year. And as we have noted in the past, thousands of United States of America—trained Chinese scientists are heading back to China. In five years, America will still be the World center of corporate research. However, China will outrank Britain, Germany, and Japan. Add China’s sharklike appetite for data, information and ideas from the outside World. To do business in China, foreign companies usually have had to transfer technology—and many agreed to do so in return for even limited access to the huge Chinese market. Nor is this hunger for know-how narrowly restricted to technology. As formerly Communist China entered into broader economic relationships with the West, it also sought practical knowledge about capitalist management, finance and business in general. As of 2022, there are 46 MBA programs offered in China—many in partnership with leading American schools such as MIT, UC/Berkeley and Northwestern. Less formally, knowledge is transferred by the more than 600,000 international students who now live and work in China—in sharp contrast to the days when foreigners were likely to be labeled spies or allowed to enter only as part of closely monitored tourist groups. Behind China’s amazing drive, therefore, we find radically changed attitudes toward all three of the deep fundamental central to economies of the future—further evidence of its intention to create the World’s leading knowledge-based economy. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Taken together, facts like these suggest an unstoppable China on a short, double-quick march to superpowerdom. Beijing, however, knows better. Recently, China watchers have begun to spin dark scenarios. Those include the possibility that China could suffer a financial crisis like the one that hit the rest of Asia in 1997-98, for example. Or that it will go through a series of ups and downs that it will attempt to mitigate with Keynesian measures. Alternatively, worriers point to a possible convergence of other troubles—an energy breakdown, and environmental crisis or something else. Or, worse, yet, a war with Taiwan in which both sides hurl missiles at each other, destabilizing the new Asia. Any or all of these could hammer the global economy in the years immediately head. One of the most pessimistic assessments of China’s future is that the nation will collapse, the revolution has grown old, the discontent of the people is explosive, state-owned enterprises are dying, Chinese banks will fail, and that ideology and politics restrain progress—and that is only part of the list. However, experts are saying the same about America. If this is true, the global financial system might have to be wheeled into the intensive-care ward. Investors, corporations and central banks around the World could all be traumatized. The price of T-shirts and toys might drop still further in the corner Wal-Mart. However, hundreds of millions of workers around the World—from iron-ore miners in Brazil to bankers in Manhattan or Tokyo—would be looking for jobs. These scenarios are dire enough. However, they overlook more startling possibilities. “They will throw their money in the streets, tossing it out like worthless trash. Their silver and gold will not save the on that day of the LORD’s anger,” reports Ezekiel 7.19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
The info-wars cast the corporation—and the work that does on in it—into a new light. Forget, for a moment, all conventional job descriptions; forget ranks; forget departmental functions. Think of the firm, instead, as a beehive of knowledge processing. In the day of the smokestack it was assumed that workers knew little of importance and that relevant information or intelligence could be gathered by top management or a tiny staff. The proportion of the work force engaged in knowledge processing was tiny. Today, by contrast, we are finding that much of what happens inside a firm is aimed at replenishing its continually decaying knowledge inventory, generating new knowledge to add to it, and upgrading simple data into information and knowledge. To accomplish this, employees constantly “import,” “export,” and “transfer” data and information. Some employees are essentially importers. These “OUT-IN” people gather information from outside the company and deliver it to their co-workers inside. Market researchers, for example,” are OUT-INers. Studying consumer preferences in the external World, they add value by interpreting what they learn, and then deliver new, higher-order information to the firm. Public relations people do the reverse. They market the firm to the World by collecting information internally and disseminating or exporting it to the outside World. They are IN-OUTers. House accounts are basically IN-IN people, gathering most of their information from inside the firm and transferring it internally as well. Good salespeople are two-way RELAYS. They disseminate information, but also collect it from outside and then report it back to the firm. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
These functions relate to flows of data, information, or knowledge. Cutting across them is a set of functions that have to do with upgrading the stock of data, information, and knowledge that the firm and its people already possess. Some mind-workers are creators, capable of finding new, surprising juxtapositions of ideas, or putting a fresh spin on an old idea; other “edit” new ideas by matching them against strategic requirements and practical considerations, then deleting those that are irrelevant. In reality, we all do all these things at various times. However, while different functions emphasize one or another, no conventional job descriptions or management texts deal with such distinctions—or their implications for power. At almost every step in this knowledge processing, some people or organizations gain, and others lose, an edge. Thus, conflicts—tiny, sometimes highly personal info-wars—are fought over things like who will or will not be invited to a meeting, whose names appear on the routing slip, who reports information to a superior directly and who, by contrast, is asked to leave it with a secretary, and so forth. These organizational battles—“micro info-wars,” so to speak—are hardly novel. They are a feature of all organizational life. They take on new significance, however, as the super-symbolic economy spreads. Since the value added through smart knowledge-processing is critical in the new system of wealth creation, 21st-century accountants will find ways to assess the new economic value added by various informational activities. The performance ratings of individuals and units may well take into account their own contribution to knowledge enhancement. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Today, a geologist who funds a huge oil strike is likely to be well rewarded by the company for adding to its reserves. Tomorrow, when knowledge resources are recognized as the most important of all, employee remuneration may well come to hinge, at least in part, on the success of each individual in adding value to the corporate knowledge reserve. In turn, we can expect even more sophisticated power struggles for the control of knowledge assets and the processes that generate them. We are already witnessing the beginnings of a change in management assumptions about the functions of the work force. Thus, all employees are increasingly expected to add not merely to the firm’s knowledge of assets in general, but to its competitive intelligence arsenal as well. A company tht does CI work for both U.S. and Japanese firms, the Japanese take a far more wholistic view of intelligence than do the Americans. While Japanese executives regard information collection as a routine part of their jobs, if you ask a typical Harvard M.B.A., it is the company librarian’s job. That narrow assumption, however, is fading. At General Mills every employee is expected to engage in competitive intelligence gathering. Even janitors when buying supplies are supposed to ask vendors what competing firms are buying and what they are doing. Telephone companies in the United States of American runs seminars and distribute literature explaining the methods and benefits to CI to their executives. Bayer even rotates executives through its CI staff to teach them the importance of this kind of information collection. GE links CI directly into its strategi planning. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Pushed to extremes, such measures inch us toward the nation of the corporation as a total info-war fighting machine. Every science is a mutilated octopus. If its tentacles were not clipped to stumps, it would feel it ways into disturbing contacts. To a believer, the effect of the contemplation of science is of being in the presence of the good, the true, and the beautiful. However, what he is awed by is mutilation. To our crippled intellects, only the maimed is what we call understandable, because the unclipped ramifies into all other things. According to my aesthetics, what is mean by beautiful is symmetrical deformation. In very various strata of Iranian literature from the most ancient texts of the Avesta to the poetry of Firduis, we find elements of the saga of the primeval king Yima or Yama, a figure transmuted from primeval Indo-Aryan tradition into Indian and Iranian mythology. He “whose gain is like the sun,” the “great shepherd”—he has rightly been explained as the ancient shepherd-god of the Persians seen through the eyes of the peasant—is born immortal, but become mortal through his offence. The highest god, Ahura Mazdah, invited him to tend and protect religion, his, Ahura Mazdah’s religion, and then, when Yima has declared himself unfit for this, he bids him foster, multiply and guard the World, his, Ahura Mazdah’s World. This Yima is prepared to do; he assumes dominion over the World and it shall be a World in which none of the destructive powers will have a part, neither cold nor hot wind, nor sickness, nor death. Already previously he had besought the gods with sacrifices to grant him that in his real man and cattle should be released from death, and water and trees from drought. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
He besought them to let him become the ruler of all countries, them shall take all evil from off Ahura Mazdah’s creatures. This is now granted him. Three hundred year elapse, and since none of the creatures dies the Earth overflows “with small cattle and great cattle and dogs and birds and red flaming fires.” Called by Ahura Mazdah, Yima advances “to light, at midday, towards the path of the sun” and, with the gold-embellished goad and friendly incantation received from the god, urges on the Earth to stretch apart until it has become greater by a third of its size. This is repeated twice more: the Earth has now doubled its size, and all creatures live upon it at their pleasure. However, now Ahura Mazdah gathers together the gods and the best men, Yima at their peak. To him he announces that upon the World given over to materiality (here it sounds as though, in consequence of Yima’s refusal, it was devoid of spirituality) there will descend the greater winter, which will first cover it in snow and then flood it in the thaw, so that no creature will be able any more to put its feet upon the ground. Then Yima is instructed to erect a mighty pen, like a citadel, and to secure therein the seed of the best and most beautiful of all living and growing things. It is done. Then, however, Yima vouchsafes the access of demonry, which he had hitherto held in coercion, and takes the lie into his mind by lauding and blessing himself. Immediately the regal glory, the lustre of good-fortune, which has till then irradiated his brow, leaves him in the shape of a raven and he becomes mortal. “And I would not that ye think that I know of myself—not of the temporal but of the spiritual, not of the carnal mind but of God,” reports Alma 36.4. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Fixed is Better than the Evolutionary
They appeared as though out of nowhere, or so it must have seemed to the countless pedestrians who came across the black-clad missionaries hawking their books and pamphlets on the streets of major U.S. cities. They were members of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. Their message was one of Apocalyptic prophecy infused with an odd theology of Christian/Satanic reconciliation. Of their origins, intentions and activities, there has been much dispute and allegation. One thing, however, remains certain: The Process has left an indelible watermark upon the post-psychedelic era, and have become a part of that era’s urban folklore. The Process is characterized as a cult that never quite got off the ground and which experienced a major theological and organizational schism from the mid-1970s. Some allude that their existence is a sort of modern Thuggee or Satanic underground, in which the Process is a central organizing factor. There used to be and still may be a family residence for The Process house in the Haight-Ashbury region of San Francisco, California. There was rumored to be a lot of dark goings-on within. The Process was allegedly part of a vast cryptocracy of serial murders who supposedly had links with the police and judicial establishment, thereby evading responsibility for their cultic crimes. However, The Process nor its founders were every personally accused of these crimes—but there is an overall impression that they are guilty nonetheless. The Process is known for having “chant sessions,” “midnight meditations,” and other activities. They at one time and still may have The Process coffee house in Chicago. The Process discusses how soulless technology and bureaucracy has imposed on our lives. Ecology had not yet become the catch slogan yuppie materialists, yahoo politicians and quarterly stockholder reports. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22
Much like now, people felt constricted under the thumb of a debased age in which advertising slogans supplanted poetry, contractual agreements replaced love, and televangelism masqueraded as spirituality. Unlike the alien and decadent garb of the Guru cults from the East, The Process had a distinctly Westerly, neo-Gothic exterior: Neatly-trimmed shoulder-length hair and equally neat beards, all set-off by tailored magician’s capes with matching black uniforms. My earliest memories of The Process are associated with bitter subzero nights, accompanied by a group of friends as we hurried down deserted back streets on Chicago’s North side, a section of the city where some of the last remaining cobblestones had not yet been covered with asphalt. The glitter of stars could still be seen in the night sky as the mercury vapor lamps had not yet been installed there. Process headquarters was a four-story Victorian house that also doubled as living quarters for the majordomos of the Chicago chapter. We entered that bitter chill Winter night past the yellow exterior porch lights and encountered several young men in black uniforms with black caps who stood talking to a small group of people in conventional clothes. A tall thin man with a neat fringe of beard greeted us cheerfully with the salutation, “As It Is.” I rejoindered, “So Be It.” I asked him about the coffee house some other Processians told me about, and he directed us toward a back room, where we would find a staircase leading to the coffee house in the basement. Were descended the narrow, curving stairs to a room in the basement where some music emanated from. “As It Is,” hailed an attractive, petite woman with an upper-class British accent. “So Be It,” we replied. She seated us at a table and gave us menus. We ordered tea and listened to the recorded folk music of John Renbourn and Pentangle. It seemed the perfect accompaniment to the setting. The coffee house was low ceilinged, with curtains hanging on the ground-level windows. Second-hand tables, chairs and benches comprised the sparse décor. A candle burned in the center of each table. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22
Several days earlier I had run into a pretty young woman with an English accent dressed in Process garb on Wabash Avenue Downtown Chicago. She handed me a leaflet listing the group’s activities and invited us to the group’s coffee house. Later that day I stopped by at a psychedelic head shop where I was hawking my poster art. One of the workers was familiar with the Process and showed me the Fear issue. The colors and graphics were very eye-catching and impressively put-together, and I pored over its contents. At the coffee house we experienced no hard-sell proselytizing, in fact we were all a bit disappointed until it was announced that the “Sabbath assembly” was to begin in several minutes on the top floor of the house. Anticipating the adventure of it, we climbed the narrow stairs to the unfinished attic of the building, the roof-beams and wooden rafters rising sharply to the roof’s steep peak. A could dozen people were already seated in a semi-circle on floor cushions. At the center of the circle was a low round table upon which a black and red altar cloth hung down to the floor in neat folds. In front of the windows hung a back curtain with a red Goat of Mendes in its center. To its left was a large gong. To one side of the altar was a steel container of water, to the other side a steel container with a burning pyre. Standing in front of the goat’s head symbol was a man wearing a tabard, a ceremonial device such as a Catholic or Anglican priest might wear. In the center of the tabard was a symbol of a sort of omega confirmation. We were to learn later that this man was called the Sacrifist. At the entrance of the room stood another man dressed in an ankle-length black robe underneath a tabard. On the center of it was the Process Symbol of Four P’s, which formed a swastika-like device. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22
This celebrant was known as the Evangelist. The Sacrifist carried a red-leather bound book at his side and the Evangelist a similar one of black. By the early 1970s, the decline of the counterculture and the use of hallucinogens led to a waning popular interest in the occult. Spiritual realization and wicca groups lost membership as people once more became fixated on material goals. The “me” generation, forerunners of the yuppies, came into prominence. For a while, groups like the Church of Satan, which exhorted egotism and a pragmatic, selfish brand of ritual magic, thrived, but by 1975, interest in all magical groups dropped as the economy took an upturn and people got what they wanted through more practical means. Around the Zarathustrian doctrine, which it resists it, the question grows and grows, till the West Iranian religion develops the myth of Zurvan, Time Unbonded in reply. We only know it from a later version, but its original content is unmistakable. Zurvan arises out of the primal sleep, as it seems, and sacrifices murmuring (the song of the generation of the gods, of which we know through Herodotus, is presumably meant), for a thousand years, to obtain the son, Ahura Mazdah, who would create Heaven and Earth. It would be beside the point to ask to whom he is sacrificing: similarly without recipient, the primeval Indian gods also sacrifice (or sacrifice themselves) that out of them may arise the World. After all the vain sacrifice, Zurvan is overcome by doubt: “What avails sacrifice? Perhaps being is not?” Then arose two in the womb: the Wise Lord from the sacrifice, from the doubt the Wicked Spirit. But Zurvan is obviously “fluid” deity. Evil arises in him through his Fall. He does not choose, he doubts. Doubt is unchoice, indecision. Out of it arises evil. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22
We must note that the Wicked Spirit, Angra Mainyu, the well-known Ahriman, is here not the son of Ahura Mazdah, but his brother; Ahura Mazdah, Ormuzd, is, however, no longer a primal god, he enters at the beginning into being, and now precisely as the Only-good One. Thus here too the twins stand in radical antithesis to one another, but here, in contradistinction to the twin-myth of the Avesta, the antithesis of the one to the other is not explicitly stated, nor is the coming World-process between the two of them announced; we hear nothing of good and evil and their mutual relationship; we merely watch the appearance of the protagonists in the nascent cosmic conflict. Yet by what is recounted of the primal god himself we are led not less deep than there, and perhaps deeper, into the sphere of the question what good and evil are. There is was deception and truth, deception in sense of being deceptive, truth in the sense of being true, which confronted one another; here doubt of being is the evil, the good is “knowledge,” belief in being, against which Zurvan transgresses. Here it is ultimately a question of fidelity and infidelity to being. However, some within the Zurvan community could not tolerate the notion of a divine Fall. Of these, some supposed that the time-god had gone astray as to being at a particular moment, but that from the beginning something bad, either bad thinking or a corruption of the essence, had been admixed into him, and from this evil made its start; these are evidently reverting to the Avestic doctrine, though a modified form. However, others said Zurvan brought forth both, in order to mingle good with evil, from which it is clearly inferred that only through the gradated abundance of such inter-mixtures can the full manifoldness of things arise; here the fundament of the Iranian tradition is abandoned: good and evil are no longer irreconcilable principia, but utilizable qualities, before whose utilisability the question of an absolute worth and worthlessness vanishes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22
The fundament of another tradition is adopted, when in the opinion of a third of these sects Ahriman is an outcast angel who was cursed for his disobedience. About that, so end the report in this connection, much can be said. However, there is a fragment of the Avesta which runs: “All good thoughts, all good words, all good deed, I do consciously. All evil thoughts, all evil words, all evil deeds, I do unconsciously.” From here a path leads to the psychological problem of evil, as it first evolved in early Christendom. The character of the experience Socrates represents is important because it is the soul of the university. The rich drama of Socrates, the early philosopher, who came to the attention of the city because he was a philosopher, presents all the questions of freedom of thought from all the angles, without any kind of doctrinairism, and hence provides us with a fresh view of the importance and also of the difficulties of such freedom. From the Republic, which really takes seriously only the demands of knowledge, to the Laws, which gives full attention to the competing demands of political life, Socrates as perfecter and as dissolver of the community reveals all the facets of his activity. The difficulty he and the other philosophers contend with from the law is not to be confounded with society’s prejudice against outsiders, dissenters or nonconformists but is, at least apparently, a result of an essential opposition between the two highest claims of a man’s loyalty—his community and his reason. That opposition can only be overcome if the state is rational, as in Hegel, of if reason is abandoned, as in Nietzsche. However that may be, we have a record, unparalleled in its detail and depth, of this first appearance of philosophy, and we can apprehend the natural, or at least primitive, responses to it, prior to philosophy’s effect on the World. This provides a view of the beginning at a time when we may be witnessing the end, partly because we no longer know that beginning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22
The poetry written about Socrates by Plato and Xenophon is already in the defensive mode, a rehabilitation of the condemned man. The first statement of the city’s reaction to Socrates is made by Aristophanes. What luck Socrates had! Not only did he command the pens of Plato and Xenophon; he also was the central figure of the greatest work of the consummate genius of the comedy. The Clouds often arouses indignation in those who care little for Socrates but think serious matters are not laughing matters. Socrates’ fate and Aristophanes’ possible contribution to it trouble them. However, Socrates was probably not of their persuasion. He laughed and joked on the day of his death. He and Aristophanes share a certain levity. Aristophanes does present a ridiculous Socrates and takes the point of view of the vulgar, to whom Socrates does look ridiculous. However, Aristophanes also ridicules the vulgar. Reading him we, indeed, laugh at the wise as do the unwise, but we also laugh at the unwise as to the wise. Above all we laugh at the anger of the unwise against the wise. The Socrates of The Clouds is a man who despises what other people care about and cares about what they despise. He spends his life investigating nature, worrying about gnats and stars, denying the existence of the gods because they are not to be found in nature. His maps have only a tiny dot where Athens looms large to its citizens. Law and convention (nomos) mean nothing to him, because they are not natural but manmade. His companions are pale-faced young men totally devoid of common sense. In this academy, which has established itself in the free atmosphere of Athens, these eccentrics carry on their activities without appearing to be other than harmless cranks. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22
They are poor, without any fixed means of support. Socrates receives gifts and apparently countenances minor thefts, literally to keep body and soul together. There is no morality, but they are not vicious people, because their only concern is their studies. Socrates is utterly indifferent to honor or luxury. Aristophanes recaptures for us the absurdity of a grown man who spends his time thinking about gnats’ anuses. We have been too persuaded of the utility of science to perceive how far the scientist’s perspective is from that of a gentleman, how shocking and petty the scientist’s interests appear to a man who is concerned with war and peace, justice, freedom and glory. Aside from the occasional surfacing of an adolescent outlaw group, such as the Black Magic Cult in Northglenn, or a similar cult of high schoolers in Lake County, Illinois, in 1972, and a flurry of rumors of Satanic cattle sacrifices in the Midwest, all was quiet on the Satanic front. As we stood in front of the goat’s head altar at The Process house, slowly our eyes adjusted to the light of white and red candles. After a moment of hushed silence, the two began to chant: “Contact reaching to the stars through the spirit of Christ; knowledge of the Universe, He is the way of life.” Sacrifist: “The Final Reckoning.” Evangelist: “An End a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “Christ and Satan joined!” Evangelist: “The Lamb and the Goat.” Together: “Pure Love, descended from the Pinnacle of Heaven, united with Pure Hatred raised from the Depths of Hell.” Sacrifist: “Repayment of the Debt.” Evangelist: “Fulfillment of the Promise.” Sacrifist: “All Conflicts are Resolved.” Evangelists: “An End and a New Beginning.” Sacrifist: “The End of Hell and the Beginning of Heaven.” Evangelists: “The End of Darkness and the Beginning of Light.” Sacrifist: “The End of War and the Beginning of Peace.” Evangelist: “The Hatred and the Beginning of Love.” Sacrifist: “The End is Now. The Beginning is yet to come.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 22
After the pronouncements, we read a series of positive and up-tempo hymns from books that had been passed around. Another Processian got up and read Process material concerning the Gods Jehovah, Lucifer, Satan and Christ, and their respective roles in the Universe. Another Processian strummed a guitar in accompaniment. At the conclusion, the Sacrifist rung the gong. The Evangelist began reciting and was followed by more singing. The gong sounded again and the Sacrifist spoke: “All those Initiates who wish to rededicate their lives on the service of Christ and the three great Gods of the Universe, come forward and kneel before me.” A woman got up from the circle and knelt before the Sacrifist, and the Sacrifist continued: “In the name of the Lord Christ, and in the name of the Lord Satan, I accept you as an initiate of The Process, Church of the Final Judgment. As It Is.” The kneeling initiate countered: “So Be It.” My friends and I discussed our experience at Process headquarters could only agree that it was pleasant, but we had not yet drawn any hard conclusions. In the following months I noticed the presence of biker-types at the coffee hose, who seem to be employed as bodyguards for the headquarters. Little of a theological nature was discussed at the coffee house, and occasionally a Processian would play guitar and sing Process-inspired songs, much of it beautifully melodic. In the Spring the Victorian headquarters on Demming Place was set aside as living quarters for full-time members and was thereafter closed to the general public. Public activities were moved to a newly acquired lost above a store in Chicago’s Old Town District on North Wall Street. Old Town, like Greenwich Village and Haight-Ashbury, was the countercultural headquarters. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22
Focusing on the nation, problems arise when a politician appears to have little chance of reflection. The problem becomes even more acute with a lame duck. From the point of view of the public, a Politian facing an end of career can be dangerous because of the increased temptation to seek private goals rather than maintain a pattern of cooperation with the electorate for the attainment of mutually rewarding goals. Since the turnover of political leaders is a necessary part of democratic control, the problem must be solved another way. Here, political parties are useful because they can be held accountable by the public for the acts of their elected members. The voters and the parties are in a long-term relationship, and this gives the parties an incentive to select candidates who will not abuse their responsibilities. And if a leader is discovered giving in to temptation, the voters can take this into account in evaluating the other candidates of the same party in the next election. The punishment of the Republican party by the electorate after Watergate shows that parties are indeed held responsible for the defections of their leaders, which is something many politicians should keep in mind. In general, the institutional solutions to turnover need to involve accountability beyond the individual’s term in a particular position. In an organizational or business setting, the best way to secure this accountability would be to keep track not only of the person’s success in that position, but also the state in which the position was left to the next occupant. For example, if an executive sought a quick gain by double-crossing a colleague just before transferring to a new plant, this fact should be taken into account in evaluating that executive’s performance. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22
Cooperation Theory has implications for individual choice as well as for the design of institutions. Speaking personally, one of my biggest surprises in working on this project has been the value of provocability. I came to this project believing one should be slow to anger. The results of the Prisoner’s Dilemma indicates that it is actually better to respond quickly to a provocation. It turns out that if one waits to respond to uncalled for defections, there is a risk of sending the wrong signal. The longer defections are allowed to go unchallenged, the more likely it is that the other player will draw the conclusion that defection can pay. And the more strongly this patterned is established, the harder it will be to break it. The implication is that it is better to be provocable sooner, rather than later. The success of TIT FOR TAT certainly illustrates this point. By responding right away, it gives the quickest possible feedback that a defection will not pay. The response to potential violations of arms control agreements illustrates this point. Russian has occasionally taken step which appear to be designed to probe the limits of its agreement with the United States of America. The sooner the United States of America detects and responds to these Russian probes, the better. Waiting for them to accumulate only risks the need for a response so large as to evoke yet more trouble. The speed of response depends upon the time required to detect a given choice by the other players. The shorter this time is, the more stable cooperation can be. A rapid detection means that the next move in the interaction comes quickly, thereby increasing the shadow of the future as represented by the parameter. For this reason, the only arms control agreement which can be stable are those whose violations can be detected soon enough. The critical requirement is that violations can be detected before they can accumulate to such an extent that the victim’s provocability is no longer enough to prevent the challenger from having an incentive to defect. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22
The results concerning the value of provocability are complemented by the theoretical analysis of what it takes for a nice rule to be collectively stable. In order for a nice rule to be able to resist invasion, the rule must be provocable by the very first direction of the other individual. Theoretically, the response need not come immediately, and it need not occur with certainty, but it must have a real probability of coming eventually. The important thing is that the other individual does not wind up having an incentive to defect. Of course, provocability has a danger. The danger is that is the other individual does try a defection, retaliation will lead to further retaliation, and the conflict will degenerate into an unending strong of mutual defections. This can certainly be a serious problem. For example, in many cultures blood feuds between clans can continue to undimished for years and even generations (Black-Michaud 1975). This continuation of the conflict is due to the echo effect: each side responds to the other’s last defection with a new defection of its own. One solution is to find a central authority to police both sides, imposing a rule of law. Unfortunately this solution is often not available. And even when there is a rule of law, the costs of using the courts for routine affairs such as enforcement of business contracts can be prohibitive. When the use of a central authority is impossible or too expensive, the best method is to rely on a strategy which will be self-policing. Such a self-policing strategy must be provocable, but the response must not be too great lest it lead to an unending echo of defections. For example, suppose that Russia (then the Soviet Union) in conjunction with the other Warsaw Pact countries undertakes a partial mobilization of its armed forces throughout Eastern Europe. This mobilization would give the Soviets an added advantage if conventional war were to break out. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22
A useful response from NATO would be to increase its own state of alter. If additional troops moved from the Soviet Union to Eastern Europe, NATO should respond with additional troops moved from the United States of America. It is also recommended that this type of response be automatic so that it can be made clear t the Soviets that such increases in NATO readiness are standard procedure and take place only after Soviet mobilizations. It is also recommended that the response be limited, say one American division moved for every three Soviet divisions mobilized. In effect, this would help limit the echo effects. Limited provocability is a useful feature of a strategy designed to achieve stable cooperation. While TIT FOR TAT responds with an amount of defection exactly equal to the other’s defection, in many circumstances the stability of cooperation would be enhanced if the response were slightly less than the provocation. Otherwise, it would be all too easy to get into a rut of unending responses to each other’s last defection. There are several ways for an echo effect to be controlled. One way is for the individual who first defected to realize that the other’s response need not call for yet another defection. For example, the Soviets might realize that NATO’s mobilization was merely a response to their own, and hence need not be regarded as threatening. Of course the Soviets might not see it that way, even if the NATO response was automatic and predictable. Therefore, it is also useful if the NATO response is somewhat less than proportional to the Soviet mobilization. Then if the Soviet response is also somewhat less than the NATO mobilization, the escalation of preparations can become stabilized, and then possibly reversed for a return to normal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22
Fortunately, friendship is not necessary for cooperation to evolve. As the trench warfare example demonstrates, even antagonists can learn to develop cooperation based upon reciprocity. The requirement for the relationship is not friendship, but durability. The good thing about international relations is that the major powers can be quite certain they will be interacting with each other year after year. Their relationship may not always be mutually rewarding, but it is durable. Therefore, next year’s interactions should cast a large shadow on this year’s choices, and cooperation has a good chance to evolve eventually. Foresight is not necessary either, as the biological examples demonstrate. However, without foresight, the evolutionary process can take a very long time. Fortunately, humans do have foresight and use it to speed up what would otherwise be a blind process of evolution. The individuals who were able to use the result of the first round in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, including the value of reciprocity, to anticipate what would work well on the second round end up gaining foresight. Foresight pays off with substantially more rewarding results. The result for the second round of negotiations is typically more sophisticated than the first. Cooperation based upon reciprocity was firmly established. The various attempts at exploitation of the unsophisticated entries of the first round all failed in the environment of the second round, demonstrating that the reciprocity of strategies like TIT FOR TAT is extraordinarily robust. Perhaps it is not too much to hope that people can use the surrogate experience of these rules to learn the value of reciprocity for their own Prisoner’s Dilemma interactions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22
Once the word gets out that reciprocity works, it becomes the thing to do. If you expect others to reciprocate your defections as well as your cooperations, you will be wise to avoid trying to start any trouble. Moreover, you will be wise to defect after someone else defects, showing that you will not be exploited. Thus you too will be wise to use a strategy based upon reciprocity. So will everyone else. In this manner the appreciation of the value of reciprocity becomes self-reinforcing. Once it gets going, it gets stronger and stronger. This is the essence of the ratchet effect which was established in a past reports: once cooperation based upon reciprocity gets established in a population, it cannot be overcome even by a cluster of individuals who try to exploit the others. The establishment of stable cooperation can take a long time if it is based upon blind forces of evolution, or it can happen rather quickly if its operations can be appreciated by intelligent individuals. The empirical and theoretical results of these reports might help people see more clearly the opportunities for reciprocity latent in their World. Knowing the concepts that accounted for the results of the two rounds of the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and knowing the reasons and conditions for the success of reciprocity, might provide some additional foresight. We might come to see more clearly that there is a lesson in the fact that TIT FOR TAT succeeds without doing better than anyone with whom it interacts. It succeeds by eliciting cooperation from others, not by defeating them. We are used to thinking about competitions in which there is only one winner, competitions such as football or chess. However, the World is rarely like that. In a vast range of situations mutual cooperation can be better for both sides than mutual defection. The key to doing well lies not in overcoming others, but in eliciting their cooperation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22
Today, the most important problems facing humanity are in the arena of international relations, where independent, egoistic nations face each other in a state of near anarchy. Many of these problems take the form of an iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma. Examples can include arms races, nuclear proliferation, crisis bargaining, and military escalation. Of course, a realistic understanding of these problems would have to take into account many factors not incorporated into the simple Prisoner’s Dilemma formulation, such as ideology, bureaucratic policies, commitments, coalitions, mediation, and leadership. Nevertheless, we can use all the insights we can get. From the ancient Greeks to contemporary scholarship all political theory addresses one fundamental question: How can the human race, whether for selfish or more cosmopolitan ends, understand and control the seemingly blind forces of history? In the contemporary World this question has become especially acute because of the development of nuclear weapons. The advice to players of the Prisoner’s Dilemma might serve as good advice to national leaders as well: do not be envious, do not be the first to defect, reciprocate both cooperation and defection, and do not be too clever. Likewise, techniques we have discussed for promoting cooperation in the Prisoner’s Dilemma might also be useful in promoting cooperation in international politics. The core of the problem of how to achieve rewards from cooperation is that trial and error in learning is slow and painful. The conditions may all be favorable for long-run developments, but we may not have the time to wait for blind processes to move us slowly toward mutually rewarding strategies based upon reciprocity. Perhaps if we understand the process better, we can use our foresight to speed up the evolution of cooperation. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22
Though HAGOTH, with program that could detect if someone over the phone was being dishonest, has virtually disappeared, its idea survives—for example, in the machines called “lie detectors.” In American these are taken very seriously by police officers, lawyers, and corporate executive who ever more frequently insist that their employees be subjected to lie-detector tests. As for intelligence tests, they not only survive but flourish, and have been supplemented by vocational aptitude tests, creativity test, mental-health tests, tests that base attractions on pleasures of the flesh, and even material compatibility tests. One would think that two people who have lived together for a number of years would have noticed for themselves whether they get along or not. However, in Technopoly, these subjective forms of knowledge have no official status, and must be confirmed by tests administered by experts. Individual judgments, after all, are notoriously unreliable, filled with ambiguity and plagued by doubt. Tests and machines are not. Philosophers may agonize over the questions “What is truth?” “What is intelligence?” “What is the good life?” However, in Technopoly there is no need for such intellectual struggle. Machines eliminate complexity, doubt, and ambiguity. They work swiftly, they are standardized, and the provide us with numbers that you can see and calculate with. They tell us that when eight green lights go on someone is speaking the truth. That is all there is to it. They tell us that a score of 136 means more brains than a score of 104. This is Technopoly’s version of magic. #RandolphHarris 17 of 22
What is significant about magic is that it directs our attention to the wrong place. And by doing so, evokes in us a sense of wonder rather than understanding. In Technopoly, we are surrounded by the wondrous effects of machines and are encouraged to ignore the ideas embedded in them. Which means we become blind to the ideological meaning of our technologies. In considering here the ideological biases of medical technology, let us begin with a few relevant facts. Although the U.S.A. and England have equivalent life-expectancy rates, American doctors perform six times ad many cardiac bypass operations per capita as English doctors do. American doctors perform more diagnostic tests than doctors do in France, Germany, or England. An American woman has two to three times the chance of having a hysterectomy as her counterpart in Europe; 60 percent of the hysterectomies performed in America are done on women under the age of forty-four. American doctors do more prostate surgery per capita than do doctors anywhere in Europe, and the United States of America leads the industrialized World in the rate of cesarean-section operations—50 to 200 percent higher than in most other countries. When American doctors decide to forgo surgery in favor of treatment by drugs, they give higher dosages than doctors elsewhere. They prescribe about twice as many antibiotics as do doctors in the United Kingdom and commonly prescribe antibiotics when bacteria are likely to be present, whereas European doctors tend to prescribe antibiotics only if they know that the infection is caused by bacteria and is also serious. American doctors use far more X-rays per patient than doctors in other countries. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22
In one review of the extent of X-ray use, a radiologist discovered cases in which fifty t one hundred X-rays had been taken of a single patient when five would have been sufficient. Other surveys have shown that, for almost one-third of the patients, the X-ray could have been omitted or deferred on the basis of available clinical data. We have been able to use basic principles to design and build a simple molecule that folds up the way we want it to. This is really the first real example of a design protein structure, designed from scratch, not by taking an already existing structure and tinkering with it. Although scientists do the work, the work itself is really a form of engineering. The process makes this clear: After you have made it, the next step is to find out whether our protein did what you expected it to do. Did it fold? Did it pass ions across bilayers [such as cell membranes]? Does it have a catalytic function [speeding specific chemical reactions]? And that is tested using the appropriate experiment. More than likely, it will not have done what you wanted it to do, so you have to find out why. Now, a good design has in it a contingency plan for failure and helps you learn from mistakes. Rather than designing a structure that would take a year or more to analyze, you design it so that it can be assayed for given function or structure in a matter of days. Many groups are pursuing design today, including academic researchers like Jane and Dave Richardson at the Duke University, Bruce Erickson at the University of North Carolina, and Tom Blundell, Robin Leatherbarrow, and Alan Fersht in Britain. The successes have stated to roll in. Japan, however, is unique in having an organization devoted exclusively to such projects: the Protein Engineering Research Institute (PERI) in Osaka. In 1990, PERI announced the successful designs and construction of de novo protein several times larger than any built before. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22
Extra-intelligence can squeeze untold billions of fat and waste out of the economy. It potentially represents an enormous leap forward—the substitution of brainpower and imagination not merely for capital, energy, and resources, but for brutalizing labor as well. However, whether extra-intelligence produces a “better” way of life will depend partly on the social and political intelligence that guides its overall development. The more automated and extra-intelligent our networks become, the more human decision-making is hidden from view, and the more dependent we all become on preprogrammed events based on concepts and assumptions that few understand and that are sometimes not even willingly disclosed. Before long the power of computers will leap forward because f parallel processing, artificial intelligence, and other studding innovations. Speech recognition and automatic translation will, no doubt, come into wide use, along with high-definition visual displays ad concert-class sounds. The same networks now routinely carry voice, data, imagines, cable, Internet, and other information in other forms. All this raises profound philosophical questions. Some see in all this the coming monopolization of knowledge. The moment of truth comes when the matter of the ownership and control of the new information banks…[strikes] with a vengeance. This is the specter of a global private monopoly of information. That fear is now far too simple. The issue is not whether one giant global private monopoly will control all information—which seems highly unlikely—but who will control the endless conversations and reconversions of it made possible by extra-intelligence, as data, information, and knowledge flow through the nervous system of the super-symbolic economy. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22
Baffling new issues about the uses and misuses of knowledge will arise to confront business and society as a whole. They will no longer simply reflect Bacon’s truth that knowledge is power, but the higher level of truth that, in the super-symbolic economy, it is knowledge about knowledge that counts most. I.T. and telecommunications, however, are not the only advanced technologies that can contribute to a real war on poverty. India has one of the most successful operational space programs running in the developing World, with capabilities to design, develop, fabricate and launch its own communications and remote sensing satellite. It is also planning to send a scientific payload to go around the moon using its own rocket. Once more, this may seem irrelevant to the less affluent—your land is subject to sudden flooding or you are among the thousands saved from drowning with the help of satellite-based disaster-warning systems and remote sensing technologies. Or if you are among the 100,000 patients of the Regional Cancer Center in Thiruvananthapuram who once had to travel extremely long distance, often more than one, and at high cost, for treatment or follow-up care. The RCC has now set up six peripheral centers. All six are teleclinics linked to the main facility by the Internet—and the number of necessary follow-up visits has fallen by more than 30 percent. The Indian Space Research Organization has also created satellite links between big, multi-specialty hospitals and eight remote healthy centers to allow the exchange of patients’ records, imagines and data from medical instruments, along with live video and audio contact. All this means that doctors in central locations can help guide medics in the remote rural villages. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22
In biotechnology, India could generate $5 billion and up to a million new jobs in the coming five years. India’s Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority has agreed to allow insurance firms to put money into biotech, and the government has made it easier for foreign venture capitalist to invest. It is in this sector, as we will see shortly, that some of the most important tools for the reduction of poverty may well be found. And not just in India. Many of the advances we see in India are still either experimental or limited. They are patchy and not yet systemically integrated. However, as more pieces of the knowledge-based wealth system are laid in place and begin to interact and reinforce one another, their payoffs will increase combinatorially, if not exponentially, as happened in the past when different components of the industrial wealth system—social, institutional, political and culture—came together. India faces many of the same social, political and cultural challenges we find in China—corruption, infirmary, massive environmental problems, the need for institutional reinvention and generational conflict, to name a few. Externally, while China worries about Taiwan, India worries about a shaky, nuclear-armed Pakistan and the ever-bloody struggle against Muslim secessionists in Kashmir. What is more, and unlike China ate present, India faces caste conflict and intermittent murderous battles between Hindu and Muslim fanatics. Despite all this, India knows it cannot delay a fresh assault on poverty—and it cannot win that attack with smokestacks alone. It also cannot win so long as most of its population remains doomed to a low-productivity peasant existence, no matter how much small-scale “appropriate technology” is introduced. Neither a Second Wave strategy nor a First Wave strategy is enough. “Believest thou that there is no God? I say unto you, Nay, thou knowest that there is a God, but thou lovest that lucre more than Him,” reports Alma 11.24. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22
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Find a Way to Have Your Own Mind
Everyone is God and the Devil, for together Satan and Christ inhabit everyone. Like Christ and Satan, many people are both metaphorically crucified and sent to hell. Anything that is not created out of the depths of loneliness is not a creation, only a production, and has no soul to sustain it. Many people who claim to be waiting for the second coming are not genuine, often they are just waiting for a chance to get on the second crucifixion. A few of them are already bargaining for the television rights lest they get caught with their pants down by an unknown contender making a surprise bid for the number one spot. What they fail to realize is that the twenty first-century savior is going to outfox them all by, yes, he is going t crucify himself, thus getting a jump on his competitors. Not only that, but his loyal followers will be standing there beside him, not just gawking or taking notes, but yes, sports lovers, actually crucifying themselves right along with their leader. And they stand, eyes wild. It is hard to see because the light is getting so bright, but it seems that each one of these men and women is armed with a golden hammer and a handful of plutonium spikes. They are standing in a circle around a tower, on the breast of a hill in the midst of a slum, and they are actually nailing themselves to the ground, fellow Americans, and some of them are nailing each other to the ground—let us have a slow motion replay of that last bit of actions—wonderful—and now it appears that these people are actually driving these spikes in rhythm and singing some sort of spiritual or worksong!—word just in from our computers indicates that the language they are singing in has never been spoke on Earth before—perhaps that is why they are singing it instead—and ladies and gentlemen, the modern messiah has just announced that as soon as he is sure these spikes have been driven deeply enough, he and his disciples will rise, that is right, folks, they are going to rise into the Heavens, and since they are so, well, attached to the Earth, they are going to drag it along behind them! #RandolphHarris 1 of 19
Wow! Sounds like they have got their work cut out for them, eh? Lucky you can just sit in your armchair and wait for it to come on tv! They seem to be nearly ready for the Big Drag now…hard to tell what is actually happening from down here, though, what with all the blood and thunder and fire and screaming—maybe I will just step up the hill here a bit, and get a closer look…might be a little risky, but it is my job to get the truth, before it gets me. The Enlightenment thinkers understood themselves to be making a most daring innovation: according to Machiavelli, modern philosophy was to be politically effective, while Plato and Aristotle, and all the ancients who followed them since Socrates founded political philosophy were politically ineffective. Machiavelli follows Callicles in Plato’s Gorgias, who ridicules Socrates for being unable to defend himself, to avert insults or slaps in the face. The vulnerability of the philosopher would seem to be the starting place for the new reflection and the renewal of philosophy. This may seem trivial to many today, but the entire philosophic tradition, ancient and modern, took the relation of mind to society as the most fruitful beginning point for understanding the human situation. Certainly the first philosophy of which we have a full account begins with the trial and execution of the philosopher. And Machiavelli, the inspirer of the great philosophical systems of modernity, starts from this vulnerability of reason within the political order and makes it his business to correct it. Some might say it was not concern with the fate of philosophers but the wish, In Bacon’s phrase, to ease man’s estate that motivated the modern thinkers. This, however, comes down to the same thing—a criticism of the ancient philosophers for their impotence, and a reflection on the relation of knowledge to civil society. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19
The ancients were always praising virtue, but men were not made more virtuous as a result. Everywhere there were rotten regimes, tyrants persecuting peoples, rich exploiting the less affluent, computer hackers robbing people of their hard earn money through various means, nobles keeping down citizens men insufficiently protected by laws or arms, et cetera. Wise men saw clearly what was wrong in all this, but their wisdom did not generate power to do anything about it. The new philosophy claimed to have discovered the means to reform society and to secure the theoretical life. If the two purposes were not identical, they were intended to be complementary. It must be remembered that this was a dispute within philosophy and that there was an agreement among the parties to it about what philosophy is. The moderns looked to and disagreed with the Greek philosophers and their heirs, the Roman philosophers. However, they shared the view that philosophy, and with it what we call science, came to be in Greece and had never, so far as is known, come to be elsewhere. Philosophy is the rational account of the whole, or of nature. Nature is a notion that itself is of Greek origin and requisite to science. The principle of contradiction guided the discourse of all, and the moderns presented reasoned arguments against those of their predecessors with who they disagree. The moderns simply took over a large part of ancient astronomy and mathematics. And they, above all, agreed that the philosophic life is the highest life. Their quarrel is not like the difference between Moses and Socrates, or Jesus and Lucretius, where there is no common universe of discourse, but more like the differences between Newton and Einstein. It is a struggle for the struggle for the possession of rationalism by rationalists. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19
This fact is lost sight of, partly because scholasticism, the use of Aristotle by the Roman Catholic Church, was the phantom of philosophy within the older order that was violently attacked by the modern philosophy. Another reason why the essential agreement between ancients and moderns is no longer clear is the modern science of intellectual history, which tends to see all differences of opinion as differences of “Worldview,” which blurs the distinction between disagreements founded on reason and those founded on faith. They very term Enlightenment is connected with Plato’s most powerful image about the relation between thinker and society, the cave. In the Republic, Socrates presents men as prisoners in a dark cave, bound and forced to look at a wall against which are projected images that they take to be the beings and that are for them the only reality. Freedom for man means escaping the bonds, civil society’s conventions, leaving the cave and going up to where the run illuminates the beings and seeing them as they really are. Contemplating them is at once freedom, truth and the greatest pleasure. Socrates’ presentation is meant to show that we begin from deceptions, or myths, but that it is possible to aspire to a nonconventional World, to nature, by the use of reason. The false opinions can be corrected, and their inner contradictions impel thoughtful men to seek the truth. Education is the movement from darkness to light. Rason projected on the beings about which at first we only darkly opine produces enlightenment. The moderns accepted that reason can comprehend the beings, that there is a light to which science aspires. The entire difference between ancients and moderns concerns the cave, or non-metaphorically, the relation between knowledge and civil society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19
Socrates never suggests that, even in the unlikely event that philosophers should be kings and possess absolute wisdom, the nature of the cave could be altered or that a civil society, a people, a demos, could not make any but the happy few able to see the beings as they really are. They would guide the city reasonable, but in their absence the city would revert to unreason. Or to put it in another way, the unwise could not recognize the wise. Men like Bacon and Descartes, by contrast, thought that it was possible to make all men reasonable, to change what had always and everywhere been the case. Enlightenment meant to shine the light of being in the cave and forever to dim the images on the wall. Then there would be unity between the people and the philosopher. The whole issue turns on whether the cave is intractable, as Plato thought, or can be changed by a new kind of education, as the greatest philosophic figures of the seventeenth and eighteenth century taught. As Plato tells us, Socrates was charged with impiety, of not holding the same gods the city held, and he was found guilty. Plato always presents Socrates as the archetypical philosopher. The events of Socrates’ life, the problems he faced, represent what the philosopher as such must face. The Apology tells us that the political problem for the philosopher is the gods. It makes clear that the images on the wall of the cave about which me will not brook contradiction represent the gods. Socrates’ reaction to the accusation is not to assert the right of academic freedom to pursue investigations into the things in the Heavens and under the Earth. He accepts they city’s right to demand his belief. His defense, not very convincing, is that he is not a subversive. He asserts the great dignity of philosophy and tries as much as possible to reduce the gap between it and good citizenship. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19
In other words, he temporizes or is insincere. His defense cannot be characterized as “intellectual honest” and is not quite to contemporary taste. He only wants to be left alone as much as possible, but is fully aware that a man who doubts what every good citizen is supposed to know and spends his life sitting around talking about virtue, rather than doing virtuous deeds, comes into conflict with the city. Characteristically, Socrates lives with the essential conflicts and illustrated them, rather than trying to abolish them. In the Republic he attempts to unite citizenship with philosophy. The only possible solution is for philosophers to rule, so there would be no opposition between the city’s commands and what philosophy requires, or between power and wisdom. However, this outline of a solution is ironic and impossible. It only serves to show what one must live with. The regime of philosopher-kings is usually ridiculed and regarded as totalitarian, but it contains much of what we really want. Practically everyone wants reason to rule, and no one thinks man like Socrates should be ruled by inferiors or have to adjust what he thinks to them. What the Republic actually traches is that none of this is possible and that our situation requires both much compromise and much intransigence, great risks and few hopes. The important thing is not speaking one’s own mind, but finding a way to have one’s own mind. Contrary to common opinion, it is Enlightenment that was intent on philosophers’ ruling, taking Socrates’ ironies seriously. If they did not have the title of king, their political schemes were, all the same, designed to be put into practice. And they were put into practice, not by begging princes to listen to them but by philosophy’s generating sufficient power to force princes to give way. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19
The rule of philosophy is recognized in the insistence that regimes be constructed to protect the rights of man. The anger we experience on reading Socrates’ censorship of the poets is unselfconscious, if we agree, as we willy-nilly do, that children must be taught the scientific method prior to any claims of the imagination on their belief or conduct. Enlightenment education really does what Socrates only tentatively proposes. Socrates, at least, tries to preserver poetry, whereas Enlightenment is almost indifferent to its fate. The fact that we think there should be poetry classes as well as education in reasoning helps us to miss the point: What happens to poetic imagination when the soul has been subjected to a rigorous discipline that resists poetry’s greatest charms? The Enlightenment thinkers were very clear on this point. There is no discontinuity in the tradition about it. They were simply solving the problem to the advantage of reason, as Socrates wished it could be solved but thought it could not. Enlightenment is Socrates respected and free to study what he wants, and thereby it is civil society reconstituted. In the Apology, Socrates, who lives in thousands fold poverty because he neither works nor has inherited, purposes with ultimate insolence that he be fed at public expense at city hall. However, what is the modern university, with its pay and tenure, other than a free lunch for philosophy and scientists? Moreover, the Enlightenment’s explicit effort to remove the religious passion from politics, resulting in distinctions like that between church and state, is motivated by the wish to prevent the highest principle in political life from being hostile to reason. This is the intention in the Republic of Socrates’ reform of the stories about the gods told by the poets. #RandolphHarris 7 of 19
Nothing that denies the principle of contradiction is allowed to be authoritative, for that is the reef against which Socrates foundered. However, Socrates did not think that church and state could be separated. He would have treated both terms as artificial. The gods are believed to be the founders of every city and are its most important beings. He would not have dared to banish them in defense of himself. The Enlightenment thinkers took on his case and carried on a way against the continuing threat to science posed by first causes that are irrational or beyond reason. The gradual but never perfect success of that war turns the desire to be reasonable into the right to be reasonable, into academic freedom. In the process, political life was rebuilt in ways that have proved intolerable to many statesmen and thinkers, and have gradually led to the reintroduction of religion and the irrational in new and often terrifying guises. This is what Socrates would have feared. However, here I am only indicating the unity of the tradition, that Enlightenment is an attempt to give political status to what Socrates represents. The academy and the university are the institutions that incorporate the Socratic spirit more or less well. Yet the existence of these institutions underlines at the same time how they differ from Socrates, who founded no institutions and had only friends. And these attacks on these institutions made first by Rousseau and then by Nietzsche are attacks on Socratic rationalism made in a Socratic spirit. The history of Western thought and learning can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates, beginning with Plato defending him, passing through the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and ending with Nietzsche accusing on him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19
The cherishing, for two and a half millennia, of the memory of this man, who was put to death by the city for philosophizing, ends with his spiritual execution in the name of culture at the hands of the latest of great philosophers. Both city and culture are authorized by the sacred. The meditation on Socrates is the inspiring theme of philosophy from Plato and Aristotle, through Farabi and Maimonides, Machiavelli, Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Rousseau and Hegel, to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Socrates is the complementary man whose enigmatic being leads to reflection of the nature of the knowers. Sometimes the problem of slowing down rather than promoting cooperation. An example is the prevention of collusive business practices by avoiding the very conditions which would promote cooperation. Unfortunately, the very ease with which cooperation can evolve even among egoists suggests that the prevention of collusion is not an easy task. Cooperation certainly does not require formal agreements or even face-to-face negotiations. The fact that cooperation based upon reciprocity can emerge and prove stable suggests that antitrust activities should pay more attention to preventing the conditions that foster collusion than to search for secret meetings among executives of competing firms. Consider, for example, the practice of the government selecting two companies for competitive development contracts for a new military airplane. Since aerospace companies specialize to some degree in planes for either Air Force or the Nav, there is a tendency for firms with the same specialty to face each other in the final competition. This frequency of interaction between two given companies makes tacit collusion relatively easy to achieve. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19
To make tacit collusion more difficult, the government should seek methods of reducing specialization or compensating for its effects. Paris of companies which shared a specialization would then expect to interact less often in the final competitions. This would cause later interactions between them to be worth relatively less, reducing the shadow of the future. If the nest expected interaction is sufficiently far off, reciprocal cooperation in the form of tacit collusion cases to be a stable policy. The potential for attaining cooperation without formal agreements has its bright side in other contexts. For example, it means that cooperation on the control of the arms race does not have to be sought entirely through the formal mechanism of negotiated treaties. Arms control could also evolve tacitly. Certainly, the fact that the United States of America and Russia know that they will both be dealing with each other for a very long time should help establish the necessary conditions. The leaders may not like each other, but neither did the soldiers in World War I who learned to live and let live. Occasionally a political leader gets the idea that cooperation with another major power should not be sought because a better plan would be to drive them into bankruptcy. This is an extraordinarily risky enterprise because the target need not limit its response to the withholding of normal cooperation, but would also have a strong incentive to escalate the conflict before it was irreversibly weakened. Japan’s despairing gamble at Pearl Harbor, for example, was a response to power American economic sanctions aimed at stopping Japanese intervention in China. Rather than give up what it regarded as a vital sphere, Japan decided to attack America before becoming even further weakened. Japan understood that American was much more powerful, but decided that the cumulative effects of the sanctions made it better to attack rather than to wait for the situation to get even more desperate. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19
Trying to drive someone bankrupt changes the time perspective of the participants by placing the future of the interaction very much in doubt. And without the shadow of the future, cooperation becomes impossible to sustain. Thus, the role of time perspectives is critical in the maintenance of cooperation. When the interaction is likely to continue for a long time, and the players care enough about their future together, the conditions are ripe for the emergence and maintenance of cooperation. The foundation of cooperation is not really trust, but the durability of the relationship. When the conditions are right, the players can come to cooperate with each other through trial-and-error learning about possibilities for mutual rewards, through imitation of other successful players, or even through a blind process of selection of the more successful strategies with a weeding out of the less successful ones. Whether the players trust each other or not is less important in the long run than whether the conditions are ripe for them to build a stable pattern of cooperation with each other. Just as the future is important for the establishment of the conditions for cooperation, the past is important for the monitoring of actual behavior. It is essential that they players are able to observe and respond to each other’s prior choices. Without this ability to use the past, defections could not be punished, and the incentive to cooperate would disappear. Fortunately, the ability to monitor the prior behavior of the other player does not have to be perfect. When dealing with the Prisoner’s Dilemma, people sometimes assume perfect knowledge of the other individual. In many settings, however, an individual may occasionally misperceive the choice made by the other. A defection may go undetected, or a cooperation may be misinterpreted as a defection. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19
The role of time perspective has important implications for the design of institutions. In large organizations, such as business corporations and governmental bureaucracies, executives are often transferred from one position to another approximately every two years. This gives executive a strong incentive to do well in the short run, regardless of the consequences for the organization in the long run. They know that soon they will be in some other position, and the consequences of their choices in the previous post are not likely to be attributed to them after they have left their position. This gives two executives a mutual incentive to defect when either of their terms is drawing to an end. The result of rapid turnover could therefore be a lessening of cooperation within the organization. Economics of the past, whether agricultural or industrial, were built around long-lasting structures. In place of these, we are laying the electronic basis for an accelerative kaleidoscopic economy capable of instantly reshuffling itself into new patterns without blowing itself apart. The new extra-intelligence is part of the necessary adaptive equipment. In the confusing new flux, businesses can use extra-intelligence to launch surprise attacks on entirely fresh territory, which means that companies can no longer be sure where the next competitive push will come from. The classic blitzkrieg—much analyzed in the network literature—was Merrill Lynch’s launch of its Cash Management Account in 1977, an early use of information technology for a strategic, as distinct from merely administrative, purpose. The Cash Management Account, or CMA, was a new financial product that combined four previously separate services for the customer: a checking account, a deposit account, a credit card, and a securities account. The customer could move money back and forth among these at will. There was no float and the checking account paid interest. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19
The integration of these previously disparate products into a single offering was made possible only by Merrill Lynch’s sophisticate computer technology electronic networks. In twelve months, Merrill sucked in $5 billion of customer fund and by 1984, according to consultant Peter Keen, $70 billion had flooded into Merrill Lynch’s hands. Keen calls it a “preemptive strike” against the banks, which saw vast sums withdrawn by customers who preferred the CMA to an ordinary bank checking account. A securities house, not subject to ban regulations and not regarded as a bank, devastated the bank. Since then, many banks and other financial institutions have offered similar packages, but Merrill has a several-year head start on them. The strange new hybrid patterns of competition—which reflect a restructuring of markets as a result of extra-intelligence—are seen in the move of retailers like Japan’s Seibu Saison group into the financial services business. A Seibu subsidiary is planning to install electronic cash dispensers in railroad stations. British Petroleum, having set up its own internal bank, sells banking services to outsiders. Extra-intelligent networks help explain the widespread push for deregulation of industry, and they suggest that existing government regulations will prove less and less effective. For existing regulations are based on categories and divisions among industries that no longer exist in the age of extra-intelligence. Should banking regulations apply to nonbanks? What, after all, is a bank these days? By linking actual operations across company lines, by making it possible for companies to compete in fields once regarded as alien, extra-intelligent networks break up the old specialization, the old institutional division of labor. In their place come new constellations and cluster of companies, densely interrelated not merely by money but by shared information. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19
Ironically, it is the disruption cased by this drastic restructuring of the economy around knowledge that explains many of today’s breakdowns and inefficiencies—the misplaced bills, the computer errors, the inadequate service, the sense that nothing works properly. The old smokestack economy is disintegrating; the new super-symbolic economy is still being built, and the electronic infrastructure on which it depends is still in a primitive stage of development. Information is the most fluid of resources, and fluidity is the hallmark of an economy in which the production and distribution of food, energy, goods, and services increasingly depend on symbolic exchange. What emerges is an economy that itself looks more like a nervous system than anything else, and which runs according to rules no one has as yet formulated coherently. Indeed, the unprecedented rise of extra-intelligence raises profound, sometimes chilling questions for society as a whole, quite different from those raised by earlier communications revolutions. The World media today focus on the striking changes wrought by the outsourcing of jobs to India from the United States of America and elsewhere. Indeed, the story of I.T. jobs flowing to Bangalore, Hyderabad, Pune, Gurgaon, and Jaipur has made front-page headlines around the World. By 2021, India was earning $157 billion a year by manning call centers, writing software, performing back-office work, accounting and even financial analysis for American and other foreign firms. And India’s projected revenue from firms being outsourced to that nation is $245 billion by 2022. But the charge that outsourcing takes jobs away from Americans overlooks a reserves effect. For instance, Bangalore Central, a new shopping mall offering such imported brands as Levi’s, Polo, Lacoste and Jockey. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19
The outsourcing boom—insourcing from India’s point of view—is unlikely to continue at its present pace of growth, but it has helped create a segment of nouveaux riches who are young, middle-class, focused on “now” and very witty, too much so for their elders. The 2004 election in India resurrected the Congress Party, whose roots in quasi-socialism led it to view development conventionally as a matter of factories and smokestacks rather than the transition to a knowledge-based wealth system. However, even longtime holdouts are coming around, including Communists, who are theoretically farther to the let than the Congress Party. A reporter not long ago chided the Communist chief minister of the state of West Bengal, where Calcutta is located, pointing out that “your party helped protect the advent of computers.” The chief minister’s response: “That was in the 1970s—that was foolish, foolish. It stated when they were going to introduce computers in bans and [insurance companies]. Their employees protested and we supported it. Nowadays they have understood…We have entered a century where industries will be talent-based.” Now even Calcutta, once the World symbol of urban misery, has reached out and attracted IMB. Article after article has pictured India’s talented young I.T. workers as a greedy, socially irresponsible, yuppiesque middle class. Less attention has been paid to the fact that, because of computers over 8 million people in the state of Karnataka can now, for the equivalent of thirty cents, get a printout of land records securing their property from takeover by corrupt, farm-grabbing landlords. On a wider scale, a consortium of Indian and U.S. corporations, along with the World Bank, and the Indian government set up Internet kiosks in five thousand Karnataka villages that allow rural residents access to banking, education and government services. Karnataka is held up as a model for the rest of the nation. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19
An enterprising company made available a machine called HAGOTH, of which it might be said, this was Technopoly’s most ambitions hour. The machine cost $1,5000, the baragen of the century, for it was able to reveal to its owner whether someone talking on the telephone was telling the truth. It did this by measuring the “stress content” of a human voice as indicated by its oscillations. You connected HAGOTH to your telephone and, in the course of conversation, asked your caller some key questions, such as “Where did you go last Saturday night?” HAGOTH had sixteen lights—eight green and eight red—and when the caller replied, HAGOTH went to work. Red lights went on when there was much stress in the voice, green lights when there was little. As an advertisement for HAGOTH said, “Green indicates no stress, hence truthfulness.” In other words, according to HAGOTH, it is not possible to speak the truth in a quivering voice or to lie in a steady one—an idea that would doubtless amuse Richard Nixon. At the very least, we must say that HAGOTH’s definition of truthfulness was peculiar, but so precise and exquisitely technical as to command any bureaucrat’s admiration. The same may be said of the definition of intelligence as expressed in a standard-brand intelligence test. In fact, an intelligence test works exactly like HAGOTH. You connect a pencil to the fingers of a young person and address some key questions to one; from the replies a computer can calculate exactly how much intelligence exists in the young person’s brain. HAGOTH has mercifully disappeared from the market, for what reason I do not know. Perhaps it was sexist or culturally biased or, worse, could not measure oscillations accurately enough. When it comes to machinery, what Technopoly insists upon most is accuracy. The idea embedded in the machine is largely ignored, no matter how peculiar. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19
Some may wonder, how can protein engineering build molecular machines? Proteins can self-assemble into working molecular machines, objects that do something, such as cutting and splicing other molecules or making muscles contract. They also join with other molecules to form huge assemblies like the ribosome (about the size of a washing machine, in our simulation view). Ribosomes—programmable machines for manufacturing proteins—are nature’s closet approach to a molecular assembler. The genetic-engineering industry is chiefly in the business of reprogramming natural nanomachines, the ribosomes, to make new proteins is termed protein engineering. Since biomolecules already form such complex devices, it is easy to see that advanced protein engineering could be used to build first-generation nanomachines. Making proteins is easier than designing them. Protein chemists began by studying proteins found in nature, but have only recently moved on to the problem of engineering new ones. These are called de novo proteins, meaning completely new, made from scratch. Designing proteins is difficult because of the way they are constructed. A characteristic of proteins is that their activities depend on their three-dimensional structures. These activities may range from hormonal action to a function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function in digestion or in metabolism. Whatever their function, it is always essential to have a definite three-dimensional shape or structure. This three-dimensional structure forms when a chain folds to form a compact molecular object. To get a feel for how tough it is to predict the natural folding of a protein chain, picture a straight piece of cord with hundreds of magnets and sticky knots along its length. In this state, it is easy to make and easy to understand. Now pick it up, put it in a glass jar, and shake it for a long time. Could you predict its final shape? Certainly not: it is a tangled mess. One might call this effort at predation “the sticky-cord-folding problem”; protein chemists call theirs “the protein-folding problem.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 19
Given the correct conditions, a protein chain always folds into one special shape, but that shape is hard to predict from just the straightened structure. Protein designers, though, face the different job of first determining a desired final shape, and then figuring out what linear sequence of amino acids to use to make that shape. Without solving the classic protein-folding problem, they have begun to solve the protein-design problem. Now many people wonder why so much pleasures of the flesh and so much skin is shown on television? Well, it is because lust is better television than satisfaction. Ebullience and anxiety are better than tranquility. On the other hand, anger is better than anxiety. Jealousy is better television than acceptance. All of these work more easily than love. Passionate love is more communicable than brotherly and sisterly love. Competition is inherently more televisable than cooperation as it involves drama, winning, wanting and loss. Cooperation offers no conflict and becomes boring. Materialism, acquisitiveness and ambition, all highly focused attitudes, work better than spirituality, nonseeking, openness and yielding. The medium cannot deal with ambiguity, subtlety and diversity. Doing is also easier to convey than being. Activity will always be chosen over inactivity. When dealing with tribal peoples, objective events such as hunting, building, fighting or dancing are easier to convey through television than subjective details of qualities of experience, ways of mind, alternative perceptions. The latter qualities, which form the heart of life for tribal people, are dropped out in favor of the former. Lound is easier to televise than soft. Close is easer than distant. Large is easier than small. Too large is harder than medium. The narrow is easier than the wide. Therefore, television is not an accurately display of live, culture, people, or civilization, and it does not really teach a lot of values one wants their kids to follow. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19
Therefore, do not let the news teach you how to profile situations or people, nor let them teach you how to predict future events. Local news tends to be fake. They are just trying to get ratings and they can keep their thoughts and prayers to themselves. Who knows what they are thinking and praying about besides a way to strike fear into people and spread ignorance in the community. Like the God of Heaven, man makes in himself the choice between good and evil, both of which, like Him, he bears within himself. Between God and man, however, stand the primal spirits, they too choosing, but in pure paradox. They neither contain nor confront a duplicity, each possesses only himself in the most extreme differentiation; the other one, the other thing, he only has as his absolute computer; such is the situation in which he chooses himself, his own kind and the work commensurate wit it. Choosing, each acknowledges himself. The evil chooses and acknowledges himself, not however merely as created thus and not otherwise, but precisely as the evil, and for his followers he does not merely posit that after death they shall abide with him, but that it is just the worst existence which shall fall to their lot (in this doctrines there is no distinction of category between bad and evil: the bad is precisely that which cases evil, and in the last analysis there is no other evil than that which it causes.) He desires evil as such; and thereby he fulfills the will of the highest god, who brought forth him and his twin: only through mastering unmitigated evil does existence attain to transfiguration. Here the most harassing of questions remains unasked: how can the God of Heavens, the primal being, have contained and encompassed evil? “And they hearkened not unto the voice of the Lord, because of their wicked combinations; wherefore, there began to be wars and contentions in all the land, and also may famines and pestilences, insomuch that there was a great destruction such and one as never had been known upon the face of the Earth; and all this came to pass in the days of Shiblom. And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them, reports Ether 10.7-8. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19
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Nothing Like this Has Ever Happened Before
Knowledge has always been a factor in the creation of wealth. However, in no previous wealth system has the knowledge sector played so dominant a role. Today we are seeing an explosive growth in the amount, variety and complexity of knowledge needed to design, produce and deliver value in every market. As a result, the market for data, information and knowledge is itself growing exponentially. Consumers devour endless amounts of information, misinformation and disinformation on every conceivable subject, from business and finance to news and entertainment, health and religion, pleasures of the flesh and sports. Companies burn through nonstop flows of data about their customers, competitors and suppliers. Scientists and researchers collect findings and formulas from all over the World. Knowledge has always been hard to define, but as we use it here, it includes not just printed texts or computer data but whispered secrets, visual images, stock tips and other intangibles. No one today knows precisely how large the knowledge sector is, and controversy rages over what to include or exclude. However, never before has so much money passed from hand to hand in exchange for knowledge, its component data and information—or for obsoledge. The knowledge market, however, is not merely expanding. It is simultaneously morphing, owing once more to changes at the deep-fundamental level of the wealth system. Never has the collection, organization and dissemination of everything from the rawest of data to the most abstract and sophisticated knowledge moved through society and the marketplace at such click speeds. This parallels and even exceeds the accelerative processes we see in every sector of the economy. Time is compressed to nanoseconds. Simultaneously, dissemination crosses all boundaries, expanding the spatial reach of knowledge in all its forms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21
Even more important are changes in our knowledge about knowledge and in the way know is organized, with long-standing disciplinary divisions going up in flames. In earlier wealth systems, access to economically valuable knowledge was severely limited. Today much of it flashes nonstop across hundreds of millions of screens and monitors in offices, kitchens and dorm rooms from Manhattan to Mumbai. In agrarian societies for thousands of years, peasants needed to know about planting a patch of land, predicting bad weather, storing harvested crops. This knowledge was local, spread by word of mouth and basically unchanging. In industrial economies, workers and managers alike required non-local knowledge from more sources about more things. However, economically valuable knowledge—about, say, advances in metallurgy—needed relatively infrequent updating. Today, by contrast, much knowledge becomes obsoledge almost before it is delivered. The range of subject matter is constantly broadening. The sources are multiplying. And they may originate in any part of the World. What we are seeing, then, are self-reinforcing, interacting changes that transform the relationships among not products but whole market sectors. Yet even the cumulative impact of all of these is dwarfed in long-term significance by the emergence of an entirely new, previously impossible marketplace. Virtually every traditional market sector—whether for land, labour, capital, things, services, experiences, or knowledge—now has a virtual twin. In effect, the great, global cybermarket adds a second layer on top of every conventional marketplace. Nothing like this has ever happened before. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21
At the turn of the last century, the dot-com collapse briefly made e-commerce a dirty word among investors as headlines proclaimed the death of online business: DOT-COMS FLAME OUT…THE PARTY’S OVER…DOT.COM DISASTER…BOOM TO BUST IN SECONDS FLAT…THE CRAZE COLLAPSES…THE END OF INTERNET TIME. However, as with the Idaho baby revived an hour after being pronounced dead, eager naysayers buried e-commerce too soon. In 2003, consumers around the World were buying some $250 billion worth of products through e-markets that did not, and could not, exist even twenty years ago—something like $40 worth a year for every person on the planet. In 2021, retail e-commerce sales amounted to approximately $4.9 trillion U.S.A. dollars Worldwide. This figure is forecast to grow by 50 percent over the next four years, reaching about $7.4 trillion dollars by 2025. In 2021, the reported total value of retail trade e-commerce sales in the United States of America amounted to $870 billion dollars. Further, they offer no clue to the real size, power and potential of online market or exchanges for direct business-to-business transactions, as e-commerce sales may be even high than reported because the Commerce Department number does not necessarily include these other services. However, the number for all retail sales in the United States of America is drastically larger at an annual total of $6.6 trillion dollars. Thirteen airlines, ranging from All Nippon and KLM Royal Dutch to Lufthansa, Air New Zealand and Northwest, created Aeroxchange, the virtual equivalent of a medieval fair, to display their wares and make deals. Today’s thirty-three members buy parts from four hundred online vendors in thirty counties with an annual revenue of $ 8 million. Similar electronic exchanges now exist for many industries, including automotive, utilities, chemicals, defense, health care, restaurants, all kinds of repair services and spare parts. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21
This global move to a knowledge-based wealth system should not be measured merely in terms of stock-market prices and the diffusion of technology. It is much more profound, and threatens capitalism as it has, until now, been described. As the Third Wave, knowledge-intensive wealth system spreads to Asia and other parts of the World, they, too, will see revolutionary changes in their property bases, capital formation, markets and—as we will see next—in money itself. The People’s Bank of China is building a yuan reserve with five other nations, including Indonesia, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Chile, with each contributing 15 billion yuan, about $2.2 billion, to the Renminbi Liquidity Arrangement, China’s central bank said in a statement Saturday. “When in need of liquidity, participating central banks would not only be able to draw down on their contributions, but would also gain access to additional funding through a collateralized liquidity window,” the bank said. According to the report, the funds will be stored with the Bank for International Settlements. Russian and China have been attempting to develop a new reserve currency with other BRICS countries, Russian President Vladimir Putin explained last week. The basket of currencies would present a United States of America-dominated International Monetary Fund alternative and include contributions from Brazil, Russian, India, China, and South Africa. “The matter of creating the international reserve currency based on the basket of currencies of our countries is under review,” Putin explained to the BRICS Business Forum on 22 June 2022. He went on to say, “We are ready to openly work with all fair partners.” Meanwhile, China’s foreign-exchange reserves—the World’s largest—grew last month for the first time in 2022, state data showed. The nation’s reserves rose by $80.6 billion to reach #.313 trillion. At the same time, the United States of America’s dollar has reached a 20-year high in recent weeks. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21
In March, reports emerged of a Saudi oil deal priced in yuan. An economist told us that a deal done without dollars could signal unease in relaying too heavily on the USA’s currency. “While any deal would be symbolic, the Chinese are not alone in the search for a nondollar reserve currency,” Aleksandar Tomic previously explained. “Other countries’ need for dollars exposed them to the UAS financial sector, and consequently gives the United States of American political leverage.” Not long ago it was announced that the Smithsonian Institution of Washington, D.C., one of the most prestigious museums in the World, was considering the purchase of a small diner in New Jersey. It was the plan of the Smithsonian to move this little restaurant to Washington, make it part of the museum, perhaps even operate it, to illustrate the synthetic materials used during a certain period in American life. The plan was never carried out. For many Americas the roadside diners exercised a nostalgic fascination. Many a 1930s Hollywood scene took place in a diner. Hemingway’s famous story “The Killers” is set in a diner. So, quite beyond illustrating the uses of vinyl and Formica, there was a certain logic to the Smithsonian’s surprising idea. However, if the Smithsonian ever wishes to show what American meant to the outside World in the 1950s, the dead center of the 20th century, it should buy and relocate not a diner but a supermarket. Pushing a car down a brightly lit supermarket aisle was a weekly ritual for a majority of American families. The supermarket with its glistening, packed shelves became a symbol of plenty in a hungry World. It was a marvel of American business and was soon emulated the World over. Today the supermarket is still there, but, largely unnoticed by the public, it has become a battlefield in the information wars—one of many raging throughout the business World today. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21
From one end of the United States of America to the other, a multibillion-dollar tug-of-war today pits giant manufacturers like Nabisco, Revlon, Procter & Gamble, General Foods, and Gillette, once at the top of the industrial heap, against the lowly retail stores that put their products into the customer’s shopping bag. Fought at the checkout counter, this battle gives a glimpse of things to come in the super-symbolic economy. In the early days of the supermarket the big food processors and manufacturers would send their thousands of salespeople across the country to call on these stores and push their various lines of food, cosmetics, soft drinks, cleaning supplies, and the like. Every day, thousands of negotiations occurred. In this day-to-day dickering, sellers had the edge. They carried with them the clout of their giant firms, which even the largest supermarket chains could not match. Each of these megafirms was a commanding presence in its chosen markets. The Gillette Company, for instance, until the late 1970s sold six out of every ten razor blades used in the United State of America. When the French firm Bic, the World’s largest maker of ballpoint pens and disposable cigarette lighters, challenged Gillette on its home turf with a line of disposable razor blades, Gillette fought back and wound up with 40 to 50 percent of the U.S.A disposable market. Bic was left with under 10 percent. Gillette operated outside its own country too. Today, Gillette has company locations in forty-six countries and manufacturing plants in twenty-seven, spread across the globe from Germany and France to the Philippines. When a Gillette salesperson came to call, the supermarket listed hard—or else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21
From the 1950s into the 1980s, the balance of power, with the giant manufacturers at the top and the wholesalers and retailers at the bottom, remained essentially unchanged. One of the reasons for manufacturer-power was control of information. At the peak of this dominance, these manufacturers were among the heaviest mass advertisers in America. This gave them effective command of the information reaching the consumer. Gillette was particularly astute. It spent heavily to advertise razor blades or shaving cream on TV broadcasts of baseball’s World Series. It plugged its perfumes on the televised Miss America Pageant. Gillette typically ran six “marketing cycles” in the course of a year, each with a big backup ad campaign. This was called “pull-through” marketing—designed to “pull” customers into the store aisles and wipe the shelves clean in no time. These campaigns were so effective, supermarkets could hardly afford not to carry the Gillette products. In turn, success at the cash register meant that Gillette, like the other big firms, could order its own supplies in bulk, at reduced prices. In this way, by coordinating production and distribution with the mass media, manufacturers by and large came to dominate al the other players in the production cycle—farmers and raw material suppliers as well as retailers. In fact, the Gillette man (rarely a woman) could often dictate to the store how many blades it would buy, what types, how they would be displayed, when they would be delivered, and, not infrequently, what the price would be. This was economic power in actions, and it could not have existed without the pivotal control of information. It was Gillette, after all, not the retailer, who touted the advantages of Foamy or Gel shaving cream on television, or showed stubble-faced athletes using Gillette blades to get a clean shave. What the World knew about these products it learned from Gillette. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21
Moreover, if Gillette controlled the information going to the consumer, it also collected information from the consumer. At every stage, Gillette simply knew more than any of its retailers about how, when, and to whom its products would sell. Gillette knew when its advertising would appear on television, when new products were to be launched, what price promotions it would offer, and it was able to control the release of all this information. In short, Gillette and the other mass manufacturers stood between the retailer and the customer, feeding information under their exclusive control, to both. This control played a critical, though largely overlooked, role in maintaining the traditional dominance of the manufacturer vis-à-vis the store. And it paid off. There was a time when Campbells Soup did not even take the trouble to list a phone number on its salespeople’s calling cards. “No use calling them,” vice-president of the Grand Union supermarket chain points out. “They never name deals.” Similarly, when Gillette’s salesman came to the store to sell, he knew what he was talking about. The buyer did the listening. Now, while on the subject, it is also a great time for everyone to think about having some kind of life insurance policy, no matter how young or mature you are. Even kids, teens, young adults, and mature adults should be insured. Many parents have policies for their children, but if you are a young adult or mature, it is a good idea to think about getting your own life insurance policy. Globe Life is a very friendly, safe and professional company to buy a policy from. They offer policies with monthly rates for adults for $3.49 and $2.17 for children. Coverages range from $5,000 to $100,000 and there is no medical exam, and no waiting period. Even if you just buy the lowest cost policy, it is better than having nothing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21
That way, if the unthinkable happens, you will not be a burden on your family, and can maybe even get a large enough policy to pay not only for funeral costs, but also to leave some money behind for your wife, kids, parents, sibling, family members, maybe even a friend or a charity. Having life insure is very important and it is way to make sure your loved ones and/or property are taken care of and your bills are paid in case you get called home to Heaven. And remember, even a small policy is better than no policy, and some cost less than a bottle of juice. So check out Globe Life, you will be happy you are not leaving your loved ones to the fate of the World. In considering how the evolution of cooperation could have begun, some social structure was found to be necessary. In particular, in a population of meanies who always defect, they cannot be invaded by a single individual using a nice strategy such as TIT FOR TAT. However, if the invaders had even a small amount of social structure, things could be different. If they came in a cluster so that they had even a small percentage of their interaction with each other, then they could invade the population of meanies. There are also four factors that we will discuss over the next few days that can give rise to interesting types of social structure, which includes: labels, reputation, regulation, and territoriality. A label is a fixed characteristic of an individual such as gender or skin colour, which can be observed by the other player. This is why when people are upset, they usually find something about you mean to day that is different from a characteristic they possess. It does not mean that is what they truly think, it could be that they just want to hurt your feelings because they are hurting. Differences and labels can give rise to stable forms of stereotyping and status hierarchies. However, not all stereo types are bad. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21
The reputation of an individual is malleable and comes into being when another individual has information about the strategy that the first one has employed with other individuals. Reputations give rise t a variety of phenomena, including incentives to establish a reputation as a bully, and incentives to deter others from being bullies. Regulation is a relationship between a government and governed. Governments cannot rule only through deterrence, but must instead achieve the voluntary compliance of the majority of the governed. Therefore regulation gives rise to the problems of just how stringent the rules and the enforcement procedures should be. Finally, territorially occurs when players interact with their neighbours rather than with just anyone. It can give rise to fascinating patterns of behaviour as strategies spread through a population. People often related to each other in ways that are influenced by observable features such as gender, age, skin color, hair style, and style of dress. These cues allow a player to begin an interaction with a stranger with an expectation that the stranger will behave like others who share these same observable characteristics. In principle, then, these characteristics can allow an individual to know something useful about the other individual’s strategy even before the interaction begins. This happens because the observed characteristics allow an individual to be labeled by others as a member of the group with similar characteristics. This labeling, in turn, allows the inferences about how that individual will behave. The expectations associated with a given label need not be learned from direct personal experience. The expectations could also be formed by secondhand experiences through the process of sharing of anecdotes. The interpretations given to the cues could even be formed through genetics and natural selection, as when a turtle is able to distinguish the gender of another turtle and respond accordingly. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21
A label can be defined as a fixed characteristic of an individual that can be observed by other individuals when the interaction begins. When there are labels, a strategy can determine a choice based not only on the history of the interaction so far, but also upon the label assigned to the other person. One of the most interesting but disturbing consequences of labels is that they can lead to self-confirming stereotypes. To see how this can happen, suppose that everyone has either a Blue label or a Green label. Further, suppose that both groups are nice to members of their own group and mean to members of the other group. For the sake of concreteness, supposed that members of both groups employ TIT FOR TAT with each other and always defect with members of the other group. And supposed that the discount parameter is high enough to make TIT FOR TAT a collectively stable strategy. Then a single individual, whether Blue or Green, can do no better than to do what everyone else is doing and be nice to one’s own type and mean to the other type. This incentive means that stereotypes can be stable, even when they are not based on any objective differences. The Blues believe that the Greens are mean, and whenever they meet a Green, they have their beliefs confirmed. The Greens think that only others Green will reciprocate cooperation, and they have their beliefs confirmed. If you try to break out of the system, you will find that your own payoff falls and your hopes will be dashed. So if you become a deviant, you are likely to return, sooner or later, to the role that is expected of you. If your label says you are Green, others will treat you as a Green, and since it plays for you to act like Greens act, you will be confirming everyone’s expectations. This kind of stereotyping has two unfortunate consequences: one obvious and one more subtle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21
The obvious consequence of stereotyping is that everyone is doing worse than necessary because of mutual cooperation between the groups could have raised everyone’s score. A more subtle consequence comes from any disparity in the numbers of Blues and Greens, creating a majority and a minority. In this case, while both groups suffer from the lack of mutual cooperation, the members of the minority group suffer more. No wonder marginalized groups tend to suffer more. No wonder people who are not members of the non-dominant group often seek defensive isolation. Some may even seek to take over a location. To see why, suppose that there are eighty Greens and twenty Blues in a town, and everyone interacts with everyone else once a week. Then for the Greens, most of their interactions are within their own group and hence result in mutual cooperation. However, for the Blues, most of their interactions are with the other group (the Greens), and hence result in pushing mutual defection. Thus, the average score of the minority Blues is less than the average score of the majority Greens. This effect will hold even when there is a tendency for each group to associate with its own kind. The effect still hold because if there are certain number of times a minority Blue meets a majority Green, this will represent a larger share of the minority’s total interactions than it does of the majority’s total interactions. The result is that labels can support stereotypes by which everyone suffers, and the minority suffers more than the rest. Labels can lead to another effect as well. They can support status hierarchies. For example, supposed that everyone has some characteristic, such as height or strength or skin tone, that can be readily observed and that allows a comparison between two people. For simplicity imagine that there are no tie values, so that when two people meet it is clear which one has more of the characteristic which one has less. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21
Now supposed that everyone is a bully toward those beneath them and meek toward those above them. Can this be stable? Yes, and here is an illustration. Suppose everyone uses the following strategy when meeting someone beneath them: alternate defection and cooperation unless the other individual defects even once, in which case never cooperate again. This is being a bully in that you are often defecting, but never tolerating a defection from the other individual. And suppose that everyone uses the following strategy when meeting someone above them: cooperate unless the other defects twice in a row, in which case never cooperate again. This is being meek in that you are tolerating being a sucker on alternating moves, but it is also being provocable in that you are not tolerating more than a certain amount of exploitation. This pattern of behaviour sets up a status hierarchy based on the observable characteristic. The people near the top do well because they can lord it over nearly everyone. Conversely, the people near the bottom are doing poorly because they are being meek to almost everyone. It is easy to see why someone near the top is happy with the social structure, but is there anything someone near the bottom can do about it acting alone? Actually there is not. The reason is that when the discount parameter is high enough, it would be better to take one’s medicine every other move from the bully than to defect and face unending punishment. Therefore, a person at the bottom of the social structure trapped. He or she is doing poorly, but would do even worse by trying to advance in the system. The futility of isolated revolt is a consequence of the immutability of the other individuals’ strategies. A revolt by a low-status individual might alter their behaviour under duress, then this fact should be taken into account by a lower-status individual contemplating revolt. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21
However, this consideration leads the higher-status individual to be concerned with their reputation for firmness. To study this type of phenomena, one needs to look at the dynamics of reputations. Life-style was first popularized here to describe and make acceptable the lives of people who do attractive things that are frowned upon by society. It was identical to counterculture. Two great expressions in the American usage, draped in the authority lent by their philosophic genealogy, provided moral warrant for people to live exactly as they please. Counterculture, of course, enjoyed the dignity attaching to culture, and was intended as a reproach to the bourgeois excuse for a culture we see around us. What actually goes on in a counterculture or a life-style—whether it is ennobling or debasing—makes no difference. No one is forced to think through one’s practices. It is impossible to do so. Whatever you are, whoever you are, is the good. All this is testimony to the amazing power, about which Tocqueville speaks, of abstractions in a democratic society. The mere words change everything. It is also a commentary on our moralism. What begins in a search if not precisely for selfish pleasures—historians of the future will not look back on us as a race of hedonists who knew how to “enjoy,” in spite of all our talk about it—then at least for avoidance of and release from suffering or distress, transmogrified into a life-style and a right, becomes the ground of moral superiority. The comfortable, unconstrained life is morality. One can see this in so many domains across the whole political spectrum. Self-serving is expressed as, and really believed to be, disinterested principle. When one looks at the earnest, middle-class proponents of birth control, abortion, and easy divorce—with their social concern, their humorless self-confidence and masses of statistics—one cannot help thinking that all this serves them very well. This is not to deny the reality of the problems presented by too many children for the poor, the terrible consequences of assaults and battered wives. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21
However, none of those problems really belongs to the middle classes, who are not reproducing themselves, are rarely assaulted or battered, but who are the best-rewarded beneficiaries of what they themselves propose. If one of their proposals entailed a sacrifice of freedom or pleasure for them or their class, they would be more morally plausible. As it is, all their proposals contribute to their own capacity to choose, in the contemporary sense of choice. Motives that could easily be so flawed should not be, but are, the basis for moral smugness. It this case, as in so many others, making relations involving pleasures of the flesh becomes identical to morality. I fear that the most self-righteous of Americans nowadays are precisely those who have most to gain from what they preach. This is made all the more distasteful when their weapons are constructed out of philosophic teachings the intentions of which are the opposite of theirs. Life in civilization is lived almost wholly in a medium of symbols. Not only scientific or technological activity but aesthetic activity consists largely of symbol processing. The laws of aesthetic form are cannon of symbolization, often expressed quite unspiritually. It is widely averred, for example, that a limited number of mathematical figures account for the efficacy of art. There is Cezanne’s famous dictum to “treat nature by the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,” and Kandinsky’s judgment that “the impact of the acute angle of a triable on a circle produced an effect no less powerful than the finger of God touching the finger of Adam in Michelangelo.” The sense of a symbol, as Charles Pierce concluded, is its translation into another symbol, thus an endless reproduction, with the real always displaced. Though at is not fundamentally concerned with beauty, its inability to rival nature sensuously has evoked many unfavorable comparisons. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21
“Moonlight is sculpture,” wrote Hawthorne: Shelley praised the “unpremeditated art” or the skylark; Verlaine pronounced the sea more beautiful than all the cathedrals. And so on, with sunsets, snowflakes, flowers, et cetera, beyond the symbolic products of art. Jean Arp, in fact, termed “the most perfect picture” nothing more than “a warty, threadbare approximation, a dry porridge.” Why then would one respond positively to art? As compensation and palliative, because our relationship to mature and life is so deficient and disallows an authentic one. As Motherlant put it, “One gives to one’s art what one has not been capable of giving to one’s existence.” It is true for artist and audience alike; art, like religion, arises from unsatisfied desire. Technopoly is a state of culture. It is also a state of mind. It consists in the deification of technology, which means that the culture seeks its authorization in technology, finds its satisfactions in technology, and takes its order from technology. This requires the development of a new kind of social order, and of necessity leads to the rapid dissolution of much that is associated with traditional beliefs. Those who feel most comfortable in Technopoly are those who are convinced that technical progress is humanity’s supreme achievement and the instrument by which our most profound dilemmas may be solved. They also believe that information is an unmixed blessing, which through its continued and uncontrolled production and dissemination offers increased freedom, creativity, and peace of mind. The fact that information does none of these things—but quite the opposite—seems to change few opinions, for such unwavering beliefs are an inevitable product of the structure of Technopoly. In particular, Technopoly flourishes when the defenses against information break down. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21
The relationship between information and the mechanism for its control is fairly simple to describe: Technology increases the available supply of information. As the supply is increased, control mechanisms are strained. Additional control mechanisms are themselves technically, they in turn further increase the supply of information. When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquility and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures. One way of defining Technopoly, then, is to say it is what happens to society when the defenses against information glut have broken down. It is what happens when a culture, overcome by information generated by technology, tries to employ technology itself as a means of providing clear direction and humane purpose. The effort is mostly doomed to failure. Though it sometimes possible to use a disease as a cure for itself, this occurs only when we are fully aware of the processes by which disease is normally held in check. The dangers of information on the loose may be understood by the analogy of an individual’s biological immune system, which serves as a defense against the uncontrolled growth of cells. Cellular growth is, of course, a normal process without a well-functioning immune system, and organism cannot manage cellular growth. It becomes disordered and destroys the delicate interconnectedness of essential organs. An immune system, in short, destroys unwanted cells. All societies have institutions and techniques that function as does a biological immune system. Their purpose is to maintain a balance between the old and the new, between novelty and tradition, between meaning and conceptual disorder, and they do so by “destroying” unwanted information. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21
We have art in order not to perish of Truth. Its consolation explains the widespread preference for a metaphor over a direct relationship to the genuine article. If pleasure were somehow released from every restraint, the result would be the antithesis of art. In a dominated life freedom does not exist outside of art, however, and so even a tiny, deformed fraction of the riches of being is welcome. “I create in order not to cry,” revealed Klee. This separate realm of contrived life is both impotent and in complicity with the actual nightmare that prevails. In its institutionalized separation it corresponds to religion and ideology in general, where its elements are not, and cannot be, actualized; the work of art is a selection of possibilities unrealized except in symbolic terms. Arising from the sense of loss referred to above, it conforms to religion not only by reason of its confinement to an ideal sphere and its absence of any dissenting consequences, but it can hence be no more than thoroughly neutralized critique at best. Frequently compared to play, art and culture—like religion—have more often worked as generators of guilt and oppression. Perhaps the ludic function of art, as well as its common claim to transcendence, should be estimated as one might reassesses the meaning of Versailles: by contemplating the misery of the workers who perished draining it marshes. Clive Bell pointed to the intention of art to transport us from the plane to the daily struggle “to a World of aesthetic exaltation,” paralleling the aim of religion. Malraux offered another tribute to the conservative office of art when he wrote that, without art works civilization would crumble “within fifty years…” becoming “enslaved to instincts and to elementary dreams.” Hegel determined that art and religion also have “this in common, namely, having entirely universal matters as content.” This feature of generality, of meaning without concrete reference, serves to introduce the notion that ambiguity is a distinctive sign of art. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21
Advertisers are the high artists of the medium. They have gone further in the technologies of fixation than anyone else. However, the lesson has also been learned by producers of the programs, and finally, by politicians. During the Trump-Biden presidential campaign, at the point that Biden was gaining on Trump with incredible rapidity, the technical-events ratio between the commercials of the two was about four to one in favour of Trump. If Trump had spent a little more advertising money, and if the campaign had gone on another few days, I believe Trump kept excelling past Biden, no matter what the messages within their commercials. Because of the central role television now plays in campaigning, advertising technique has become more important than content in the American political arena. The fact that advertising contains many more technical events per minute than commercial programming is significant from another, more subtle perspective. Advertising starts with a disadvantage with respect to the programming. It must be more technically interesting than the program or it will fail. That is, advertising must itself become a highlighted moment compared with what surrounds it. If advertising failed to work on television, then advertisers would cease to sponsor the programs, leading, at least as things are presently structure, to the immediate collapse of television’s economic base. If the programs, leading, at least as thing are presently structured, to the immediate collapse of television’s economic base. If the programs ever become too interesting, that will be the end of television. The ideal relationship between program and commercial is that the programing should be just as interesting enough to keep you interested but not so interesting as to actually dominate the ads. This applies to technique as well as content. Now, when it comes to nanotechnology, if these ideas about nanotechnology had some fatal flaw, life might be much simpler. If only molecules could not be used to form machines, or the machines could not be used to build things, then we might be able to keep right on going with our crude technologies: our medicine that does not heal, our spacecraft that does not open a new frontier, our oil crises, our pollution, and all the limits that keep us from trading familiar problems for strange ones. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21
Especially if they purport to bring radical change, most new ideas are wrong. It is not unreasonable to hope that these wrong. From years of discussions with chemists, physicists’, and engineers, it is possible to compile what seems to be a complete list of basic, critical questions about whether nanotechnology will work. The questioners generally seem satisfied with answers. Will thermal vibrations mess things up? The earlier scenarios describe the nature of thermal vibration and the problems it can cause. Designing nanomachines strong enough and stiff enough to operate reliably despite thermal vibration is a genuine engineering challenge. However, calculating the design requirements usually requires only simple textbook principles, and these requirements can be met for everything we have described in these reports about nanotechnology. Will quantum uncertainty mess things up? Quantum mechanics says that particles must be described as small smears of probability, not as points with perfectly defined locations. That is, in fact, why the atoms and molecules in the simulations felt so soft and smooth: their electrons are smeared out over the whole volume of the molecule, and these electrons clouds taper off smoothly and softly toward the edges. Atoms themselves are a bit uncertain in position, but this is a small effect compared to thermal vibrations. Again, simple textbook principles apply, and well-designed molecular machines will work. Will loose molecules mess things up? Chemist work with loose molecules in liquids, and they naturally tend to picture molecules as flying around loose. It is possible to build nanomachines and molecular manufacturing systems that work in this sort of environment (biological mechanisms are an existence proof), but in the long run, there will be no need to do so. The Silicon Valley Faire simulation gives the right idea: Systems can be built with no loose molecules, making nanomechanical design much easier. If no molecules are loose inside a machine, then loose molecules cannot cause problems there. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21
Speaking of problems, the fierce Cherubim drove Adam and Eve from the Garden with their swords of flame. And what had they done? They meant no harm. They were unenlightened, and did as other children might do. They could not know it was wrong to disobey the command, for the words were strange to them and they did not understand them. They did not know right from wrong—how should they know? They could not, without the Moral Sense; it was not possible. If they had been given the Moral Sense first—ah, that would have been fairer, that would have been kinder: then they should be to blame if they disobeyed. However, to day to those poor unenlightened children words which they could not understand, and then punish them because they did not do as they were told—ah, how can that be justified? They knew no more than this littlest child of yours knows with its four years—oh, not so much, one would think. Would I say to the baby, “If thou touchest this bread I will overwhelm thee with unimaginable disaster, even to the dissolution of thy corporeal elements,” and when it took the bread and smiled up in your face, thinking no harm, as not understanding those strange words, would one take advantage of its innocence and strike it down with the mother-hand it trusted? Whoso knoweth the mother-heart, let one judge if one would do that thing. Adam says Eve’s brain is turned by her troubles, and that she became wicked. Eve says, “I am as I am; I did not make myself.” After the gates had been shut, Adam and Eve became rich in learning. They learned hunger, thirst, and cold; they knew pain, disease and grief; they learned hate, rebellion and deceit; they learned remorse, the conscious that persecutes guilt and innocence alike, making no distinction. They learned right from wrong, a product of the Moral Sense, and it became their possession. The whole of God’s speech can only be translated conjecturally, the most likely version being: “Why art thou worth? Why is thy countenance fallen? Is it no so: if thou purposest good, bear it aloft, but if thou dost not purpose good—sin before the door, a beast lying in wait, unto thee his desire, but prevail thou over him.” “And U, being fifteen years of age ad being somewhat of a sober mind, therefore I was visited of the Lord, and tasted and knew of the goodness of Jesus,” reports Mormon 1.15. #RandolphHarris 21 of 21
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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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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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