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It Would Save My Life—That’s All!
In 1839 down-at-heels artist who gave lessons in drawing was asked by a pupil whether payment of a ten-dollar fee would be helpful. The art teacher—a something dabbler in the mysteries of the electromagnetism—replied. “It would save my life, that’s all.” Samuel F.B. Morse had already proved that he could send coded messages along an electric wire. However, it was not until four years later, by dint of strenuous lobbying, that Mores managed to persuade the United States of America’s Congress to appropriate $30,000 to build a telegraph line between Washington and Baltimore. It was on the opening of that earliest line that Morse sent his historic telegram—“What hath God wrought!” With that Morse opened the age of telecommunications and triggered one of the most dramatic commercial confrontations of the 19th century. He started a powerful process that is still unfolding in our time. Today, even as the battle of the supermarket checkout counters intensifies, a larger conflict is shaping up, centered on control of what might be called the electronic highways of tomorrow. Because so much of business now depends on getting and sending information, companies around the World have been rushing to link their employees through electronic networks. These networks form the key infrastructure of the 21st century, as critical to business success and national economic development as the railroads were in Morse’s era. Some of these are “local area networks,” or LANs, which merely hook up computers in a single building or complex. Others are globe-girdling nets that connect CitiBank people the World over, or help Hilton reserve its hotel rooms and Hertz its cars. Every time McDonald’s sells a Big Mac or a McMuffin, electronic data are generated. McDonald’s is the World’s leading global foodservice retailer with over 38,000 restaurants in over 100 countries, McDonald’s operates no fewer than 20 different networks to collect, assemble, and distribute information. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Du Pont’s medical sales force plugs laptops into its electronic mail network, and Sara Lee depends on its nets to put L’eggs hosiery onto the shelves. Volvo links 20,000 terminals around the World to swap market data. DEC’s engineers exchange design information electronically Worldwide. IBM alone connection over 355,000 terminals around the World through a system called VNET, which in 1987 handled an estimated 5 trillion characters of data. By itself, a single part of that system—called PROFS—saved IBM the purchase of 7.5 million envelopes, and IBM estimates that without PROFS it would need nearly 40,000 additional employees to perform the same work. Networking has spread down to the smallest businesses. With some 250 million PCs in use in the United States of America, Wang now advertises its networking equipment over the radio, sandwiching its commercials about “connectability” between Bach and suites and Beethoven symphonies. Companies daily grow more dependent on their electronic nets for billing, ordering, tracking, and trading; for the exchange of design specification, engineering drawings, and schedules; and for actually controlling production lines remotely. Once regarded as purely administrative tools, networked information systems are increasingly seen as strategic weapon, helping companies protect established markets and attack new ones. The race to build these networks has taken on some of the urgency that accompanied the great age of railroad construction in the 19th century, when nations became aware that their fate might be tied to the extensiveness of their rail systems. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Yet the power-shifting implications of this phenomenon are only dimly perceived by the public. To appreciate their significance, it helps to glance back to what happened after Samuel Morse strung the first telegraph network. By the mid-19th century Morse franchises had built thousands of miles of telegraph lines. Competing companies sprang up, networks grew, and an intense race began to connect major cities to one another across the continent. Stringing its wires along railroad rights of way, a company called Western Union began gobbling up smaller companies. Within eleven years its lines reached from one end of America to the other, and its capital had shot up from $500,000 to $41,000—a bank-boggling amount in those days. Soon its subsidiary, the Gold & Stock Telegraph Company, was providing high-speed information for investors and gold speculators—paving the way for today’s Dow Jones or Nikkei. At a time when most messages were still carried across the continent in saddlebags or railway cars, Western Union had a stranglehold on the means of advanced communications. Success, as usual, bred corporate arrogance. Thus, in 1876, when a voice teacher named Alexander Graham Bell patented the first telephone, Western Union tried to laugh it off as a joke and a fad. However, as public demand for telephone service soared, Western Union made it clear it was not about to surrender its monopoly. A knockdown conflict ensured, and Western Union did everything possible to kill or capture the newer technology. It hired Thomas Edison to invent alternatives to the Bell technology. Its lawyers fought Bell in court. It hired Thomas Edison to invent alternatives to the Bell technology. Its lawyers fought Bell in court. “At another level,” writes Joseph C. Goulden, author of Monopoly, “Western Union barred Bell from the right-of-way monopolies it owned for its wires along highways and railroads. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
“Western Union had its instruments in every major hotel, railway station, and newspaper office in the nation, under terms which forbade installations of telephones. A Bell manager in Philadelphia was forbidden to erect lines anywhere in the city; his workers frequently were jailed on complaints sworn by Western Union. The telegraph company’s political influence in Washington kept Bell phones from federal offices.” Despite all this, Western Union failed, swept aside not so much by its smaller antagonist as by the business World’s desperate hunger for better communications. In turn, the winner of that corporate power struggle grew into the biggest privately owned business the World had ever seen—the American Telephone & Telegraph Company (AT&T). During the Worldwide Great Depression in the 1930s, a satirical French movie called Le Million showed two farmers sitting at an outdoor bistro savouring glasses of Bordeaux. When the waiter gives them the check, l’addition, one farmer reaches into a sack and hands him a chicken. The waiter returns with change, putting two eggs on the table, at which point the farmer picks up the eggs and places one back as the trip, or pourboire. The absurdity perfectly captures the realities of life for millions in economies where money loses its value, as it did not so long ago in Southeast Asia, Russia, and Argentina. However, tomorrow we may not wait for crises to engage in moneyless transactions. Barter, long regarded as impractical in complex markets, is being given new life. For the average person, the word barter calls to mind images of a primitive society or of small-scale personal exchanges. A lawyer writes a will for a friend who gives him a tennis lesson in return. So many of these transactions occur daily and are so natural that they pass for favors. However, economically speaking, they are in fact minor forms of barter. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
However, barter is also big business. While reliable global statistics are hard to come by because definitions vary, according to Forbes, “it is estimated that more than 60 percent of all Forbes 500 companies use barter. Even heavyweights, including General Electric, Marriott, and Carnival Cruise Lines have been known to barter goods or services.” Fortune reports that two thirds of all major global companies regularly engage in barter and have set up departments specifically to handle such deals. In Argentina in 2002, as the economy tanked and auto sales melted away, Toyota and Ford agreed to accept grain in payments for cars. When Ukraine racked up a massive debt for natural gas, Russia took eight Tu-160 Blackjack bombers as partial payment. Russia swapped three billion dollars worth of Stolicnaya vodka for Pepsi-Cola syrup. Other governments have put on the barter block everything from alpaca cloth to zinc. At the global level, according to Bernard Lietaer, formerly chief planner of Belgian central bank and one of the architects of the euro, international corporate barter, otherwise known as countertrade, is in “common use among no less than 200 countries around the World, with a volume that now ranges from $800 billion to $1.2 trillion a year.” And barter growth is accelerating. One reason is that we may be heading into decades of tempestuous economic conditions. Say Lietaer, major currencies today are “exhibiting a volatility that is presently four times higher than it 1971.” High volatility suggests that an increasing number of countries will find themselves facing periodic foreign-exchange shortages. Bater gives governments and business a way to trade when no one wants their own nation’s currency. When currencies oscillate wildly, it is also a way to reduce risk. When countries agree to exchange goods or services in lieu of money, currency risk is essentially eliminated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Until now, the main objection to barter has been the difficulty of matching what one person wishes to sell with what another has to offer in return—what economists have called a necessary “coincidence of needs.” However, the rise of the Internet radically reduces these impediments, making it almost instantly possible to locate potential trading partners around the World and expanding the variety of barterable items. Not only is it easier—given today’s remarkable financial networks—to find a partner for a two-sided trade, but the ready availability of data and global communications makes it possible to match the simultaneous offerings and needs of multiple participants. This points toward more complex but far bigger barter deals in days to come. How big? Big enough to replace money within this lifetime? “There is no reason products and services could not be swapped directly by consumers and producers through a direct exchange—essentially a massive barter economy.” That conclusion comes from Mervyn King, formerly deputy governor of the Bank of England. Combine (1) the rise of para-money; (2) the growth of barter; (3) the increase of intangibility; (4) the spread of ever-more-complex global financial networks; and (5) radical new technologies soon to be deployed. Set these against (6) a World economy that is highly leveraged, rocked by largely unregulated speculation; and (7) the coming decades f seismic changes in the World geopolitical framework, and conventional, industrial-age money may not disappear—but it may become a collector’s item. Today, as these forces converge, we also find scattered small-scale experiments with alternate currencies, mostly at a community level, often combined with elements of barter. However, crypto currency was hyped when it first came out, but its value has decrease nearly 60 percent since its peak and now most people are likely to lose money when investing in it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
A program pioneered in Ithaca, New York, and now copied in dozens of other communities allows consumers and merchants to use chits rather than real currency to exchange goods and services for everything ranging from rent and medical bills to theater tickets. Another system, created by Edgar Cahn and detailed in his book Time Dollars, lets people build up service credits for, say, taking an elderly neighbour shopping, which can then be used to obtain babysitting from another participant in the network. In their own ways, all of these ventures seek to recognize and give quasi-monetary value to the many economic contributions made by prosumers. Considering the vast new opportunities opened by electronic exchange, it may be possible to expand on such community-based experiments and develop large-scale alternative currencies for certain kinds of prosumer activity. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the Terra Project calls for a superanational currency based not on gold or wildly floating exchange rates but on a basket of internationally traded commodities and services. The larger questions facing us, however, involve not only the fate of money but, as we have seen, the future of property, capital and markets—and their interactions—as well. They involve the shift from wage labour toward “portfolio work” and self-employment; from handcraft prosuming to technology-based prosuming; from profit-based production toward open-source contributions to software, medicine to value based on ideas, images, symbols and models inside billions of brains. They involve completely altered uses of time, space and knowledge—among the deepest fundamental of wealth. How might the growing links between unpaid prosumer production in the non-money economy and the paid production in the money economy affect capitalism? #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
What happens to capitalism when its most important input is not scarce, but essentially limitless and non-rival? What happens to capitalism when a growing proportion of property becomes not only intangible, but doubly intangible? Faced with these changes, as the Third Wave of change supplants industrialism and spread far beyond its origins in the United States of America, capitalism faces a crisis of redefinition. When that revolutionary redefinition is completed, will what remains still be capitalism? I know that the millions of people who migrate to and the other country that try to copy America sure hope so. When I was fifteen years old, I saw the University of Chicago for the first time and somehow sensed that I had discovered my life. I had never before seen, or at least had not noticed, buildings that were evidently dedicated to a higher purpose, not to necessity or utility, not merely to shelter or manufacture or trade, but to something that might be an end in itself. The Middle West was not known for the splendor of its houses of worship or its monument to political glory. There was little visible reminiscence of the spiritual heights with which to solicit the imagination or the admiration of young people. The longing for I knew not what suddenly found a response in the World outside. It was, surely, the World outside. Although the Gothic buildings were magnificent, they are not as grand as the ones in Europe. However, they pointed toward a road of learning that leads to the meeting place of the greats. There one finds examples of a sort not likely to be seen around one, without which one could neither recognize one’s own capacities nor know how wonderful it is to belong to the species. This imitation of styles of faraway lands and ages showed an awareness of lack of, and a respect for, the substance expressed by those styles. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
These buildings were a bow to the contemplative life by a nation addicted more than any other to the active life. The pseudo-Gothic was much ridiculed, and nobody build like that anymore. Even though it is not authentic, they should continue to build that way. To me it was and remains an expression of what we are, especially since some of these buildings were created with authentic elements from ancient Egypt, Athens, and Medieval Europe. However, one wonders whether the vulture critics had as good an instinct about out spiritual needs as the vulgar rich who paid for the buildings. This nation’s impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration. Reminiscences and warnings from the past are our only monitor as we careen along our path. Those despised millionaires who set up a university in the midst of a city that seems devoted only to the American goals paid tribute to what they had neglected, whether it was out of a sense of what they themselves had missed, or out of bad conscience about what their lives were exclusively devoted to, or to satisfy the vanity of having their names attached to the enterprise. (What feeds a man’s vanity teaches as much about him as anything.) Education was an American thing, and not only technical education. For me the promise of these buildings was fully kept. From the moment I became a student there, it seemed plausible to spend all m time thinking about what I am, a theme that was interesting to be but had never appeared a proper or possible subject of study. In high school I had seen many of the older boys and girls go off to the state university to become doctors, lawyers, social workers, teachers, the whole variety of professions respectable in the little World in which I lived. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The university was part of growing up, but it was not looked forward to as a transforming experience—nor was it so in fact. No one believed that there were serious ends of which we had not heard, or that there was a way of studying our ends and determining their rank order. In short, philosophy was only a word, and literature a form of entertainment. Our high schools and the atmosphere around them puts us in this frame of mind. However, a great university presented another kind of atmosphere, announcing that there are questions that ought to be addressed by everyone but are not asked in ordinary life or expected to be answered there. It provided an atmosphere of free inquiry, and therefore excluded what is not conducive to or is inimical to such inquiry. It made a distinction between what is important and unimportant. It protected the tradition, not because tradition is tradition but because tradition provides models of discussion on a uniquely high level. It contained marvels and made possible friendships consisting in shared experiences of those marvels. Most of all there was the presence of some authentically great thinkers who gave living proof of the existence of theoretical life and whose motives could not easily be reduced to any of the baser ones people delight in thinking universal. They had authority, not based on power, money or family, but on natural gifts that properly compel respect. The relations among them and between them and students were the revelation of a community in which there is a true common good. In a nation founded on reason, the university was the temple of the regime, dedicated to the purest use of reason and evoking the kind of reverence appropriate to an association of free and equal human beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
The years have taught me that much of this existed only in my youthful and enthusiastic imagination, but not so much as one might suppose. The institutions were much more ambiguous than I could have suspected, and they have proved much frailer when caught in contrary winds than it seemed they would be. However, I did see real thinkers who opened up new Worlds for me. The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for. If fortune had not put me into a great university at one of its greatest moments, they accompany me every minute of every day of my life, making me see much more and be much more than I could have seen or been. I have had teachers and students such as dreams are made on. And most of all I have friends with whom I can share thinking about what friendship is, with whom there is a touching of souls and in whom works that common good of which I have just spoken. All of this is, of course, mixed with the weaknesses and uglinessess that life necessarily contains. None of it cancels the low in man. However, it informs even that low. None of my disappointments with the university—which is after all only a vehicle for contents in principle separable from it—has ever made me doubt that the life it gave me was anything other than the best one available to me. Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society. Falling in love with the idea of the university is not a folly, for only by means of it is one able to see what can be. Without it, all these wonderful results of the theoretical life collapse back into the primal slime from which they cannot re-emerge. The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties. However, such debunking can obscure them, and has. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
When driving a car, one’s nervous system becomes linked with the vehicle in a very basic way. If the driver decides to brake, the body performs a complex sequence of maneuvers with the brake, accelerator and steering wheel, all acting as sense-extension. The vehicle becomes body-like and responds in body-like fashion to the driver’s thoughts. If the driver decides to accelerate, the brain signals the foot which responds by signaling the accelerator, which responds by increasing fuel flow, which enacts a series of events that causes the vehicle to increase speed. In a sense, the car is the driver’s body and is directly controlled by the driver’s brain and central nervous system. The driver “feels” other objects external to the vehicle and judges distances from the car in a manner crudely analogous to the operations involved in judging one’s environment from the physical body. The difference is that the signal flow from the brain to the auto is indirect and is impeded by the physical separation of the operator’s appendages from the appropriate control mechanisms. A little over a decade ago, there was talk of an experimental automobile braking system which was to be engaged by simply lifting an eyebrow, cutting in half the reaction time of a conventional brake system and reducing physical effort and mechanical work. As we designed increasingly subtle mechanisms responsive to heat, pressure, and biological signals, we appear to be approaching a time when “willing” a machine into action will be relatively common. The separate steps between thought and realization of a desire goal begin to blur and finally disappear. Signal flow between organic and mechanical units linked in a system gradually becomes continuous and unbroken. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
This trend toward continuous communications has resulted in the transfer of the machine operator’s work from “…the level of muscular activity to the level of perception, memory and thought—to internal mental processes.” MIT mathematician Norbert Wiener (1894-1964) noted that the Industrial Revolution concerned the machine primarily as an alternative to human muscle. According to Lewis Mumford in The Pentagon of Power, “Man’s biological emergence during the last two million years has, indeed, accelerated; and it has done so mainly in one direction, in the enlargement of the nervous system, under an increasingly unified cerebral direction.” Machines make the body expendable. If machines have accomplished nothing else, they have reduced the human self to the brain and central nervous system. The history of simple tools is a chronology of extension and articulation of human functions. Tools, originally conceived about two million years ago as crude adjuncts of the body to increase its power and efficacy, are passive participants in accomplishing work. A machine is merely a supplemental limb; this is the be-all and end—all of machinery. Tools connected in series produce machines. Machinery has gone a step beyond the tool in that it is capable of varying degrees of automatism (self-regulated activity without human participation), contingent behavior (decision making) and reaction to sensory stimulus through artificial organs. Mechanical history involves not only extension but replacement of human acidity. Mumford has actually called that machine “…a sort of minor organism, designed to perform a single set of functions.” You might say that extension of the limb evolved into extensions of the brain. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Technology improves itself in a Darwinian way, as seen in the electronic marketplace, where unfit contraptions become extinct every year. As technology absorbs more and more human work, the line separating biology and mechanics gradually becomes less distinct. Though we are still toolmakers and our “logic engines” are still tools in the general sense of the word, the context has changed. No one living at the time of Hero of Alexandria had any idea that five machines he defined would have produced offspring capable of instantaneous logarithmic calculation or incorporated into the body as working parts. By World War II, machines were exhibiting behaviour originally thought to be characteristic of primitive life. Early guided missiles were designed with the idea of goal-seeking and scanning in mind, which “had combined as the essential mechanical conception of a working model that would behave very much like a simple animal. Throughout history, limited tools have limited achievement. Leonardo da Vinci’s sixteenth-century chain drives and ball bearings were theoretically workable, yet never worked in their inventor’s lifetime. Charles Babbage’s nineteenth-century mechanical computer suffered the same fate. The problem? Both inventors needed precisely machined parts that (though readily available today) were beyond the manufacturing technology of their times. Physicist David Miller recounts how a sophisticated integrated circuit design project at TRW counts how a sophisticated integrated circuit design project at TRW hit similar limits in the early 1980s: “It all came down to whether a German company could col their glass lenses slowly enough to give us the accuracy we needed. They couldn’t.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
In the molecular World, tool development again paces progress, and new tools can bring breathtaking advances. Mark Pearson, director of molecular biology for Du Pont, has observed this in action: “When I was a graduate student back in the 1950s, it was a multiyear problem to determine the molecular structure of a single protein. We used to say, ‘One protein, one career.’ Yet now the time has shrunk from a career to a decade to a year—and in optimal cases to a few months.” Protein structures can be mapped atom by atom by studying X-ray reflections from layers in protein crystals. Pearson observes that “Characterizing a protein was a career-long endeavor in part because it was so difficult to get crystals, and just getting the material was a big constraint. With new technologies, we can get our hands on the material now—that may sound mundane, but it is a great advance. To the people in the field, it makes all the difference in the World.” Improved tools for making and studying proteins are of special importance because proteins are promising building blocks for first-generation molecular machines. At one end of what we might think of as the spectrum of personal experience, there is the occasional momentous event. Emotionally engulfing. Intellectually overpowering. These experiences happen to everyone, but they are relatively rare. Between these “highs,” life moves along from routine experience to routine experience, flowing one into the next, developing the overall pattern that is life’s true content. When you sit down at a café with a friend, you do not need to have a highly excitable and joyful emotional experience to be worthwhile. Perhaps nothing will happen in that hour or two. No exclamations of passion. No news of dire events. No shoot-outs at the next table or in the street. Perhaps you will explore some obscure detail in your friend’s feelings or personal history. Perhaps you will merely converse or watch the passing parade. Perhaps you will explore some obscure detail in your friend’s feelings or personal history. Perhaps you will muse about fashion. Most coffeehouse conversations, like the rest of life, will go more or less that way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Ordinary life contains speaks and valleys of experience, highs and lows, long periods of dormancy, many periods of quiet, indecision, ambiguity, resolution, failed resolution. All of these fit into a wide pattern that is the way of life is actually lived. Included within this pattern are occasional highlighted events: great shocks, unexpected eruptions, sudden achievements. Life would be frustrating without such catharsis and excitement, but life would be bizarre and maddening if it had too many of these peak events. Much of the nervousness in the World today in both individual and national life may be attributable to the destiny and power of the experiences that are prearranged for our consumption. Too much happens too fast to be absorbed and integrated into an overall pattern of experience. It is no accident that the World outside television has concentrated increasingly on large and cathartic events. All artificial environments and the consumer life encourage focus on peak events. When nature is absent, so is natural subtlety. Personal attunement to slower, nature-based rhythms is obscured. We focus on the “hits” that are provided, and these reduce more and more to commodities. Every commodity is advertised as offering a bigger and better and more powerful experience than the one that preceded it. Since life’s experiences have been reduced to packaged commodities, like the chimpanzee in the lab, that is what we seek. Television, in addition to being the prime exponent of the commodity life, makes a direct contribution to distorting life in the direction of highlighted experience by choosing its contents to fit this pattern. It is a technological necessity that it do so. Since television is such a vague and limited medium, so unlikely to produce much of any response in a viewer, producers must necessarily divide all the content into two distinct categories: peaks and troughs, the highlighted and the routine, always choosing the former and not the latter. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
In this way, the choices in content match the technical bias toward artificial unusualness and also the tendencies of the wider commodity-based, artificial environment. The programming bias is always toward the more vivid, more powerful, more cathartic, more definite, “clean” peaks of content. The result, not the process. The bizarre, rather than the unusual. When we think about territorial systems, suppose that a single individual using a new strategy is introduced into one of the neighbourhoods of a population where everyone else is using a native strategy. One can say that the new strategy territorially invades the native strategy if every location in the territory will eventually convert to the new strategy. Then one can say that native strategy is territorially stable if not strategy can territorially invade it. All this leads to a rather strong result: it is no harder for a strategy to be territorially stable than it is to be collectively stable. In other words, the conditions that are needed for a strategy to protect itself from takeover by an invader are no more stringent in a territorial social system than they are in a social system where anyone is equally likely to meet anyone else. If a rule is collectively stable, it is territorially stable. The proof of this proposition gives some insight into the dynamics of a territorial system. Suppose there is a territorial system in which everyone is using a native strategy that is collectively stable, except for one individual who is using a new strategy. Now consider whether a neighbour of the newcomer would ever have reason to convert to the newcomer’s strategy. Since the native strategy is collectively stable, the newcomer cannot be scoring as well when surrounded by natives as a native who is surrounded by natives is scoring. However, every neighbour of the newcomer actually does have a neighbour who is also a native and who is entirely surrounded by other natives. Therefore no neighbour of the newcomer will find the newcomer’s neighbours will retain their own native strategy, or, what amounts to the same thing, will convert to the strategy of their native neighbours. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Therefore, the new strategy cannot spread in a population of collectively stable strategies, and consequently a collectively stable strategy is also territorially stable. The proposition that a collectively stable rule is territorially stable demonstrates that protection from invasion is at least easy in a territorial system as in a freely mixing system. One implication is that mutual cooperation can be sustained in a territorial system by a nice rule with no greater requirement on the size by a nice rule with no grater requirement on the size of the discount parameter relative to the payoff parameters than it takes to make that nice rule collectively stable. Even with the help of a territorial social structure to maintain stability, a nice rule is not necessarily safe. If the shadow of the future is sufficiently weak, then no nice strategy can resist invasion even with the help of territoriality. In such a case, the dynamics of the invasion process can sometimes be extremely intricate and quite fascinating to look at. Meanies spreading in a population of TIT FOR TAT goes something like this: there is an initial situation of one mean person in the population, by generation 1, there are five meanies. By generation 7 most of the community is mean, while the nice people being a very small minority. In this case, the shadow of the future has been made quite weak. By generation 19, the meanies have practically taken over, and finding a pocket of nice people extremely rare. The meanies colonize the original TIT FOR TAT population, forming a fascinating patten of long borders and bypassed islands of cooperators. Another way of looking at the effects of territoriality is to investigate what happens when the players are using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The Biblical tale of the flood is started when the wickedness of man is so great on Earth and all the imagery of the designs of his heart only evil the whole day, and He repents of having made man. God Himself speaks: He does not wish again to curse the Earth on account of man, “for the imagery of man’s heart is evil from his youth.” Scripture has at its core such a powerful mythology that even the residue of that mythology is still sufficient to serve as an exacting control mechanism for some people. It provides, first of all, a theory about the mean of life and therefore rules on how one is to conduct oneself. With apologies to Rabbi Hillel, who expressed it more profoundly and in the time it takes to stand on one leg, the theory is as follows: There is one God, who created the Universe and all that is in it. Although humans can never fully understand God, He has revealed Himself and His will to us throughout history, particularly through His commandments and the testament of the prophets as recorded in the Bible. The greatest of these commandments tell us that humans are to love God and express their love for Him through love, mercy, and justice to our fellow humans. At the end of time, all nations and humans will appear before God to be judged, and those who have followed His commandments will find favour in His sight. Those who have denied God and the commandments will perish utterly in the darkness that lies outside the presence of God’s light. To borrow from Hillel: That is the theory. All the rest is commentary. Those who believe in this theory—particularly those who accept the Bible as the literal word of God—are free to dismiss other theories about the origin and meaning of life and to give minimal weight to the facts on which other theories are based. Moreover, in observing God’s laws, and the detailed requirements of their enactment, believers receive guidance about what books they should not read, about what plays and films they should not see, about what music they should not hear, about what subjects their children should not study, and so on. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
For strict fundamentalists of the Bible, the theory and what follows from it seal them off from unwanted information, and in that way their actions are invested with meaning, clarity, and they believe, more authority. “These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them…I am whoever you make me, but what you want is a fiend; you want a sadistic fiend, because that is what you are,” say Charles Manson. Many people try to persuade the youth to follow religion and come and meet Jesus Christ, but some to not accept the invitation and become Worldly. A lot of people are disenchanted and have dropped out from main stream society. As they do, the converge to partake in their own great social experiment. They were alienated by the sterility of a technological society that elevated scientific materialism and rational planning as its ultimate ideals, yet could not solve basic problems such as poverty and economic injustice. They were frustrated by the hypocrisy and failures of religious and political institutions that preached Christian tolerance, yet supported the ecology-shearing practices of big business, racial intolerance, and the horrors of the 2020 riots. They sought solace in an atavistic romanticism. En masse, they “turned in, turned on, and dropped out.” This counterculture was a full-fledged revolt against the American technocracy, social form in which an industrial society reaches the peak of its organizational integration. In an attempt to blot out the vision of a “brave new World,” in which corporate profits supersede all other goals, these youths came together in an attempt at a utopian tribal society, in which man was in harmony with the environment, and in which the needs of all members of the tribe would be taken care of willingly, without government coercion. “Therefore we did pour out our souls in prayer to God, that He would strengthen us and deliver us out of the hands of our enemies, yea, and also give us strength that we might retain our cities, and our lands, and our possession, for the support of our people,” reports Alma 58.10. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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A Haven in a Heartless World
A torrent of oncoming technologies will make possible endless further varieties of para-money. Thus, cards may soon let us decide how much fungibility we want. The Arab Malaysian Bank in Kuala Lampur has offered a card to Muslim customers that disallows use in massage parlors or nightclubs. Before long, activist political movements, for example, may issue millions of “boycott cards” that are fully fungible—except that they cannot be used to buy Nikes, Shell gasoline, clothes from the Gap or products of other companies on their hit list. Wives or husbands might program restrictions on a free-spending spouse’s card. Or parents may give their children cards that cannot be used to buy candy, alcohol, tobacco—of fast food. Above average weight individuals wishing to avoid fast-food fat-food but finding it hard to resist may get help from a pay card they themselves can program to block any payment to Pizza Hut or Taco Bell—or all fast-food vendors. Make a resolution, quit carrying more than a dollar’s worth of cash and let your card help stiffen your resolve. Even newer technologies are making cards themselves obsolete. In many countries, cell phones and watches are already the equivalent of electronic wallets. Containing a chip or a virtual card provided by a participating bank, the phone can authorize the retailer to make a withdrawal from your account. Such phones are already used at high-end clothing stores, restaurants, vending machines, supermarkets, and train stations, among other locations. No one expects to kill cash anytime soon, but they are hoping to eventually remove paper currency from the market. New technologies pose a parallel death threat to cards as well as cash. Three new converging forces will provide an even greater variety of payment options. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
First are new technologies to verify a user’s identity. A rash of increasingly reliable identification methods are coming into use. In Japan, for example, the largest credit-card issuer, JBC, has introduced a system that identifies individuals by the unique pattern of blood vessels in a finger. Banks and card issuers, using research accelerated by the fight against terrorism, are also exploring other biometric methods, including retinal scanning and voice and face recognition. Second are new wireless technologies, too numerous and rapidly changing to detail here. And third, across the board, are dramatic advances in miniaturization. Drawing on innovations in all three of these fields, many companies, including Sony, Philips, Sun Microsystems and IBM, are working on striking alternative to conventional plastic, and virtual cards seem to be the way to go. Virtual cards are essential the same as debt and credit cards, with the exception that there is no physical card. One just goes to their banking online system, requests a card and the details you need are given to you to make an online transaction or to use your phone as a method of payment in the store. I suppose many stores will eventually allow customers to physical enter their virtual card payment methods manually. Credit cards are just a physical variant of identity, so anyway you can identify someone can be a way to pay for things. So much technology is coming out that it is hard for retailers to keep up with. Blend these technologies together with the Gage principle, and it is not difficult to imagine the eventual implantation in out pinky, say, of a minute chip that would make it possible to purchase anything at any time from any place by simply activating it. A pinky chip could wirelessly assure a retailer that we are who we claim to be, supply a bank-account number and simultaneously authorize the bank to pay the appropriate amount. The phrase “giving someone the finger” could take on fresh meaning. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
This rapid diversification of both payment methods and degrees of fungibility reflects the advanced economy’s overall move away from the one-size-fits-all mass society of the industrial past. Even more radical possibilities have entered the World’s economy such a Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin. Sony has also been considering creating a currency of its own for use inside the company. That could permit a Sony unit in China, for instance, to do business with sister units in Japan or elsewhere without first exchanging foreign earnings into yen. The main objective would be to reduce currency risk. A further possibility would be to create a joint currency with other companies such as BMW or Chevy. The dollar may not remain a low-risk haven for foreign investors forever. And unlikely as it may seem today, the day could come when one would rather have an electronic pocketful of Microsoft “Gateses” or Sony “Moritas” than euros or dollars. Or a currency collectively backed by the Fortune 500—or, someday, the Xinhua 500. Among their other functions, para-monies are designed to speed up or slow down payment. Thus, credit cards encourage delayed payment (in return for an interest charge, of course). Debit cards, rather than delaying payment, speed it, immediately deducting the purchase price from the cardholder’s bank account. The emerging new wealth system also opens the path to radical changes in how, and especially when, we are paid to work. In the industrial past, workers were typically paid intermittently, at the end of a week or month. Most still are. This means that employers have a week’s or month’s free use of money actually owed to the employees. This “float” is the equivalent of an interest-free loan from workers to their employers. Conversely, utility bills, for example, are usually paid after the customer has already received a month’s worth of electricity or gas. In this case, the customer is the beneficiary of float. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
In the larger economy, some companies and industries—publishers of subscriber magazines, for example—live on float. However, float, regarded by some economists as inefficient for the economy as a whole, may be on its way out. Once companies and customers are all adequately wired up or wirelessly interconnected and we pay pills electronically, we may see utility providers demand streaming payment—a contract to allow their computer to electronically such payments out of our equally electronic bank accounts moment by moment as we use their services. They would get their money sooner, would be able to use or invest it earlier and could—theoretically, at least—reduce the price they charge us. We may also see groups of workers demanding to be paid electronically minute by minute for the work they do, rather than waiting for paydays. Streaming pay and payments are the natural parallel of the move in advanced knowledge-based economies from batch or intermittent production to continuous-flow, 24/7 operations. And the more instantaneous the in-stream of paychecks and the out-stream of payments, the closer the effects are to direct cash transactions. These accelerating innovations have given rise to many forecasts suggesting the “death of money.” At one time, these may have seemed fanciful. However, are they? So many forces are changing power relationships in Japan as well. According to Alex Stewart, author of a definitive report on Japanese distribution systems, “retailers are now the dominant force within the distribution industry,” while “manufacturers have to rely increasingly on retailers to interpret the needs of the marketplace.” George Fields is chairman and CEO of ASI Market Research (Japan). According to Fields, in Japan “distribution no longer means putting something on the self. It is now essentially an information system.” Distribution anywhere, he notes, “will no longer be a chain of inventory points, passing goods along the line, but an information link between the manufacturer and the consumer.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
What Fields is perhaps too police to say, and what the Japanese in particular feel uncomfortable in making explicit, is that this transformation will dethrone many of the “shoguns” of industry in Japan. In Japan, too, power will shift toward those firms or industrial sectors that know best how to win the info-wars. However, the battle between manufacturers and retailers is only beginning, and it is not a two-sided struggle. The real-life tug-of-war has drawn many others into the battle zone—everyone from banks and computer manufacturers to truckers and telephone companies. Squeezed between manufacturers and retailers are wholesalers, warehousers, transport firms, and others, each engaging in a fiercely competitive war-against-all, wielding advanced information and communications technologies at the main weapons. Moreover, what we have seen so far is only the opening skirmish, and manufacturers themselves are mounting important counter-offensives—selling through alternative channels outside the store (direct mail, for example), using computers and telecommunications to set up their own vertically integrated distribution systems, buying up retail stores, and attempting to leapfrog technologically, to get ahead of the retailers. Information flowing from these technologies will transform all our production and distribution systems, creating vast power vacuums that completely new groups and institutions are already racing to fill. Throughout history, people have worked to achieve better control of matter, to convince atoms to do what we want them to do. This has gone on since before people learned that atoms exist, and has accelerate ever since. Although different industries use different materials and different tools and methods, the basic aim is always the same. They seek to make better things, and make them more consistently, and that means better control of the structure of matter. From this perspective, nanotechnology is just the next, natural step in a progression that has been underway for millennia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Nano technology is unpredictable and it goes to the heart of important questions: “How will this technology be developed? Who will do it? Where? When? In ten years? Fifty? A hundred? Will this happen in my lifetime?” The answers will depend on what people do with their time and resources, which in turn will depend on what goals they think are most promising. Human attitudes, understanding, and goals will make all the difference. Nanoscience is the study of structures and material on an ultra-small scale. A nanometre is one billionth of a metre. The physical and chemical properties of matter change at the nano level. Nanotechnology has the potential to revolutionize a diverse range of fields, from health care to manufacturing. The safety of nanomaterials and nanotechnology is still being debated, tested, and assessed. Nanoscience is an emerging area of science which involves the study of materials on an ultra-small scale and the novel properties that these materials demonstrate. Nanoscience has the potential to reshape the World around us. It could lead to revolutionary breakthroughs in fields ranging from manufacturing to health care. However, what is nanoscience, how does it work and how could it help change our lives? Nanoscience is the study of structures and materials on an ultra-small scale, and the unique and interesting properties these materials demonstrate. Nanoscience is cross disciplinary, meaning scientists from a range of fields including chemistry, physics, biology, medicine, computing, materials science and engineering are studying it and using it to better understand our World. Nanotechnology (also sometimes called molecular manufacturing), on the other hand, is the design, production and application of structures, devices and systems at the nanoscale. So essentially one is studying nanomaterials and their properties and the other is using those materials and properties to create something new or different. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
The nanoscale is the dimensional range of approximately 1 to 100 naometres. However, what does this really mean? Well, it is so tiny that it might take a moment to get your head around. Take a look at the back of your hand. Using just your eyes you can focus down to a scale of 1 centimetre to 1 millimetre. At this scale the skin looks flat. However, get out a magnifying glass and you can see it is actually wrinkly with cracks and folds. The magnifying glass allows you to study the fine structure of the skin at less than a millimetre (or one-thousandth f a metre). If you were to look more closely with a microscope, you could examine the cells that make up your skin. Now you are working at the scale of micrometres (one-thousandth of a millimetre), sometimes referred to as the microworld. Cells and bacteria are measures in micrometres, and electronic components on a silicon chip are usually around 1 micrometre in size. To reach the nanoworld you have to go smaller again. A nanometre (nm) is 10^-9, which is one-thousandth of a micrometre, or one-billionth of a metre. This is the scale at which we measure atoms and the molecules they make. By manipulating and moving atoms around, we can create new things. Think of nanotechnology, then, as being a bit like construction…only on a tiny scale. Nanotechnology may seem like something out of the future, but in fact, many everyday products are already made using nanotechnology. Sunscreen is a product of nanotechnology. Nanoparticles have been added to sunscreen for years to make them more effective. Two particular types of nanoparticles commonly added to sunscreen are titanium dioxide and zinc oxide. These tiny particles are not only high effective at blocking UV radiation, they also feel lighter on the skin, which is why modern sunscreens are nowhere near as think and gloopy as the sunscreens used in the past. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Nanotechnology is even used in textiles. Nanoparticles of silica can help to create fabrics that repel water and other liquids. Silica can be added to fabrics either by being incorporated into the fabric’s weave or sprayed onto the surface of the fabric to create a waterproof or stainproof coating. So if you have ever noticed how liquid forms little beads on waterproof clothing-beads that simply roll off the fabric rather than being absorbed—that is thanks to nanotechnology. Carbon nanotubes are close to replacing silicon as a material for making smaller, faster and more efficient microchips and devices, as well as lighter, more conductive and stronger quantum nanowires. Graphene’s properties make it an ideal candidate for the development of flexible touchscreens. A new semiconductor developed by Kyto University makes it possible to manufacture solar panels that double the amount of sunlight converted into electricity. Nanotechnology also lowers costs, produces stronger and lighter wind turbines, improves fuel efficiency and, thanks to the thermal insulation of some nanocomponents, can save energy. The properties of some nanomaterials make them ideal for improving early diagnosis and treatment of neurodegenerative diseases or cancer. They are able to attack cancer cells selectively without harming other healthy cells. Some nanoparticles have also been used to enhance pharmaceutical products such as sunscreen. Air purification with ions, wastewater purification with nanobubbles or nanofiltration systems for heavy metals are some of its environmentally-friendly applications. Nanocatalysts are also available to make chemical reactions more efficient and less polluting. When it comes to food, nanobiosensors could be used to detect the presence of pathogens in food or nanocomposites to improve food production by increasing mechanical and thermal resistance and decreasing oxygen transfer in packed products. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Researchers play a central role in the development of nanotechnology. They tend to work on what they think is interesting, which depends on what they think is possible, which depends on the tools they have or—among the most creative researchers—on the tools they can see how to make. Our tools shape how we think: as the saying goes, when all you all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. New tools encourage new thoughts and enable new achievements, and decisions about tool development will pace advances in nanotechnology. This field will exceed $125,000,000,000 USD globally by 2024. Nanotechnology is really a great idea because if you recall, graphene—modified carbon is harder than steel, lighter than aluminum and almost transparent. We tend to focus on money, technology, housing, jobs, and cars so much that this may cause some people to become cold. However, consider the family. As it developed in Europe in the late eighteenth century, its theory included the premise that individuals need emotional protection from a cold and competitive society. The family became, as Christopher Lasch calls it, a haven in a heartless World. Its program included (I quote Lasch here) preserving “separatist religious traditions, alien languages and dialects, local lore and other traditions.” To do this, the family was required to take charge of the socialization of children; the family became a structure, albeit an informal one, for the management of information. It controlled what “secrets” of adult life would be allowed entry and what “secrets” would not. There may be readers who can remember when in the presence of children adults avoided using certain words and did not discuss certain topics whose details and ramifications were considered unsuitable for children to know. A family that does not or cannot control the information environment of its children is barely a family at all, and may lay claim to the name only by virtue of the fact that its members share biological information through DNA. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
In fact, in many societies a family was just that—a group connected by genetic information, itself controlled through the careful planning of marriages. In the West, the family was as an institution for the management of nonbiological information began with the ascendance of print. As books on every conceivable subject becomes available, parents were forced into the roles of guardians, protectors, nurturers, and arbiters of taste and rectitude. Their function was to define what it means to be a child by excluding from the family’s domain information that would undermine its purpose. That the family can no longer do this is, I believe, obvious to everyone. Courts of law, the school, and the family are only three of several control institutions that serve as part of a culture’s information immune system. The political party is another. As a young man growing up in a Democratic household, I was provided with clear instructions on what value to assign to political events and commentary. The instructions did not require explicit statement. They followed logically from theory, which was, as I remember it, as follows: Because people need protection, they must align themselves with a political organization. The Democratic Party was entitled to our loyalty because it represented the social and economic interests of the working class, of which our family, relatives, and neighbors were members (except for one uncle who, though a truck driver, consistently voted Republican Party represented the interests of the rich, who, by definition, had no concern for us. The theory gave clarity to our perceptions and a standard by which to judge the significance of information. The general principle was that information provided by Democrats was always to be taken seriously and, in all probability, was both true and useful (expect if it came from Southern Democrats, who were helpful in electing presidents). #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Information provided by Republicans was often balderdash to many non-Democrats and was only useful only to the extent that it confirmed how self-serving some Republican were considered to be. The rule of law is an oversimplification. A curriculum is an oversimplification. So is a family’s conception of a child. That is the function of theories—to oversimplifying, and thus to assist believers in organizing, weighting, and excluding information. Therein lies the power of theories. Their weakness is precisely because they oversimplify, they are vulnerable to attack by new information. When there is too much information to sustain any theory, information becomes essentially meaningless. The most imposing institution for the control of information are religion and that state. They do their work in a somewhat more abstract way than do courts, schools, families, or political parties. They manage information through the creation of myths and stories that express theories about fundamental questions: why are we here, where have we come from, and where are we headed? I have already alluded to the comprehensive theological narrative of the medieval European World and how its great explanatory power contributed to a sense of well-being and coherence. Perhaps I have not stressed enough the extent to which the Bible also served as an information control mechanism, especially in the moral domain. The Bible gives manifold instructions on what one must do and must not do, as well as guidance on what language to avoid (on pain of committing blasphemy), what ideas to avoid (on pain of committing idolatry). Necessarily but perhaps unfortunately, the Bible also explained how the World came into being in such literal detail that it could not accommodate new information produced by the telescope and subsequent technologies. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The trials of Galileo and, three hundred years later, of Scopes were therefore about the admissibility of certain kinds of information. Both Cardinal Bellarmine and William Jennings Bryan were fighting to maintain the authority of the Bible to control information about the profane World as well as the sacred. In their defeat, more was lost than the Bible’s authority in defining and categorizing moral behavior was also weakened. When the World’s population reached five billions the Earth was heavily burdened to support it. However, wars, pestilences and famines brought relief, from time to time, and in some degree reduced the prodigious pressure. The memorable benefaction of the year 508, which was a famine reinforced by a pestilence, swept away sixteen hundred millions of people in nine moths It was not much, but it was something. The same is all that can be said of its successors of later periods: The burden of population grew heavier and heavier and more and more formidable, century by century, and the gravity of the situation created by it was steadily and proportionately increased. After the age of infancy, few died. The average of life was 600 years. The cradles were filling, filling, filling—always, always, always; the cemeteries stood comparatively idle, the undertakers have but little traffic, they could hardly support their families. The death-rate was 2250 in the 1,000,000. To the thoughtful this was portentous; to the light-witted it was matter for brag! These latter were always comparing the population of one decade with that of the previous one and hurrahing over the might increase—as if that were an advantage to the World; a World that could hardly scratch enough out of the Earth to keep itself from starving. And yet, worse was to come! Necessarily our true hope did not and could not lie in spasmodic famine and pestilence, whose effects could be only temporary, but in war and physicians, whose help is consistent. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
Self-perception and self-relationship are the peculiarly human, the irruption of a strange element into nature, the inner lot of man. Here also, then, the demoniac, whose desire is toward us, as a woman’s is towards a man—to arouse this association in the reader, one of the phrases God addressed to Eve is incorporated in His speech to Kain—is first to be encountered directly; from this point too it first become accessible and demonstrable to us in the World. Here, at the inner threshold, there is of course no further room for disposition; the struggle must now be fought out. In contradistinction to the first humans, Kain does not reply to God’s address, He refuses to account to him for this deed. He refuses to fact the demon at the threshold he thus delivers himself up to the latter’s “desire.” Intensification and confirmation of indecision is decision to evil. So Kain murders. He speaks to his brother, we are not told what he says’ he goes with him into the field; he strikes him dead…Why? No motive, not even jealousy, is sufficient to explain the monstrous deed. We must remember that it is the first murder: Kain does not yet know that such a thing exists, that one can murder, that if one strikes a person hard enough one strikes him dead. He does not yet know what death and killing are. It is not a motive that is decisive, but an occasion. In the vortex of indecision Kain strikes out, at the point of greatest provocation and least resistance. He does not murder, he was murdered. When God’s curse—again in words which refer back to the cursing of the first humans and lead over and beyond it—sends him forth from the ploughed fields to be “a fugitive and a vagabond on Earth,” he is allotting him a destiny which is the incarnate representation of what took place within his soul. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
What is so paradoxical is that our language is the product of the extraordinary thought and philosophical greatness at which this cursory and superficial survey has done nothing more than hint. There is a lifetime and more of study here, which would turn out impoverishing certitudes into humanizing doubts. To return to the reasons behind our language and weigh them against the reasons for other language would in itself liberate us. I have tried to provide the outline of an archeology of our souls as they are. We are like unenlightened shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part. All that is necessary is a careful excavation to provide them with life-enhancing models. We need history, not to tell us what happened, or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible. This is our educational crisis and opportunity. Western rationalism had culminated in a rejection of reason. Is this result necessary? Many will say that my reports of the decisive influence of Continental, particularly German, philosophy on us are false or exaggerated and that, even if it were true that all this language comes from the course to which I attribute it, language does not have such effects. However, the language is all around us. Its sources are also undeniable, as is the thought that produced the language. We know how the language was popularized. I need only think of my Amherst students or my Atlanta taxi driver to be persuaded that the categories of the mind determined the perceptions. If we can believe tht Calvinist “worldviews” made capitalism, we can also credit the possibility that overpowering visions of German philosophers are preparing the tyranny of the future. #RandolphHrris 14 of 20
I must reiterate that Rousseau, Kant, Hegel and Nietzsche are thinkers of the very highest order. This is, in fact, precisely my point. We must relearn what this means and also that there are others who belong in the same rank. Nations, businesses, tribes, and birds are examples of individuals which often operate mainly within certain territories. They interact much more with their neighbors than with those who are far away. Hence their success depends in large part on how well they do in their interactions with their neighbors. However, neighbors can serve another function as well. A neighbor can provide a role model. If the neighbor is doing well, the behavior of the neighbor can be imitated. In this way successful strategies can spread throughout a population, from neighbor to neighbor. Territories can be thought of in two completely different ways. One way is in terms of geography and physical space. For example, the live-and-let-live system in trench warfare might have spread from part of the front line to adjacent parts. Another way of thinking about territories is in terms of an abstract space of characteristics. For example, a business might market a soft drink with a certain amount of sugar and a certain amount of caffeine. The “neighbors” of this soft drink are other drinks on the market with a little more or less sugar, or a little more or less caffeine. Similarly, a political candidate might take a position on a liberal/conservative dimension and a position on an internationalism/isolation dimension. If there are many candidates vying with each other in an election, the “neighbors” of the candidate are those with similar positions. Thus territories can be abstract spaces as well as geographic spaces. Colonization provides another mechanism in addition to imitation by which successful strategies can spread from place to place. If the location of a less successful strategy was taken over by an offspring of a more successful neighbor, colonization would occur. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, whether strategies spread by imitation or colonization, the idea is the same: neighbors interact and the most successful strategy spreads to bordering locations. The individuals remain fixed in their locations, but their strategies can spread. To make this process amenable to analysis, it must be formalized. For illustrative purposes, consider a simple structure of territories in which the entire territory is divided up so that each individual has four neighbors, one to the north, one to the east, one to the south, and one to the west. In each “generation,” each individual attains a success score measured by its average performance with its four neighbors. Then if an individual has one or more neighbors who are more successful of them (or picks randomly among the best in case of a tie among the most successful neighbors). Territorial social structures have many interesting properties. One of them is that that it is at least as easy for a strategy to protect itself from a takeover by a new strategy in a territorial structure as it is in a nonterritorial structure. If the newcomer does better with a native than a native does with another native, a single individual using a new strategy can invade a population of natives. If no strategy can invade the population of natives, then the native strategy is said to be collectively stable. “And it was by faith that the three disciples obtained a promise that they should not taste death; and they obtained not the promise until after their faith. And neither at any time hath any wrought miracles until after their faith; wherefore they first believed in the Son of God. And there were many whose faith was so exceedingly strong, even before Christ came, who could not be kept from within the veil, but truly saw with their eyes the things which they had beheld with an eye of faith, and were glad,” reports Ether 12.17-19. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Pop Art demonstrated that the boundaries between art and mass media (exempli gratia ads and comics) are dissolving. Its perfunctory and mass-produced look is that of the whole society and the detached, blank quality of Warhol and his products sum it up. Banal, morally weightless, depersonalized images, cynically manipulated by a fashion-conscious marketing stratagem: the nothingness of modern art and its World revealed. The proliferation of art styles and approaches in the 60s—conceptual, minimalist, performance, et cetera—and the accelerated obsolescence of most art brought the “postmodern” era, a displacement of the formal “purism” of modernism by an electric mix from past stylistic achievements. This is basically a tired, spiritless recycling of used-up fragments, announcing that the development of art is at an end. Against the global devaluing of the symbolic, moreover, it is incapable of generating new symbols and scarcely even makes an effort to do so. Occasional critics, like Thomas Lawson, bemoan art’s current inability “to stimulate the growth of really troubling doubt,” little noticing that a quite noticeable movement of doubt threatens to throw over art itself. Such “critics” cannot grasp that art must remain alienation and as such must be superseded, that art is disappearings because the immemorial separation between nature and art is a death sentence for the World that must be voided. Deconstruction, for its part, announced the project of decoding Literature and indeed the “texts,” or systems of signification, throughout all culture. However, this attempt to reveal supposedly hidden ideology is stymined by its refusal to consider origins or historical causation, an aversion it inherited from structuralism/poststructuralism. Derrida, deconstruction’s seminal figure, deals with language as solipsism, consigned to self-interpretation; he engages not in critical activity but in writing about writing. Rather than a de-constructing of impacted reality, this approach is merely a self-contained academicism, in which Literature, like modern painting before it, never departs from concern with its own surface. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Meanwhile, since Piero Manzoni canned his own feces and sold them in a gallery and Chris Burden had himself shot in the arm and crucified to a Volkswagen, we see in art ever more fitting parables of its end, such as the self-portraits drawn by Anastasi—with his eyes closed. “Serious” music is long dead and popular music deteriorates; poetry nears collapse and retreats from view; drama, which moved from the Absurd to Silence, is dying; and the novel is eclipsed by non-fiction as the only way to write seriously. In a jaded, enervated age, when it seems to speak is to say less, art is certainly less. Baudelaire was obliged to claim a poet’s dignity in a society which had no more dignity to hand out. A century and more later how inescapable is the truth of that condition and how much more threadbare is the consolation or station of “timeless” art. Adorno began his last book thus: “Today it goes without saying that nothing concerning art goes without saying, much less without thinking. Everything about art has become problematic: its inner life, its relation to society, even its right to exist.” But Aesthetic Theory affirms art, just as Marcuse’s last work did, testifying to despair and to the difficulty of assailing the hermetically sealed ideology of culture. And although other “radicals,” such as Habermas, counsel that the desire to abolish symbolic mediation is irrational, it is becoming clearer that when we really experience with out hearts and hands the sphere of art is shown to be pitiable. In the transfiguration we must enact the symbolic will be left behind and art refused in favor of the real. Play, creativity, self-expression and authentic experience will recommence at that moment. With TV, the Technical Events Test is extremely subversive to television. This is one reason I have asked you to do it. As people become aware of the degree to which technique, rather than anything intrinsically interesting, keeps them fixed to the screen, withdrawal from addiction and immersion can begin. I have seen this happen with my own children. Once I had put them to the task of counting and timing these technical events, their absorption was never the same. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
When viewers become alert to the technology being used upon them, they can separate technique from content. With the effects of technique stripped away, the true content of the program has to stand on its own. In the case of advertising, it falls apart. Regular programming also assumes its true worth and it is often even less than you may have imagines was possible. As you become able to pull back out of the immersion in the TV set, you can widen your perceptual environment to again include the room you are in. Your feelings and personal awareness are rekindled. With self-awareness emerging you can perceive the quality of sensory deadness television induces, the one-dimensionality of its narrowed information field, and arrive at an awareness of boredom. This leads to channel switching at first and eventually to turning off the set. Any act that breaks immersion in the fantastic World of television is subversive to the medium, because without the immersion and addiction, its power is gone. Brainwashing ceases. As you watch advertising, you become enraged. The great German dramatist Bertolt Brecht used the term “alienation” to describe this process of breaking immersion. Writing during the early thirties, Brecht used the term to mean the shattering of theatrical illusion. By breaking immersion in the fantasy the theater-goer becomes self-aware and attains a mental attitude that allows discernment, criticism, thought and political understanding of the material on display. Without “alienation,” involvement is at an unconscious level, the theater-goer absorbing rather than reflecting and reacting. Brecht argued that becoming lost or immersed in the words, fantasies and entertainments of theater was preparation for similar immersion in the words and fantasies of theatrical leadership: Hitler. Brecht, like Walter Benjamin, felt that the entire development of art during the thirties furthered ways of mind suitable for autocracy. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
Brecht developed his concept of “alienation” in order to break the form of the theatrical relationship. To accomplish this, he would interrupt the line of the theatrical action; or have the actors step out of their parts to speak directly to the audience personally or politically; or add such elements as placards. In films, he would put words on the screen to explain the meaning of a scene that might otherwise have been received as “entertainment,” thereby shattering unconscious absorption. In Brechtian terms, if an actor developed a character in such a way that the audience became absorbed in the character rather than the meaning of the character, then the actor would have failed. The goal was that each member of the audience become aware that he or she is in a theater, that actors are performing, that the characters are created on purpose to convey a message, and that the massage applies directly to each person in the audience. In this way, theater had the capacity to become educational in a revolutionary way, capable of moving people to actions. Without this shattering of illusion, Brecht felt, theater remains an example of mindless immersion within an autocratic format. And yet, because theater involves a live public performance, the possibilities for technically created illusion are far fewer than in film of television. It is this very quality of “alienation” from the illusion, the experience of self-awareness, that advertisers and program producers go to such lengths to avoid. They may not actually be thinking to themselves: “I have got to keep these viewers hyped and away from boredom or I’ll lose them.” Instead, they define some production values as “good television” and others as “bad television.” They will do anything they can to develop and keep your fixed gaze and total involvement. They have found that technical tricks do better than content because, as we have seen, the content loses too much in the translation through the medium to be engrossing on its own. However, they do also choose content for its immersive and hyperactive value. In addition to shattering your normal perceptual patterns by artificially unusual imagery, dragging your mind and awareness forward, never allowing stasis or calm or a return to self-awareness, producers must also make program choices that fit the process. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Cresleigh Homes
“But tomorrow may rain so, I’ll follow the sun” – The Beatles 🎶
We’ll follow the sun through those giant windows at our #CresleighRanch home at #MillsStation – this is Residence 2, Lot #104…and it’s ready for its new owner!
Sunshine yellow footstools aren’t required, but they’re a nice touch – we can’t wait to see how you decorate.
Keep in mind that the primary suite is downstairs and offers a deep soaker up, full sized window, and a shower that provides a spa like retreat. https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/
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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The Death Spell Had Broken Between the Living and the Dead
Speculation is bound to pursue a wealthy, extremely beautiful, celibate recluse, who has lost those who mean the most to her and is haunted by spirits of the damned. Many wild rumors circulated about Sarah Winchester during her residence in Santa Clara Valley—her opulent estate was even known locally as “The Spirit House”—and some say the rumors may have added to Mrs. Winchester’s isolation. However, the glory, the splendor, the beauty of her mansion, surpassed the vicious rumors and speculation; and the fragrances of the Victorian garden were intoxicating. The tracks were gone; they vanished where the velvet emerald green sod began. There were plenty of creatures, and they welcomed her with caresses. Yet, Mrs. Winchester was bent, broken, withered, widowed—her head was white with unnumbered sorrows. She had been familiar with grief for a thousand years. The deaths of her young husband and her six-week-old daughter Annie stood out clear in her memory, for it was a land-mark; it brought Mrs. Winchester her first real misery, her first real heartbreak. Her memories were blurred with tears, and after ten centuries she cried over and over and over again. Crying over it for pity of that poor child—the child she had lost. Other mothers have felt something akin to this in recalling, not their former selves, (as in her case), but the little figures which represents sons and daughters of their which have since grown to the gravity and stature of full age. Sometimes, for a moment, these poor mothers have a vision of those little creatures romping by, and they recognize the voices of laughter—gone silent long ago!—and they have a pain at the heart, as knowing that those children are lost to them for always, in the flesh, although their grown-up selves are still present in life and still precious. The loved and lost! Lives having gone out from their mothers’, lives to return no more but in visions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Yes, across the mouldering centuries Mrs. Winchester could still see that silken little baby, with her waxen round arms, and delicate smile, just as she was, the fairest thing in this fair World; and in her heart, leathery as it was, she felt again the pang of that day’s disappointment, holding on to the memory of what could have been. It was weeks that she had been wandering the halls of her enormous mansion, and had found no trace of William, her husband. The Valley was so cruelly vast! Early she had a happy thought, and took the bloodhound throughout the estate and showed him the tracks, and was fully of hope, not doubting he would hunt him down in an hour. But she knew that she tried everything she could try, and just needed to say goodbye forever. The track gave no scent. William Winchester was dead. The hurt stayed with her, and Mrs. Winchester was resolved to absorb herself in the construction of her mansion. She did the work, but the old pleasure in it was somehow gone; she did not care anymore. She had between 500 to 600 rooms constructed, but thought they were not good ones and tore them down because her heart was not in it. Some of them were tolerable, but mainly they were crude and inartistic; they lacked finish. The miles of twisting hallways were made even more intriguing by secret passageways in the walls. When Mrs. Winchester set out for her Séance Room, it might well have discouraged the ghost of the angry spirits or even of a bloodhound, to follow her. After traversing an interminable labyrinth of rooms and hallways, suddenly she would push a button, a panel would fly back and she would step quickly from one apartment into another, and unless the pursuing ghost was watchful and quick, he would lose her. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Then she opened a window in that apartment and climbed out, not into the open air, but on the top of a flight of steps that took her down one story only to meet another flight that brought her right back up to the same level again, all inside the house. This was supposed to be very discomforting to evil spirits who are said to be naturally suspicious of traps. Mrs. Winchester was the most unfortunate of women. Rich, respected, very well educated and of sound health and mind—with many other advantages usually valued by those having them and coveted by those who have them not—she sometimes thought that she would be less unhappy if they had been denied her, for then the contrast between her outer and inner life would not be continually demanding a painful attention. In the stress of privation and the need of effort, she might sometimes forget the sombre secret ever baffling the conjecture that it compels. After communing with the spirits, as she turned the hallway, Mrs. Winchester could hear a sound of a door gently closing, and saw in the darkness, indistinctly, the figure of a man, which instantly disappeared among the statues and furniture. A hasty pursuit and brief search of the mansion in the belief that the trespasser was someone secretly visiting a servant proving fruitless, she entered an unlocked door and mounted the stairs to her chamber. Its door was open, and stepping into black darkness she fell headlong over some heavy object on the floor. She spared herself the details; it was her poor William, dead of strangulation by human hands! Nothing had been taken from the house, the servants had heard no sound, and excepting those terrible fingermarks upon the dead man’s throat—dear God she hoped to forget them!—no trace of the assassin was even found. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Although William had Tuberculosis, something had come to end his life before the illness did. Mrs. Winchester kept barbarous murder a secret. Mrs. Winchester donated a substantial sum of money to the Winchester Clinic of the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. One night, a few months after the dreadful event, Mrs. Winchester and her butler were walking back from the carriage house after a trip to the city. The full moon was about three hours above the eastern horizon; the entire countryside had the solemn stillness of a summer night; their footfalls and ceaseless song of the katydids were the only sound, aloof. Black shadows of bordering trees lay athwart the mansion, which, in the short reaches between, gleamed a ghostly white. As they approached the door to the mansion, whose front was in shadow, and in which no light shone, her butler suddenly stopped and clutched her arm, saying, hardly above his breath: “God! God! what is that?” “I heard nothing,” Mrs. Winchester replied. “But see—see!” he said, pointing along the road, directly ahead. Mrs. Winchester said: “Nothing is there. Come, Henry, let us go in—you are ill.” He had released her arm and was standing rigid and motionless in the center of the illuminated roadway, staring like one bereft of sense. His face in the moonlight showed a pallor and fixity inexpressibly distressing. She pulled gently at his sleeve, but he had forgotten her existence. Presently he began to retire backward, step by step, by step, never for an instant removing his eyes from what he saw, or thought he saw. Mrs. Winchester turned half round to follow, but stood irresolute. She did not recall any feeling of fear, unless a sudden chill was its physical manifestation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
It seemed as if an icy wind had touched her face and enfolded her body from head to foot; she could feel the stir of it in her hair. At that moment her attention was drawn to a light that suddenly streamed from an upper window of the mansion: one of the servants, awakened by what mysterious premonition of evil who can say, and in obedience to an impulse that she was never able to name, had turned on the Carbide gas lights, which were operated by pushing an electric button. When she turned to look for the butler he was gone, and in all the years that had passed no whisper of his fate has come across the borderland of conjecture from the realm of the unknown. Mrs. Winchester retired and had fallen almost immediately into a peaceful sleep, from which she awoke with an indefinable sense of peril which was, a common experience in her estate. The servants slept in another part of the house. But these were familiar conditions and never distressed Mrs. Winchester. Nevertheless, the strange terror grew so insupportable that concurring her reluctance to move she sat up and pushed the button to turn on the lights at her bedside. Contrary to her expectation this gave her no relief; the light seemed rather as added danger, for she reflected that it would shine out under the door, disclosing her presence to whatever evil think might lurk in the halls of her mansion. You that are still in the flesh, subject to horrors of the imagination, think what a monstrous fear that must be which seeks in darkness security from malevolent existences of the night. That is to spring to close quarters with an unseen enemy—the strategy of despair! Extinguishing the gas lights, Mrs. Winchester pulled the bedclothing about her heard and lay trembling and silent, unable to shrike, forgetful to pray. In this pitiable state she must have lain for what you call hours—with her there are no hours, there is no time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
At last it came—a soft, irregular sound of footfalls on the stairs! They were slow, hesitant, uncertain, as of something that did not see its way; to her disordered reason all the more terrifying for that, as the approach of some blind and mindless malevolence to which is no appeal. She even thought that she must have left the hall gasolier burning and the groping of this creature proved it a monster of the night. This was foolish and inconsistent with her previous dread of the light, but what would you have? Fear has no brains; it is an idiot. The dismal witness that it bears and the cowardly counsel that it whispers are unrelated. In Mrs. Winchester’s mansion lived those who have passed into the Realm of Terror, who skulk in eternal dusk among the scenes of our former lives, invisible even to themselves, and one another, yet hiding forlorn in lonely places; yearning for speech with out loved ones, yet unenlightened, and as fearful of them as they of humans. Sometimes the disability is removed, the law suspended: by the deathless power of love or hate they break the spell—they are seen by those whom they would warn, console, or punish. What form they seem to them to bear one knows not; they know only that they terrify even those whom they most wish to comfort, and from whom they most crave tenderness and sympathy. What a thing it is to have legions of spirits, cowering and shivering, fearful and vengeful in an altered World, roaming the hallways of one’s house. However, Mrs. Winchester did not die of fright: the Thing turned and went away. She heard it go down the stairs, hurriedly, she thought, as if itself in sudden fear. Then she rose to call for help. Hardly had her shaking hand found the annunciator when—merciful Heaven!—she heard it returning. Its footfalls as it remounted the stairs were rapid, heavy and loud; they shook the mansion. She fled to an angle of the wall and crouched upon the floor. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Mrs. Winchester tried to pray. She tried to call the name of her maid. Then she heard the door thrown open. There was an interval of unconsciousness, and when she revived, she felt a strangling clutch upon her throat—felt her arms feebly beating against something that bore her backward—felt her tongue thrusting itself from between her teeth! And the she felt the life pass from her. As the spirits still dwelled in the mansion of the shadows, lurking in its desolate places, peering from brambles, thickets, towers, corners, stairways and doors. Ghosts at the Winchester mansion know when it is night, for then most people retire and they can venture from their places of concealment to move unafraid about in their old mansion, to look in at the windows, even to enter and gazes upon people’s faces who might still be wandering in the evening hours. Vainly, spirits often seek some method of manifestation, some way to make their continued existence and their great love and poignant pity understood by their loved one’s or those they wish to haunt and terrorize. Ghosts dare to approach people when they are awake, but the terrible eyes of the living frighten them by the glances that they seek from the purpose the hold. Demons, ghosts, and other spiritual beings search for the living in the Winchester mansion during the moonlight dawn. At the time of her death, the unrelenting construction had rambled over six acres. The sprawling mansion contained 160 rooms, 2,000 doors, 10,000 windows, 47 stairways, 47 fireplaces, 13 bathrooms, and 6 kitchens. Carpenters even left nails half driven when they learned of Mrs. Winchester’s death. According to the provisions of her will, Mrs. Winchester’s personal property, including the furnishings, household goods, pictures, jewelry, and papers were left to her niece, Mrs. Marian Merriman Marriott, who promptly has the furnishings auctioned off. It is said to have required sic trucks working six weeks to car the furnishings away! The mansion and farm were not mentioned specially in the will. They became part of the Mrs. Winchester’s estate. #RandolphHaris 7 of 16
Demon possession is a well-defined phenomenon and should be clearly distinguished from spiritism. Since the same demonic forces are at work in both phenomena, they bear some similar characteristics and result in the same occult oppression and bondage. The demonized state of the demon possessed is similar to the trance of the spiritistic medium. Both are under the direct influence of demons who speak through them. In the case of the medium who processes to communicate with the spirits of deceased persons, the demon apes the personality and voice of the deceased. In the case of the demon possessed, the evil spirits appear to be more crassly cruel, unclean, violent, and less sophisticated and subtle than spirits working through a clairvoyant medium. In demon possession, they are also more domineering and brutally enslaving. Nervous muscular reactions and contortions peculiar to the demoniac often appear also in the spiritistic medium when one goes into a trance, but in a much milder form. Then, too, the demoniac is normally an involuntary victim of possession, while the medium is a willing subject, who cultivates psychic propensities and willingly yield to demonic control. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind us of similar happenings in spiritism. Extraordinary movements of inanimate objects surrounding the demon-possessed remind s of similar happenings in spiritism and magic. Tables, chairs, dishes, and the like are mysteriously moved about without anybody touching them, recalling tumbler moving and table lifting so common in spiritistic séances, and magic conjurations. In demon possession as well as in spiritism, unexplained rappings and noises in so-called “haunted houses” are heard. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
After the Winchester mansion was opened for tours, a spirit from the house had taken possession of one of the tour guides. The spirit insisted on taking up its abode with them, since it has been driven away from its for dwelling by the presence of Christians. Such cases of haunted houses about everywhere in occult literature in connection with mediums, magicians, and demon possessed persons. The tour guide saw apparitions and had frequent attacks in which she fell unconscious and demons spoke through her in their own voice and personality. A thorough investigation was conducted. Persons were stationed all around the house, in various rooms, and even in the Daisy Bedroom. Noises were heard which gradually increased in violence and seemed to concentrate in the bedroom Mrs. Winchester died in. Chairs bounced, windows rattled, plaster fell from the ceiling, and objects moved about without any visible explanation. Prayer caused the noises and telekinetic phenomena continued for a while in the mansion. On one occasion, after continued prayer, one of the demons inhabiting Jane cried out, “All is now.ost. Our plans are destroyed. You have shattered our bond, and put everything into confusion. You, with your everlasting prayers—you scatter us entirely. We are 13,130,130,130 in number. But there are still multitudes of living men, and you should warn them lest they be like us forever, lost and cursed of God.” The demon confessed that he was an emissary of Satan. The next day, the contents of the mansion were found in compete disarray and utter confusion. The amazing and terrifying thing was that the doors were still securely locked. No man or beast had entered. Evil spirits had obviously been at work in a satanic assault. On that day there were some tremendous crashing and knocking noises heard in the Winchester mansion, as if the whole house was filled with evil spirits. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Everyone giving tours in the mansion in the early 1900s, used to hear knocking and rumbling and crashing noises to such an extent that some of the visitors were frightened by them. Ghosts were also seen there quite regularly, even during the day time. A headless ghost was repeatedly seen in the mansion. Many people reporting becoming burned after contact with the “possessed” tour guide Jane. The autumn of 1925, all the pigs on the Winchester mansion’s farm died. The cause of death could not be found even though one of the carcasses was sent to a biological institute for examination. They tried everything but all to no avail. The following year the same thing happened again. This time the farmer redoubled his efforts to discover the cause of the pigs’ death. He had the stables inspected and the food analyzed but again without success. He thus decided to have the conservators of the estate decided to have the pigsty torn down and rebuilt on another site using completely different materials. Next year the pigs died again. They would all of the sudden squeal and then collapse. The whole process was repeated and every possible examination made in order to find out why the pigs had died. At this time certain of the member of the community began to say that someone must be killing the pigs magically out of spite. At first the conservators of the Winchester Estate would have nothing of this and continued to seek the advice of the vet and other such people. However, they could not help them, and so in the end they went to see the local minister to ask him about the question of magic. The minister simply laughed and said that the idea was stupid. Nevertheless the villagers pointed out to the representatives that there did exist some people in some areas of California who could kill livestock by means of magic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The conservators could do nothing though, and the event recurred year after year in spite of the fact that by now they had doubly secured the stables with locks and had sometimes stayed up all night with thread stretched out around the estate in order to discover if anyone was causing the animals’ deaths. One day, however, the circumstances changed. The minister visited the estate and asked one of the tour guides to accompany him to the vicarage. There they found one of the neighbour’s of the Winchester Estate, a man who had been less affluent, and this man confessed that it was he who had been the cause of everything. He had killed the pigs using black magic. The tour guides and conservators were naturally upset because by now 39 pigs had been killed. When asked why he had done this, the neighbour replied that it was because the tourists made such a noise outside his house. He had become so angry that he had tried to get his revenge in this way. He had subscribed himself to the devil with his own blood. To do this he had gone out on a Friday night to some crossroads and there drawn up a contract between himself and the devil. He mentioned that the devil had not appeared to him as he is often pictured, but that he met a black curly headed figure with blood-red eyes and a small snout and that the figure had been dressed in rather old-fashioned clothes. Ever since that day the man confessed that among other things, he had had the power to kill his friend’s pigs. The minister asked him what had made him come out into the open about the whole matter. His answer was that the people at the Winchester estate had been so kind to him over the year, donating food, clothes and furniture, that he had felt ashamed and he now asked for them to forgive him, and promised he would no longer plague them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Not wanting to take any legal action, the conservators of the Winchester Estate forgave him and all went well until the neighbour ceased going to church and slid back into his old ways. Since his confession none of the estate’s pigs had died but now the man again took up his drinking habits two more of the pigs died in exact same ways as the others. The conservators decided to shutdown the farming land of the Winchester Estate and sell off hundred of acres, only keeping four. In the process, several other Victorian houses on the grounds, along with fountains, and gazebos were demolished. From the psychological point of view it is suggested that a person delving into magic and who believes in occult practices is really only succumbing to a fulfilment compulsion. One unconsciously fulfils the things that one seeks to perform by magic. One is the victim of auto-suggestion. However, even if this were the whole explanation as some people affirm, it would still be true to say that occult practices have a corrupting effect on all those who get involved in them. Demons tend to be somewhat more independent than angels…When possession takes place, you will not get to see them at all. The Florida-based Luciferian Light Group (LLG) adopted the ‘Watcher myth’ of devils that were originally angels, sent to Earth to guard humankind and cursed by God for screwing their charges. In the original myth the couplings produced monsters, but, according to the LLG, the actual result was the Aryan race. They say that African Americans and other racial groups take pride in their cultural roots, so the argument goes, why should the same concept not apply to Europeans? The argument cannot be countered by liberal sophistry, and so the ghosts of German volkisch occultists continue to be conjured. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The role of cultural villain again proves to be a delicate balancing act—nothing can ever be condemned on purely moralistic grounds. Many people are still trying to protect “The Black House.” The Black Pope himself once reassured his flock, “the first 99 years are always the toughest. Rege Satanas!” Satanism is opposed to victimology and scapegoating. Many people are really drawn to the dark side because they grow up reading a lot of books and watching a lot of movies about it. If witches are out there, practicing some of the old ways of the pre-Christian gods and goddesses, then they are still Satanic in the sense that they are heretical. One side of the heretical and diabolical is the scientific aspect of Satanism. Copernicus and Galileo were regarded as practicing sorcerers in as far as they dared to challenge the supremacy of God with their heresies-their scientific research. Anton LaVey codified modern Satanism. There is a rich heritage of hearsay and blasphemy behind it, but as far as an aboveground religion that reveres Satan, there was not anything before the Church of Satan’s foundation in 1966. There were Black Masses that parodied the Catholic Church. A lot of modern Satanism draws from that codification or personification of Satan used as an archetype in mythology. Satanist are more interested in power, and what was going on in the castles and courts of the times. The interactions of power and Machiavellian machinations interest a Satanists rather than going out and find herbs to cure indigestion. Satanists are reaching for a religion of the aristocracy. They have all the aspects of that pride, that energy, that stye, and hopefully those elevated standards. Many people fear them because they believe they will lure you in their house and kill you, but is that not what many Christians are doing today? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Your relationship with your personal Satanic archetype is yours alone. The only way some can see how effective one is as a practicing black magician is how well one gets on in the outside of the World. Satanism has always represented and will always represent the adversary. He is a counterbalance to the unspoken injustice that prevails in the current society, whether that be overweening elitism or, going to the opposite extreme, mob rule. They always have to be in the minority that push hard in the other direction to get the pendulum swinging. Satanism will never be a religion of the people. It will never be populist beyond its current position. You see hundreds of thousands of kids making the sign of the horns, wearing black, getting devil tattoos, and listening to rock music they think is Satanic. They will take all the trappings and even grasp a few of the basic ideas, like Satan representing indulgence and independence of spirit. But, beyond that, they will always be a minority and that is how some think it should be. The Winchester mansion is a common site of demonic assault. In the early 1900s, a group of tourists and tour guides were attacked by demons; some became possessed; 30 people in the group were seized. In 1926, Satan and his allies once again possessed people at the Winchester mansion. For the first time in their lives, many of these people found themselves to be powerful, significant beings, establishing their own realm of authority. When they spoke, everyone in the mansion stopped to listen, for their shrill cries became testimony. Many historians have argued that the Satanism at the Winchester mansion was only the product of demented minds. However, there was something quite real in all the series of accusations and counteraccusations of the witnesses and the possessed—some definitely evil driving force that led humans to turn against one another like mad dogs lusting for the smell of blood. If Satan was to have presided over the Satanism at the Winchester Mansion, much was left out of the picture. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The Devil manifested himself in many forms to people at the Winchester Mansion—as a horse, a fox, a dog, a cat, a pig, and as a shadowy figure. At the Sabbats, the Devil was always present in the form of a tall, handsome man with blue eyes and black hair making no attempt to disguise his identity in any way Neither was the all-important bloodletting present in the ceremonies, either in the form of a sacrifice or in the singing of the pact. There was no defiling of sacred object, nor mention of the administering of the witches’ mark, a painful ceremony that was quite vivid in the minds of many of the witches at the estate. The Sabbats, all in all, seemed to have been rather staid affairs, involving no wild ritual or debauchery. The Devil offered not immediate wealth or riches, but a new system of government, where all humans would be equal, each human being free to “live bravely.” He promised an end to beliefs. Whoever the Devil was at those meetings, he obviously did not seek adulation, but rather he sought to establish a more equal and suitable social order among humans. Taken in this context, the entire episode begins to sound like a huge projection, a gigantic wish fulfillment on the part of the disgruntled citizens, who were expressing disdain for the system that, in their eyes had become oppressive. The figure chosen by the confessors as the Devil presiding over the midnight Sabbats had himself become disillusioned by the system. Perhaps he had been holding nocturnal meetings in the mansion in an effort of “cleansing the soul.” At any rate, the meetings were necessary psychological safety valves in the minds of the people. People would stand around begging for the master to teach them his secret. How to become invisible, how to acquire love, and oh! beyond all, how to make gold. How much gold would you give for the Secret of Infinite Riches? Humans became strengthened with wonderful power through the order of angels, so that one declares the divine will. From the Seraphim, that we cling with fervent love. From the Cherubim, enlightenment of the mind, power and wisdom over the exalted figures and images, through which we can gaze upon divine things, etcetera. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
From the Thronis, a knowledge of how we are made and constituted, that we may direct our thoughts upon eternal things. From Dominationbius, assistance to bring into subjection our daily enemies, who we carry with us constantly, and enabling us to attain salvation. From Potestatibus, protection against human enemies of life. From Virtuibus, God infuses strength into us, enabling us to contend against the enemies of truth and reward, that we may finish the courage of our natural life. From the Principtibus, that all things become subject to humans, that one may grasp all power, and draw unto oneself all secret and supernatural knowledge. From Archangelis, that one may rile over all things that God has made subject to one, over the animals of the field, over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the air. From the Angelis one receives the power to be the messenger of the divine. When the veil between the conscious and the subconscious mind begins thinning it is likely that one will begin to experience certain phenomenon that will grab your attention throughout the day. This will occur more and more as the veil between Worlds thins merging your spiritual awareness with your physical life. Usually it will manifest in the form of synchronicity, Déjà vu, or circumstance which seems to jump out and grab your attention. Thee I invoke, the Bornless one. Thee, that didst create the Earth and the Heavens: Thee, that didst create the Night and the Day. Thee, that didst create the Darkness and the Light. Thou art Osorronophris: Whom no human has seen at any time. Thou art Ahriman. Hear Thou Me, for I am the Angel of Paphro. Osorronophris: this is Thy True Name, handed down to the Prophets of Ishrael. Ahriman rise up through the infernal planes through the seal of Arezura and find rest within this manifestation of the blessings. Fill this sorcerous fluid with your power and might that it will serve my cause of counter creation through the intent of my own evil mind. Bless this blood as the very powers of death, destruction, and decay that I may cast out all that does not serve the cause of my own great work upon this path of enlightenment. Come tour the dark, brooding and mysterious, promising all kinds of forbidden treats. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Winchester Mystery House
Happy weekend! Will we be seeing you on the estate today? 🌻 https://www.winchestermysteryhouse.com/
You Do Not Feel Powerful at All?
As one moves up the evolutionary ladder in neural complexity, game-playing behavior becomes richer. The intelligence of primates, including humans, allows a number of relevant improvements: a more complex memory, more complex processing of information to determine the next action as a function of the interaction so far, a better estimate of the probability of future interactions with the same individual, and a better ability to distinguish between different individuals. The discrimination of others may be among the most important abilities because it allows one to handle interactions with many individuals without having to treat them all the same, thus making possible the rewarding of cooperation from one individual and the punishing of defection from another. The model of the iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is much less restricted than it may at first appear. Not only can it apply to interactions between two bacteria or interactions between two primates, but it can also apply to the interactions between a colony of bacteria and, say, a primate serving as a host. There is no assumption that payoffs of the two sides are comparable. Provided that the payoffs to each side satisfy the inequalities that define the Prisoner’s Dilemma. The model does assume that the choices are made simultaneously and with discrete time intervals. For most analytic purposes, this is equivalent to a continuous interaction over time, with the length of time between moves corresponding to the minimum time between a change in behaviour by one side and a response by the other. And, if they were treated as sequential, while the model treats the choices as simultaneous, it would make little difference. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
Turning to the development of the theory, the evolution of cooperation can be conceptualized in terms of three separate questions: Robustness. What type of strategy can thrive in a variegated environment composed of others using a wide variety of more or less sophisticated strategies? Stability. Under what conditions can such a strategy, once fully established, resist invasion by mutant strategies? Initial viability. Even if a strategy is robust and stable, how can it ever get a foothold in an environment which is predominantly noncooperative? IBM, Kodak, and the NYPD are all large, old organizations. However, preventing the oncoming implosion requires more than changing in-place institutions. It also necessitates creating new types of companies, organizations and institutions, large and small, at every level of society. And that calls for social inventors prepared to face inadequate resources, rivalry, suspicion, cynicism, and just plain uber—stupidity. Daunting as all that sounds, it helps to remember that none of today’s familiar institutions—not IBM, not Kodak, not the United Nations, not the IMF, not police forces or post offices—dropped full-blown out of the Heavens. All our institutions, from central banks to blood banks, factories to firehouses, art museums to airports, were in fact originally conceived by business innovators and social inventors who faced far more entrenched resistance to change than we find in the advanced economies today. And many of their innovations in business and society have been at least as important as those in technology. We know the names of many of history’s great technological innovators—Savery and Newcomen and the steam engine, Whitney and the cotton gin, Edison and electric lighting, Morse and the telegraph, Daguerre and photography, Marconi and the radio, Bell and the telephone. And we justly celebrate their immense contributions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
Unfortunately, few—other than specialists and historians, if needed they—can name the social inventor who first came up with the concept of a limited-liability corporation. Or the person who wrote it into Gesellschaft mit beschrankter Haftung, the 1892 German law that was the first to embody it. Can anyone imagine what today’s World economy and financial system would look like minus limited liability for investors? Was that any less an achievement than, say, the telegraph? Not many investors today would build a home, apartment house, office building, shopping center, cinema or factory without buying fire insurance. However, who was the innovator inside the Phoenix Assurance Company who, in the 1790s, hired cartographer Richard Horwood to draw the first map of London designed to help a company assess the value of properties and make fire insurance available? Who was imaginative and brave enough to form the first mutual fund, the first symphony orchestra, the first auto club or any number of other companies and institutions whose existence is taken for granted today? And where is the Nobel Prize for social invention? If just a tiny fraction of the sums spent on scientific and technological research and innovation were devoted to labs for designing and testing new organizational and institutional structures, we might have a much broader range of options to head off the looming implosion. Genetic kindship theory suggests a plausible escape from some issues. Close relatedness of corporations permits true altruism—sacrifice of fitness by one individual for the benefit of another. True altruism can evolve when the conditions of cost, benefit, and relatedness yield net gains for the altruism-causing genes that are resident in the related individuals. Not defecting in a single-move Prisoner’s Dilemma is altruism of a kind (the individual is foregoing proceeds that might have been taken); so this kind of behaviour can evolve if two corporations are sufficiently related. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
In effect, recalculations of the payoffs can be done in such a way that an individual has a part interest in the partner’s gain (that is, reckoning payoffs in terms of what is called fitness). This recalculation can often eliminate the inequalities, in which case cooperation becomes unconditionally favored. Thus it is possible to imagine that the benefit of cooperation in Prisoner’s Dilemma-like situations can begin to be harvested by groups of closely related individuals and corporations. Obviously, as regards pairs, a parent and its subsidiaries or many examples of cooperation or restraint of selfishness in such pairs are known. Once the genes for cooperation exist, selection will promote strategies that base cooperative behavior on cues in the environment. Such factors as promiscuous fatherhood and events at ill-defined group margins will always lead to uncertain relatedness among potential participants. The recognition of any improved correlates of relatedness and use of these cues to determine cooperative behavior will always permit an advance in inclusive fitness. When a cooperative choice has been made, one cue to relatedness is simply the fact of reciprocation of the cooperation. Thus modifiers for more selfish behaviour of another individual or corporation is acquired, and cooperation can spread into circumstances of less and less relatedness. Finally, when the probability of two individuals meeting each other again is sufficiently high, cooperation based on reciprocity can thrive and be evolutionarily stable in a population with no relatedness at all. When a man or woman has got vast power, such as you have—you admit you have, do you not? “I do not know it, sir.” The man in the witness chair, who “did not know” he held power, was a bull-necked, bristle-browed banker with a fierce mustache and an above average sized nose. The congressional committee investigator pressed him: “You do not feel [powerful] at all?” #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
“No,” he replied smoothly, “I do not feel it at all.” The time was 1912. The witness, in a dark suit and wing collar, with a gold watch chain draped across his generous paunch, dominated three or four giant banks, three trust companies, an equal number of life insurance companies, ten railroad systems, plus, among a few other odds and ends United States Steel, General Electric, AT&T, Western Union, and International Harvester. John Pierpont Morgan was the quintessential financial capitalist of the industrial era, the very symbol of turn-of-the-century money power. A womanizing churchgoer and moralizer, he lived in conspicuous opulence and gluttony, holding business meetings amid damask and tapestries from the palaces of Europe, next to vaults containing Leonardo da Vinci notebooks and Shakespeare folios. Morgan looked down his monumental nose at Jewish people and other marginalized groups, hated trade unions, sneered at new money, and fought ceaselessly with the other “robber barons” of his era. Born enormously rich in an era of capital scarcity, he was imperious and driven, savagely repressing competition, sometimes relying on methods that would probably now have landed him in jail. Morgan assembled huge sums and poured them into the great smokestack industries of his time—into Bessemer furnaces and Pullman cars and Edison generator and into tangible resources like oil, nitrates, copper, and coal. However, he did more than simply seize targets of opportunity. He planned strategically and helped shape the smokestack age in the United States of America, accelerating the shift of political and economic power from agricultural to industrial interests, and from manufacturing to finance. Furthermore, he was said to have “Morganized” industry in the United States of America, creating a hierarchically ordered, finance-driven system and, according to his critics, a “money trust,” which essentially controlled the main flows of capital in the country. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When Morgan blandly denied having any power, the cartoonists had a field day, one picturing him sitting astride a mountain of coins marked “Control over $25,000,000,000”; another as a dour emperor in crown and robes, with a mace in one hand and a purse in the other. While to Pope Pius X he was a “great and good man,” to the Boston Commercial Bulletin he was a “financial bully, drunk with wealth and power, who bawls his orders to stock markets, directors, courts, governments and nations.” Morgan concentrated capital. He consolidated small companies into even larger and more monopolistic corporations. He centralized. He regarded top-down command as sacred and vertical integration as efficient. He understood that mass production was the coming thing. He wanted his investments to be protected by “hard” assets—plants, equipment, raw materials. In all this he was a near-perfect reflection of the early smokestack age he helped to create. And whether Morgan “felt powerful” or not, his control of vast sums in a period of capital scarcity have him immense opportunities to reward and punish others and to make changes on a grand scale. During the thirties some German Social Democrats became aware that Hitler, as well as Stalin, just would not fit Weber’s terms of analysis, which they had previously used; and they began to employ “totalitarian” to describe them. Whether this is a sufficient corrective to Weber’s narrowly conceived political science is questionable. However, “charismatic” did indeed fit Hitler, unless charismatic necessarily means something good—a favorable value judgment. I suspect that those who abandoned Weber in this way did so because they could not face how wrong he had been, or the possibility that the thought they had embraced and propagated might have heled to support fascism. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Hannah Arendt gave perhaps unconscious witness to my suggestion, in her book Eichmann in Jerusalem, where she used the now celebrated phrase “the banality of evil,” to describe Eichmann. It is not difficult to discern the “routinization of charisma” under this thin disguise. Hitler, then, must have been charismatic. After Hitler, everybody scurried back under the protective cover of morality, but practically no one turned to serious thought about good and evil. Otherwise our President, or the pope, for that matter, would not be talking about values.. This entire language, as I have tired to show, implies that the religious is the source of everything political, social and personal; and it still conveys something like that. However, it has done nothing to reestablish religion—which puts us in a pretty pickle. We reject by the fact of our categories the rationalism that is the basis of our way of life, without having anything to substitute for it. As the religious essence has gradually become a thin, putrid gas spread out through our whole atmosphere, it has gradually become respectable to speak of it under the marvelously portentous name the sacred. At the beginning of the German invasion of the United States of America, there was a kind of scientific contempt in universities for the uncleanness of religion. It might be studied in a scholarly way, as part of the past that we had succeeded in overcoming, but a believer was somehow benighted or ill. The new social science was supposed to take the place of morally and religiously polluted teachings just as Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, et. al., had, according to the popular mythology, founded a natural science that crushed the superstitions of the Dark Ages. The Enlightenment, or Marxist, spirit still pervaded the land; and religion vs. science was equal to prejudice vs. truth. Social scientist simply did not see that their new tools were based on thought that did not accept the orthodox dichotomies, that not only were the European thinkers looking for something akin to religious actors on the political scene but that the new mind itself, or the self, had at least as much in common with Pascal’s outlook as it did with that of Descartes or Locke. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
The sacred—as the central phenomenon of the self, unrecognizable to scientific consciousness and trampled underfoot by ignorant passers-by who had lost the religious instinct—was, from the outset of the value teaching, taken seriously by thinkers in Germany. That was because they understood what “value” really means. It has taken the softening of all convictions and the blurring of all distinctions for the sacred to be thought to be undangerous and to come into its own here. Of course, as we use it, it has no more in common with God than does value with the Ten Commandments, commitment with faith, charisma with Moses, or lifestyle with Jerusalem or Athens. The sacred turns out to be a need, like food or pleasures of the flesh; and in a well-ordered community, it must get its satisfactions like the other needs. In our earlier free-thinking enthusiasm, we tended to neglect it. A bit of ritual is a good thing; sacred space (Note how space—used to mean one’s apartment, workshop, office or whatever—has become a trendy word.) along with some tradition must be provided for, as a generation ago culture was thought to be a useful supplement. The disproportion between what all these words really mean and what they mean to us is repulsive. We are made to believe that we have everything. Our old atheism had a better grasp of religion than does this new respect for the sacred. Atheists took religion seriously and recognized that it is a real force, costs something and requires difficult choices. These sociologists who talk so facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
In such behavior a style of decision-making is involved that has much in common with the peculiar arbitrariness and rigour of religious vows in general, and with one called the Beast Vow in particular. Among the Pasupatas of India (the same who formalized the Seeking of Dishournor), the male practitioner commonly took the bull vow. (The bull is the most common shamanic animal by far.) He would spend a good part of each day bellowing like a bull and in general trying to transform his consciousness into that of a bull. Such behaviour was usually vowed for a specific length of time, most frequently either for a year or for the rest of one’s life. A person who took the frog vow would move for a year only by squatting and hopping; the snake vower would slither. Such vows are very precise and demanding. The novice, for example, may pick a certain cow and vow to imitate its every action. During the time of the vow the novice follows the cow everywhere: when the cow moos, the novice moos—and so on. (In ancient Mesopotamia cow-vowers were known as “grazers.”) By such actions the Paleolithic shaman attempts to effect ecology by infiltrating an animal species which can then be manipulated. The yogic practitioner hopes to escape from his or her own intentional horizon by entering into that of another species. These activities are echoed in performance pieces in various ways. Bill Gordh, as Dead Dog, spent two years learning how to bark with a sense of expressiveness. James Lee Bryars wore a pink silk tail everywhere he went for six months. Vito Acconic, in his Following Piece, 1969, would pick a passerby at random on the street and follow him or her till it was no longer possible to do so. What I am especially concerned to point out in activities like this is a quality of decision-making that involves apparent aimlessness along with fine focus and rigour of execution. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
This is a mode of willing which is absolutely creative in the sense that it assumes that it is reasonable to do anything at all with life; all options are open and none is more meaningful or meaningless than any other. A Jain monk in India may vow to sit for a year and then follow that by standing up for a year—a practice attested to in the Atharva Veda (about 1000-800 B.C.) and still done today. In performance art the subgenre known as Endurance Art is similar in style, though the scale is much reduced. In 1965 Beuys alternately stood and knelt on a small wooden platform for twenty-four hours during which he performed various symbolic gestures in immobile positions. In 1971 Burden, a major explorer of the Ordeal or Endurance genre, spent five days and nights fetally enclosed in a tiny metal locker (two feet by two feet by three feet). In 1974 he combined the immobility vow with the keynote theme of the artist’s person by sitting on an upright chair on a sculpture pedestal until, forty-eight hours later, he fell off from exhaustion. (Sculpture in Three Parts). In White Light/White Heat, 1975, he spent twenty-two days alone and invisible to the public on a high shelf-like platform in a gallery, neither eating nor speaking nor seeing, not seen by, another human being. The first thing to notice about these artists is that no one is making them do it and usually no one is paying them to do it. The second is the absolute rigour with which, in the classic performance pieces, these very unpragmatic activities are carried out. This peculiar quality of decision-making has become a basic element of performance poetics. To a degree (which I do not wish to exaggerate) it underscores the relationship between this type of activity and the religious vocation. A good deal of performance art, in fact might he called “Vow Art,” as might a good deal of religious practice. (Kafka’s term “hunger artist” is not unrelated.) #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
Enthusiasms of this type have passed through cultures before, but usually in the provinces of religion or, more occasionally, philosophy. What is remarkable about our time is that it is happening in the realm of art, and being performed, often, by graduates of art schools rather than seminaries. In our time religion and philosophy have been more successful (or intransigent) than art in defending their traditional boundaries and prevent universal overflow with its harrowing responsibilities and consequences. A classic source on the subject of Ordeal Art is a book called the Path of Purification by Buddhaghosa, a fifth century A.D. Ceylonese Buddhist. It includes an intricately categorized compendium of behavioural vows designed to undermine the conditions response systems that govern ordinary life. Among the most common are the vows of homelessness—the vow, for example, to live out of doors for a year. This vow was acted out in New York recently by Tehching Hsieh, who styed out of doors in Manhattan recently for a year as a work of art. Hsieh (who also has leapt from the second story of a building in emulation of Klein’s leap) had specialized, in fact, in year-long vows acted out with great rigour. For one year he punched in hourly on a time clock in his studio, a device not unlike some used by forest yogis in India to restrict their physical movements and thus their intentional horizons. The performance piece of this type done on the largest scale was Hsieh’s year of isolation in a cell built in his Soho studio, a year in which he neither left the cell nor spoke nor read. Even the scale of this piece, however, does not approach that of similar vows in traditional religious settings. Himalayan yogis as recently as a generation ago were apt to spend seven years in a light-tight cave, while Simeon Stylites, an early Christian ascetic in the Syrian desert, lived for the last thirty-seven years of his life on a small platform on top of a pole. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The reduced scale of such vows in the art context reflects the difference in motivation between the religious ascetic and the performance artist. Religious vows are undertaken for pragmatic purposes. The shaman seeking the ability to fly, the yogi seeking the effacement of ego, the monk seeking salvation and eternal bliss, are all working within intricately formulated belief systems in pursuit of clearly defined and massively significant rewards. Less is at stake for the performance artist than for the pious believer; yet still something is at stake. An act that lacks any intention whatever is a contradiction in terms. For some artist (for example, Burden) work of this type functions as a personal initiation or cathartic for the audience as well as an investigation of the limits of one’s will; others (including Nitsch) are convinced that their performance work is cathartic for the audience as well and in that sense serves a social and therapeutic purpose. Rachel Rosenthal describes her performance work as “sucking disease from society.” However, in most work of this type attention is directed toward the exercise of will as an object of contemplation in itself. Appropriation art in general (and Vow Art in particular) is based on an aesthetic of choosing and willing rather than conceiving and making. Personal sensibility is active in the selection of the area of the Universe to be appropriated, and in the specific, often highly individual character of the vow undertaken; the rigour with which the vow is maintained is, then, like a crafts devotion to the perfection of form. Beyond this, the performance is often based on a suspension of judgment about whether or not the act has any value in itself, and a concentration on the purity of the doing. This activity posits as an ideal (though never of course perfectly attaining it) the purity of doing something with no pragmatic motivation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Like the Buddhist paradox of desiring not to desire, it requires a motivation to perform feats of motivelessness. It shares something of Arnold Toynbee’s opinion that the highest cultures are the least pragmatic. In this mode of decision and execution the conspicuously free exercise of will is framed as a kind of absolute. Displays of this type are attempts to break up the standard weave of everyday motivations and create openings in it through which new options may make their way to the light. These options are necessarily undefined, since no surrounding belief system is in place (or acknowledged). The radicality of work in this genre can be appraised precisely by how far it has allowed the boundaries of the art category to dissolve. Many works of the last twenty-five years have reached to the limits of life itself. Such activities have necessarily involved artists in areas where usually the psychoanalyst or anthropologist presides. The early explorations discussed here required the explicit demonstration of several daring strategies that had to be brought clearly into the light. Extreme actions seemed justified or even required, by the cultural moment. However, the moment changes, and the mind become desensitized to such direct demonstrations after their first shock of brilliant simplicity. When an artist in 1987 announces that his or her entire life is designated as performance, the unadorned gesture cannot expect to be met with the enthusiastic interest with which its prototypes were greeted a generation ago. Now, we talked about how it is more difficult to project caring on television, for various reasons, mostly because of the tendencies of the medium. The biases are not absolute restrictions. Though extremely rare, there are occasional examples of television programs that overcome the bias. Bergman’s Scenes From A Marriage was one such example. It succeeded only because of the rare skill and sensitivity of the director and the performers. Their deep understanding of the medium allowed them to use it efficiently. Scenes qualifies as the exception that proves the rule. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
Many Americans saw this production in movies houses, but it was originally created for television. This is why Bergman devoted so much of the production to facial close-ups. In a theater two and one-half hours of facial close-up became oppressive. When one is sitting in a movie house, one wants something beyond closeup imagery. However, on television, nothing other than closeup imagery could convey the subtle themes of a plot that concerned the excruciating shifts of feeling within a disintegrating marriage. Bergman had to convey tenderness, affection, caring, concern and intimacy, together with ambiguity, and then violence, rage, sorrow. These latter scenes, the violent ones, were among the very few in which he allowed the camera to pull back from the action, because the physical movement could convey the meaning. If you honour the medium’s limits absolutely, in demonstrating the best that is possible on television, Bergman also illuminated the absoluteness of the limits. He took television as far as one could and succeeded well enough. There is the tendency to forget that one cannot go further. Bergman is one of the rarest talents in the history of moving-image media, and given even his difficulty in communicating subtle feeling, the inherent resistance of television becomes clearer. Lesser talents, not daring to try what Bergman did, have to work against the medium, as it were, choosing more confined, easier-to-handle imagery, and emotional content that fits the narrowed scope of TV. Most directors will not even attempt to deal with subtle realms of information and they are wise not to. Producers and sponsors will also tend to avoid such subtlety because it is so unlikely to get high ratings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
Roots was not an exception to this rule. In fact, it proves the rule. In the book, the cultural nuances of relationships were emphasized and developed, while the TV production avoided them altogether. Nor was there much effort to present the subtle ambience of the African natural environment, which was also highly developed in the book. The television production wisely concentrated on the larger, more explicit, and therefore more reproducible element of conflict in the story and the kinds of family attachment made familiar by soap operas. This is not to say that the production did not have value. It is only to remark that the values which were conveyed were the simplest ones to convey. The more subtle values, which are at the heart of the African culture and, therefore, formed the basis for the quality of feeling that existed among the uprooted enslaved human beings, were necessarily dropped out. In the end, the viewer got some fairly good information and feeling about good guys and bad guys during a certain period of history, but virtually no understanding of the successful repression of an entire culture and way of mind. So it goes in all dramatic programming. Nuance is being sacrificed to the larger and more visible elements of stories, and the cause of the sacrifice is a technical limitation of the medium. Problems of subtlety do not present themselves in quiz shows, sports events and sitcoms. These are confined to areas of human expression which are easy to capture, east to communicate, and easy to understand, even with directors and writers of ordinary talent and in a medium as vague as television. As a result, there is a tendency to favour such productions. The bias toward the coarse, the bold, and the obvious finds its way into all other categories of television programming, including even those that deal with so-called objective events in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Public affairs programs are seriously biased away from coverage of highly detailed, complex, and subtle information, and so are news shows. Ordinarily this bias is believed to result from time factors—it takes too long to explain complicated issues. However, certain kinds of visual information are harder to capture than others. News producers will always choose the more easily communicable image. Edward Epstein, in his very important New From Nowhere, interviews television news producers, seeking to define an inherent bias in the news that is related to technical and other factors. He observes: “The one ingredient most producers interviewed claimed was necessary for a good action story was visually identifiable opponents clashing violently. This, in turn, requires some form of stereotype: military troops fighting civilians, different cultures of students clashing, workers wearing hardhats manhandling bearded peace demonstrators, were cited by producers as examples of the components for such stories. Demonstrations or violence involving less clearly identifiable groups make less effective stories, since, as one CBS producer put it, ‘It would be hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys.’ Since news stories tend to be constructed from those aspects of a happening that can be easily filmed and recorded, and not form the poorly lit, softly spoken or otherwise inaccessible moments, events tend to be explained in terms of what one producer called ‘visual facts.’ One correspondent pointed out, for example, even if they are insignificant trash can fires, television coverage of riots or protests at night tends to focus on fires, since they provide adequate light for filming. Hence urban riots tend to be defined in terms of ‘visual facts’ of fires, rather than more complicated factors. Visual facts, of course, cover only one range of phenomena, and thus tend to limit the power of networks to explain complex events. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Americans, so often in the forefront of science and technology, have a curious difficulty in thinking about the future. Language seems to have something to do with it. If something sounds futurelike, we call if “futuristic.” If that does not step the conversation, we say that it “sounds like science fiction.” These descriptions remind listeners of laughable 1950s fantasies like rockets to the Moon, video telephones, ray guns, robots, and the like. Of course, all these become real in the 1960s, because the science was not fiction. Today, we can see not only how to build additional science-fictional devices, but—more important, for better or worse—how to make them cheap and abundant. We need to think about the future and name-calling will not help. Curiously, the Japanese language seems to lack a disparaging word for “futurelike.” Ideas for future technologies may be termed mirai no (“of the future,” a hope or a goal), shorai-teki (an expected development, which might be twenty years away), or kuso no (“imaginary” only, because contrary to physical law or economics). To think about the future, we need to distinguish mirai no and shorai-teki, like nanotechnology, from mere kuso no like antigravity boots. A final objection is the claim that there is no point in trying to think about the future, because it is all too complex and unpredictable. This is too sweeping, but has more than a little truth. It deserves a considerable response. Technocracy gave us the idea of progress, and of necessity loosened our bonds with tradition—whether political or spiritual. Technocracy filled the air with the promise of new freedoms and new forms of social organization. Technocracy also speeded up the World. We could get places faster, do things faster, accomplish more in a shorter time. Time, in fact, became an adversary over which technology could triumph. And this meant that there was no time to look back or to contemplate what was being lost. There were empires to build, opportunities to exploit, exciting freedoms to enjoy, especially in America. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
There, on the wings of technocracy, the United States of America soared to unprecedented heights as a World power. That Jefferson, Adams, and Madison would have found such a place uncomfortable, perhaps even disagreeable, did not matter. Nor did it matter that there were nineteenth-century American voiced—Thoreau, for example—who complained about what was being left behind. The first answer to the complaints was, We leave noting behind but the chains of a tool-using culture. The second answer was more thoughtful: Technocracy will not overwhelm us. And this was true, to a degree. Technocracy did not entirely destroy the traditions of the social and symbolic Worlds. Technocracy subordinated these Worlds—yes, even humiliated them—but it did not render them totally ineffectual. In nineteenth-century America, these still existed holy men and the concept of sin. There still existed regional pride, and it was possible to conform to traditional notions of family life. It was possible to respect tradition itself and to find sustenance in ritual and myth. It was possible to believe in social responsibility and the practicality of individual action. It was even possible to believe in common sense and the wisdom of the elderly. It was not easy, but it was possible. We have only to think of the declaration in His mouth that humans, now that they have acquired moral consciousness, must not be allowed to attain aeonian life as well! The meaning of this “knowledge of good and evil” is nothing else than: cognition in general, cognizance of the World, knowledge of all the good and bad things there are, for this would be in line with Biblical usage, in which the antithesis good and evil is often used to denote “anything,” “all kinds of things.” And this interpretation, the is the favourite one today. “Therefore I have written this epistle, sealing it with mine own hand, feeling for your welfare, because of your firmness in that which ye believe to be right, and your noble spirit in the field of battle,” reports Nephi 3.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
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