The Entire Estate was Swallowed Up by Lawyer’s Fees

Love is often nothing but a favorable exchange between two people who get the most of what they can expect, considering their value on the personality market. The story of Charlie Brown is absurdly simple, but you can become familiar with game trees by casting that story in such a picture. Start the game when Lucy has issued her invitation, and Charlie faces the decision of whether to accept. If Charlie refuses, that is the end of the game. If he accepts, Lucy has the choice between letting Charlie kick and pulling the ball away. We can show this by adding another fork along this road. As we said earlier, Charlie should forecast that Lucy will choose the upper branch which includes pulling the ball away, not letting Charlie kick it. Therefore he should figuratively prune the lower branch (letting him kick it) of her choice from the tree. Now if he chooses his own upper branch, it leads straight to a nasty fall. Therefore his better choice is to follow his own lower branch which would be to reject the ball. For any game with a finite number of sequential moves there exists some best strategy. Of course, just because a best strategy exists does not mean that we can easily find it. Love is considered a game by some, but is also a strategy, much like business. Different negotiations take place under differing rules. In most retail stores the sellers post a price and the buyers’ only choice is to accept the price or to take their business elsewhere. Some shoppers seem to be able to bargain anywhere (even including Sears). Generally, shopping tends to be a “take-it-or-leave-it” rule. #RandolphHarris 1 of 21

In the case of wage bargaining, a labour union makes a claim and then the company decides whether to accede. If it does not, it may make a counteroffer, or wait for the union to adjust its demand. In some cases the sequencing is imposed by law or custom; in others it may have a strategic role of its own. An essential feature of negotiations is that time is money. When negotiations become protracted, the pie begins to shrink. Still, the parties may fail to agree, each hoping that the costs of negotiating will be outweighed by a more favorable settlement. Charles Dicken’s Bleak House illustrates the extreme case; the dispute over the Jarndyce estate was so prolonged that the entire estate was swallowed up by lawyer’s fees. In the same vein, if failure to reach a wage agreement leads to a labour strike, the firm loses profits and workers lose their wages. If nations enter into a prolonged round of negotiations to liberalize trade, they forgo the benefits of the enlarged trade while they are arguing about the division of the gains. The common thread is that all parties to the negotiations prefer to reach any given agreement sooner rather than later. World War II saw the beginning of the end of classical industrial-age colonialism. Having culminated in 1945, that war is fast fading from memory, but it may help put today’s World in perspective to not that nothing since then can remotely compare with the destruction it caused—or the economic changes to which it led. #RandolphHarris 2 of 21

World War II casualties suffered by more than two dozen countries, including the United States of America, totaled at least 50 million. Take a deep breath to absorb that number. It is as though 3,226 tsunamis equal in force to the one that devastated Japan in 2011 hit the World within six years. Or a tsunami roughly every day for six years. Russia—then still the Soviet Union—alone lost at least 21 million people. Germany, succeeded to the war, lost more than 5 million, not counting the additional millions of lives lost in death camps. Many of Western Europe’s industries were destroyed. War’s end saw hunger and chaos across much of Europe. At the opposite end of the World, Japan lost about 2.5 million before its surrender. In Japan, too, key industries such as coal, iron, steel and fertilizer were reduced to rubble. In all these regions it was as if the industrial revolution had been rolled back in time. Mass destruction had smashed the means of mass production. In contrast to the other major warring nations, the United States of America lost fewer than 300,000 troops and virtually no civilians. Its infrastructure was not bombed, which lift it at war’s end the only industrialized nation with a fully functioning economy and no significant competition. Three years after the shooting stopped, the United States—today’s imperial power—did a very strange thing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 21

Rather than demanding reparations from Germany and literally carting off any of its remaining factory equipment, railcars and industrial machinery, as Soviet Russia did, and rather than reveling in the weakness of its competitors, the United States of America launched what came to be known as the Marshall Plan. Under its aegis, the United States of America, in four short years, pumped $13 billion into Europe—including $1.5 billion to West Germany—to reconstruct production capabilities, strengthen currencies and get trade moving again. Japan, under other programs, received $1.9 billion in U.S.A. aid, 59 percent for food and 27 percent in the form of industrial supplies and transportation gear. Winston Churchill, Britain’s great wartime leader, called the Marshall Plan the “most unsordid act in history.” Yet these programs of support for allies and enemies alike were hardly charitable. They were part of a long-term U.S.A. economic strategy that worked. The Marshall Plan helped restore markets for U.S.A. goods. It helped prevent the reversion of Germany to Nazism. And above all, U.S.A. aid saved Western Europe and Japan from falling into the icy grip of the Soviet Union. It put them both back in business. It was, in retrospect, one of the smartest investments in history. As for imperialism, by war’s end Moscow had gained military and political control of all the Eastern European countries. In each it implanted troops and Communist puppet regimes, and it threatened to do the same in Western Europe where Soviet-supported Communist parties, especially in France and Italy, claimed broad popular support. #RandolphHarris 4 of 21

In doing so, the Soviet had created a vast region—stretching from Vladivostok all the way to Berlin—whose centrally planned economies, with inconvertible currencies and many other barriers, deliberately split 10 percent of the World population away from the rest of the World economy. By 1949, China had joined the Communist bloc. That but another 22 percent of the World’s people out of the larger global economy. By the mid-1950s, as the wealth revolution began, fully a third of the World’s people were largely off-limits to the rest of the planet in terms of trade and finance. At the same time, Africa, Latin America and South Asia were utterly impoverished, with some regions going through the turbulent, often violent process of decolonization as their European masters pulled out. In the early 1950s, therefore, the United States alone, with just 6 percent of the World’s people, was turning out nearly 30 percent of global GDP, and fully half its manufacturing. And it faced little competition. In the typical negotiation process, the pie shrinks slowly so that there will be time for many offers and counteroffers before the pie disappears. What this suggests is that it usually does not matter who gets to make the first offer given a long bargaining horizon. The split-the-difference solution seems pretty hard to escape unless the negotiations have been deadlocked for a long time and there is hardly anything left to win. #RandolphHarris 5 of 21

It is true that the person who goes last can get everything that remains. However, by the end of the negotiations process there is hardly anything left to win. Getting all of nothing is winning the battle and losing the war. My enemy’s ememy’s enemy is not my friend. A more realistic scenario would take account of the complicated relationships between the countries and provide more detail about their willingness to attack each other. Yet, there is an important observation that carries forward: the outcome of games depends critically on how many people are playing. More may be better and then worse, even in the same game. The observation that two antagonistic countries make unstable neighbours but three antagonists restores stability does not imply that four is even better; four in this case is the same as two. When considering Charlie Brown’s problem of whether or not to kick the football, this question became a real issue for football coach Tom Osborne in the final minutes of his championship game. We think he too got it wrong. Backward reasoning will reveal the mistake. When making a negotiation, even though the chance may be diminished, something is better than nothing. The momentum argument is also flawed. One of the general morals is that if you have to take some risks, it is often better to do this as quickly as possible. This is obvious to those who play tennis: everyone knows to take risks on the fist serve and hit the second serve more cautiously. That way, if you fail on your first attempt, the game will not be over. You may still have time to take some other options tht can bring you back to or even ahead of where you were. #RandolphHarris 6 of 21

As the first factories began to appear in the United States of America, a totally different work regimen came into being, at first affecting a tiny fraction of the population, then spreading as agricultural labour declined and industrial work expanded. The urban industrial worker in a Second Wave society might be freer socially in the great, teeming anonymity of the urban slum. However, the factory itself, life was more tightly regimented. Brute technology was designed for illiterates—which most of our ancestors were. Intended to amplify human muscle power, it was heavy, rigid, and capital-intensive. Before the invention of small electric motors, the machines were typically positioned all in a row and driven by overhead belts that set the pace for the whole factory. Later came the mechanical conveyor line that compelled armies of workers to perform motions in sync, chaining them to the production system. It is no accident that the French term for “assembly line” is chaine or that everyone, from the manual labourer to the topmost managers, operated in a “chain of command.” Work was “de-skilled” or dumped-down, standardized, broken into the simplest operations. And as white-collar work spread, offices were organized along parallel lines. Because they were not harnessed to an assembly line, clerical employees had a bit more physical freedom of movement. However, the goal of management was to increase efficiency in the office by making it resemble the factory as much as humanly—or inhumanly—possible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 21

The smokestack factories and mills were severely criticized for their dehumanization of the worker. However, even the most radical thinkers of the time regarded them as “advanced” and “scientific.” Less commented on was a change in the police function. Instead of the family policing work and pressuring its members to perform, a new power structure—hierarchical management—came into being to enforce the new rules. This new Second Wave work regimen was at first bitterly resisted even by employers, who tried to keep the old agrarian system and to transplant it into the factory. Because families had long sweated together in the fields, early manufacturers hired whole families at once. However, this system, efficient in agriculture for 10,000 years, proved totally inefficient in the factory. In general, many senior citizens could not keep up with the machines. Several children had to be beaten and often manacled to prevent them from running off to play. Families arrived at different times, struggling in as thy had in the fields. Inevitably, the attempt to maintain a family production team in the new technological environment collapsed, and the smokestack regimen was imposed. The lesson became clear: You could not organize work around a steam engine or textile loom the way you did around a hoe or a team of oxen. A new technical environment required a different discipline—and a different structure of power to police and enforce it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 21

When we consider games played in life, neither player has the benefit of observing the other’s complicated move before making one’s own. Here, the interaction reasoning works not by seeing the other’s strategy but by seeing through it. For this, it is not enough simply to put yourself in you opponent’s shoes. What would you find if you did? You would only discover that your opponent is doing the same thing, that is, thinking what it must be like to be wearing your shoes. Each person has to place oneself simultaneously in both his own and the other guy’s shoes and then figure out the best moves for both sides. Instead of a linear chain of reasoning, there is a circle that goes “If I think that he thinks that I think…” The trick is to square the circle. Not surprisingly, Sherlock Holmes and his arch-rival Professor Moriarty, the Napoleon of crimes, were masters of this type of reasoning. As Holmes told Watson in The Final Problem: “All that I have to say has already crossed your mind,” said he. “Then possibly my answer has crossed yours,” I replied. You must see through all the interlocking but invisible strategies. The first way is one must not regard the unknown actions of the other players as being uncertain in an impersonal way like the weather. And keep in mind, acts are judged by their consequences alone. In general, a player has a dominant strategy when one has one course of action that outperforms all others no matter what the other players do. No moral value is placed on the act itself. Even though an individual is already mortally wounded, one might not want to take responsibility for the act that causes the death of this individual. #RandolphHarris 9 of 21

If you have a dominant strategy, use it. Do not be concerned about your rival’s choice. If you do not have a dominant strategy, but your rival does, then anticipate that he or she will use it, and choose your best response accordingly. However, care must be taken in using it if moves are sequential. If you move first, your rival’s move is not given. One will observe your choice when one makes his or her, and you have the opportunity to influence the other players behaviour. In some circumstances this may best be done by choosing something other than your dominant strategy. In school language it is said on the subject of the struggle with negative emotions: Man must sacrifice his suffering. “What could be easier to sacrifice?” everyone will say. However, in reality people would sacrifice anything rather than their negative emotions. There is no pleasure and no enjoyment man would not sacrifice for quite small reasons, but he will never sacrifice his suffering. And in a sense there is a reason for this. In a quite superstitious way man expects to gain something by sacrificing his pleasures, but he cannot expect anything for sacrifice of his sufferings. He is full of wrong ideas about suffering—he still thinks that suffering is sent to him by God or by gods for his punishment or for his edification, and he will even be afraid to hear of the possibility of getting rid of his suffering in such a simple way. #RandolphHarris 10 of 21

The idea is made even more difficult by the existence many sufferings which man really cannot get rid of, and of many other sufferings which are entirely based on man’s imagination, which one cannot and will not give up, like the idea of injustice, for instance, and the belief in the possibility of destroying injustice. Besides that, many people have nothing but negative emotions. All their “I’s” are negative. If you wee to take negative emotions away from them, they would simply collapse and go up in smoke. And what would happen to all our life, without negative emotions? What would happen to what we call art, to the theater, to drama, to most novels? Unfortunately there is no chance of negative emotions disappearing. Negative emotions can be conquered and can disappear only with the help of school knowledge and school methods. The struggle against negative emotions is a part of school training and is closely connected with all school work. What is the origin of negative emotions if they are artificial, unnatural, and useless? As we do not know the origin of man we cannot discuss this question, and we can speak about negative emotions and their origin only in relation to ourselves and our lives. For instance, in watching children we can see how they are taught negative emotions and how they learn themselves through imitation of grownups and older children. If, from the earliest days of his life, a child could be put among people who have no negative emotions, he would probably have none, or so very few that they could be easily conquered by right education. #RandolphHarris 11 of 21

However, in actual life things happen quite differently, and with the help of all the examples one can see and hear, with the help of reading, the cinema, and so on, a child of about ten already knows the whole sale of negative emotions and can imagine them, reproduce them, and identify with them as well as any grown-up man. In grown-up people negative emotions are supported by the constant justification and glorification of them in literature and art, and by personal self-justification and self-indulgence. Even when we become tired of them we do not believe that we can become quite free from them. In reality, we have much more power over negative emotions than we think, particularly when we already know how dangerous they are and how urgent is the struggle with them. However, we find too many excuses for them and swim in the seas of self-pity r selfishness, as the case may be, finding fault in everything except ourselves. This shows that we are in a very strange position in relation to our emotional center. It has no positive part, and no negative part. Most of its negative functions are invented; and there are many people who have never in their lives experienced any real emotion, so completely is their time occupied with imaginary emotions. So we cannot say that our emotional center is divided into two parts, positive and negative. We can only say that we have pleasant emotions and unpleasant emotions, and that all of them which are not negative at a given moment can turn into negative emotions under the slightest provocation or even without any provocation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 21

This is the true picture of our emotional life, and if we look sincerely at ourselves we must realize that so long as we cultivate and admire in ourselves all these poisonous emotions we cannot expect to be able to develop unity, consciousness, or will. If such development were possible, then all these negative emotions would enter into our new being and become permanent in us. This would mean that it would be impossible for us ever to get rid of them. Luckily for us, such a thing cannot happen. In our present state the only good thing about us is that there is nothing permanent in us. If anything becomes permanent in our present state, it means insanity. Only lunatics can have a permanent ego. Incidentally this fact disposes of another false term that crept into the psychological language of the day from the so-called psychoanalysis: I mean the word “complex.” There is nothing in our psychological makeup that corresponds to the idea of the “complex.” In the psychiatry of the nineteenth century, what is now called a “complex” was called a “fixed idea,” and “fixed ideas” were taken as signs of insanity. And that remains perfectly correct. Normal man cannot have “fixed ideas,” “complexes,” or “fixations.” It is useful to remember this in case someone tries to find complexes in you. We have many bad features as it is, and our chances are very small even without complexes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 21

In any events, the virtues of adopting the ascent of humanity as a scaffolding on which to build a curriculum are many and various, especially in our present situation. For one thing, with a few exceptions, it does not require that we invent new subjects or discard old ones. The structure of the subject-matter curriculum that exists in most schools at present is entirely usable. For another, it is a theme that can begin in the earliest grades and extend through college in ever-deepening and -widening dimensions. Better still, it provides students with a point of view from which to understand the meaning of subjects, for each subject can be seen as a battleground of sorts, an arena in which fierce intellectual struggle has take place and continues to take place. Each idea within a subject marks the place where someone fell and someone rose. Thus, the ascent of humanity is an optimistic story, not without its miseries but dominated by astonishing and repeated victories. From this point of view, the curriculum itself may be seen as a celebration of human intelligence and creativity, not a meaningless collection of diploma or college requirements. Best of all, the theme of the ascent of humanity gives us a nontechnical, noncommerical definition of education. It is a definition drawn from an honourable humanistic tradition and reflects a concept of the purposes of academic life that goes counter to the biases of the technocrats. #RandolphHarris 14 of 21

I am referring to the idea that to become educated means to become aware of the origins of knowledge and knowledge systems; to be familiar with the intellectual and creative processes by which the best that has been thought and said has been produced; to learn how to participate, even if as a listener, in the metaphor for what is meant by the ascent of humanity from the mud to the tower. You will come to understand that the sheer number of great works that have contributed to the western canon is unrivaled. No cultural dialogue in any other civilization can compare with that of the West. The goal toward which Western society moves is the Civilization of the Dialogue. The spirit of Western civilization is the spirit of inquiry. Its dominant element is the Logos. Nothing is to remain undiscussed. Everybody is to speak one’s mind. No proposition is to be left unexamined. The exchange of ideas is held to be the past to the realization of the potentialities of the human race. Western culture is idea-centered and coherence-centered. It is also otherworldly, inasmuch as it does not assume that what one learns in school must be directly and urgently related to a problem of today. In other words, it is an education that stresses history, the scientific mode of thinking, the disciplined use of language, a wide-ranging knowledge of the arts and religion, and the continuity of human enterprise. It is the education as an excellent corrective to the antihistorical, information-saturated, technology-loving character of Technopoly. #RandolphHarris 15 of 21

To remain ignorant of things that happened before you were born is to remain a child. It is enough to say that history is our most potent intellectual means of achieving a “raised consciousness.” History is not merely one subject among many that may be taught; every subject has a history, including biology, physics, mathematics, literature, music, and art. Every teacher must be a history teacher. To teach, for example, what we know about biology today without also teaching what we once knew, or thought we knew, is to reduce knowledge to a mere consumer product. It is to deprive students of a sense of the meaning of what we know, and of how we know. To trach about the atom without Democritus, to tech about electricity without Faraday, to teach about political science without Aristotle or Machiavelli, to tech about music without Haydn, is to refuse our students access to The Great Conversation. It is to deny them knowledge of their roots, about which no other social institution is at present concerned. For to know about your roots is not merely to now where your grandfather came from and what he had to endure. It is also to know where your ideas come from and why you happen to believe them; to know where your moral and aesthetic sensibilities com from. It is to know where your World, not just your family, comes from. To complete the presentation of Cicero’s thought, “What is a human life worth unless it is incorporated into the lives of one’s ancestors and set in an historical context?” By “ancestors” Cicero did not mean your mother’s aunt. #RandolphHarris 16 of 21

Thus, every subject should be taught as history. In this way, children, even in the earliest grades, can begin to understand, as they now do not, that knowledge is not a fixed thing but a stage in human development, with a past and a future. To return for a moment to theories of creation, we want to be able to show how an idea conceived almost four thousand years ago has traveled not only in time but in meaning, from science to religious metaphor to science again. What a lovely and profound coherence there is in the connection between the wondrous speculations in an ancient Hebrew desert tent and the equally wondrous speculations in a modern MIT classroom! What I am trying to say is that the history of subjects teaches connections; it teaches that the World is not created anew each day, that everyone stands on someone else’s shoulders. This approach to subjects may be difficult to use. There are, at present, few texts that would help very much, and teachers have not, in any case, been prepared to know about knowledge in this way. Moreover, there is the added difficulty of our learning how to do this for children of different ages. However, that it needs to be done is beyond question. The teaching of subjects as studies in historical continuities is not intended to make history as a special subject irrelevant. If every subject is taught with a historical dimension, the history teacher will be free to teach what histories are: hypotheses and theories about why change occurs. In one sense, there is no such thing as “history,” for every historian from Thucydides to Toynbee has known that his stories must be told from a special point of view that will reflect one’s particular theory of social development. #RandolphHarris 17 of 21

And historians also know that they write histories for some particular purpose—more often than not, either to glorify or to condemn the present. There is no definitive history of anything; there are only histories, human inventions which do not give us the answer, but give us only those answers called forth by the questions that have been asked. Historians know all of this—it is a commonplace ide among them. Yet it is kept a secret from our youth. Their ignorance of it prevents the from understanding how “history” can change and why the Russians, Chinese, American Indians, and virtually everyone else see historical events differently than the authors of history schoolbooks. The tsk of the history teacher, then, is to become a “histories teacher.” This does not mean that some particular version of the American, European, African, nor Asian past should remain untold. A student who does not know at least one history is in no position to evaluate others. However, it does mean that a histories teacher will be concerned, at all times, to show how histories are themselves products of culture; how any history is a mirror of the conceits and even metaphysical biases of the culture that produced it; how the religion, politics, geography, and economy of a people lead them to re-create their past along certain lines. The histories teacher must clarify for students the meaning of “objectivity” and “events,” must show what a “point of view” and a “theory” are, must provide some sense of how histories may be evaluated. #RandolphHarris 18 of 21

Today, telecommunications systems have sharply limited capacity and are expensive to expand. Molecular manufacturing will drop the price of the “boxes” in telecommunications systems—things such as switching systems, computers, telephones, and even the glorious videophone. Cables made of smart materials can make these devices easy to install and easy to connect together. Regulatory agencies willing, you might someday be able to buy inexpensive spools of material resembling kite string, and other spools of material resembling tape, then use them to join a World data network. Either kind of strand can configure its core into a good-quality optical fiber, with special provisions for going around bends. When rubbed together, pieces of strong will fuse together, or fuse to a piece of tape. Pieces of tape do likewise. To hook up to the network, you run strong or tape from your telephone or other data terminal to the nearest point that is already connected. If you live deep in a tropical rain forest, run a string to the village satellite link. These data-cable materials include amplifiers, nanocopmputers, switching nodes, and the rest, and they come loaded with software that “knows” how to act to transit data reliably. If you are worried that a line may break, run three in different directions. Even one line could carry far more data than all the channels in a television put together. Getting around quickly requires vehicles and somewhere for them to travel. The old 1950s vision of private helicopters would be technically possible with inexpensive, high-quality manufacturing, cheap energy, and a bit of improvement in autopilots and air-traffic control—but will people really tolerate that much technology roaring across the sky? Fortunately, there is an alternative both to this and to building even-more roads. #RandolphHarris 19 of 21

When it comes to recombination mechanisms, which ensure that two DNA double helices undergo an exchange reaction only if they contain an extensive region of sequence similarity (homology); unless copying errors are also occurring, selection only alters the relative frequencies of existing types. However, there are endogenous mechanisms that do create new types. In biology, one of the most important is crossover, a process of recombining genetic contributions from each of two parents. This mechanism creates novel types, but with a method vastly different from mutation. Crossover works by splicing together pieces of already viable genetic material instead of making changes at random and so is far more likely to yield an improvement than is a mutation. In has long been noted that self-conscious activities of deliberate invention have similar properties. This can be seen in early forms of inventions, such as the motor and wagon combinations of the first “horseless carriages.” In designing their aircraft, the Wright brothers defined subproblems that could be independently attacked. Solutions to the power source problem and alternative wing designs could then be recombined in various ways. As in the biological analog, these conceptual recombinations have much higher chances of being valuable new types than would random changes of design. Constraint relaxation is another such mechanism, frequently practiced in human problems solving. It seeks solutions to a hard problem by generating variants that violate some one of the situation’s constraints. #RandolphHarris 20 of 21

Constraint relaxation introduces new variants by starting with materials of established feasibility and modifying them. A nice example is the one-opening kettle, which was achieved by relaxing the constraint that kettles needed a wide hole for filling and a narrow one for pouring. Presumably, many kettle designers thought: “What if we only had one opening?” Once faucets became common for filling, instead of ladles, the two-hole constraint could be relaxed, achieving a good design that is less expensive to manufacture. In crossover, conceptual recombination, and constraint relaxations, we have examples of mechanisms that can both create new types and change relative frequencies. We will use the general label recombining mechanism for them. Because they work with portions of strategies or agents already in use, they introduce new types by an endogenous process that has some degree of correlation with the system’s other conditions. This contrasts with the exogenous sources of new types that arise from errors and random disruptions. Recombining mechanisms implicitly leverage performance criteria in their creation of new agent or strategy from those that are already succeeding. This advantage over random variation explains why they are so commonly found in Complex Adaptive Systems. Keep in mind, as far as we know, no one has yet every come back from the other World. I cannot console you, but one thing I can tell you, as long as my ideals are alive I will be alive. By contemplating one’s end, one eventually feels purified and delivered from one’s baser self, from material things, and from other humans, as well as from fear and hatred of one’s fellow man. #RandolphHarri 21 of 21

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