Japan, From Will Durant's Our Oriental Heritage

This is background on Japan's Golden Age for my study of Asian Empathy from the Life-Giving Sword

(p 829)

Buddhist Japan, 522-1603, civilized by China and Korea, refined and softened by religion.

Feudal and peaceful Japan, Tokugawa Shogunate, 1603-1868, self contained seeing no territory nor external trade, agriculture wedded to art and philosophy.

Modern Japan, opened up by America in 1853, wars of expansion, trade dependency, imperialism of Europe and America, the only possible conclusion is world war.

The Sacred Isles are created when two gods, Izanagi and Izanami, brother and sister, stood on the floating bridge of heaven and thrust a spear in the ocean and held it aloft. From the spear drops fell and they became Japan where they fell. By watching tadpoles, they learned the secrets of sex and gave birth to the Japanese.

From them was born the divine lineage of the emperors of Dai Nippon. From the time of their love there has been only one imperial dynasty in Japan.

Fourth century Japanese were described by Chinese writers as having no farm animals, facial tattoos, armed with spears and arrows, wearing no shoes. They were polygamous, peaceful, and respectful, loved to drink and lived long lives. The women wore body make-up rich in scarlet and pink.

(p 832)

Early peasants where independent soldier-gentlemen and there was no exploitation or poverty, and there was no stealing. Handicrafts came from Korea and crafts guilds were created. Free artisans where at the top of the class structure and there were also slaves. It was partly feudal and tribal, eventually landed barons operated peasants as serfs.

The early Japanese worshiped animals, ancestors and sex. Spirits were everywhere, in the night sky, in the plants and trees, insects and animals, even in men. Deities were innumerable, hovered over the homes and danced in the flames.

The dead were feared and worshiped, precious objects were laid on their graves and prayers and delicacies were offered before their ancestral tablets every day.

(p 833)

Buddhism entered in 522 satisfying the religious needs of the people and the political needs of the government. Buddha is represented differently than in his time, not the revolutionary escape from the Hindu ways of need, want and control, but the Mahayana version of Buddhism. Gentle gods and cheerful ceremonies promised personal immortality and gracefully brought piety, peacefulness and obedience to make them happy with their agricultural existence. Their content with life, joy in celebrations and a unity of feeling gave politicians the benefits of order and national strength.

Leaders gave Japan to the Buddha, lavishing resources on temples, the clergy, included the ethics in decrees. Japan socially advanced with artistic renaissance but as palace coups by rival controlling families changed the political landscape, repression and domination often replaced progress with autocratic domination.

(p 835)

In 898, one such family, the Fugiwara, installed Daigo, remembered as the greatest Emperor of Japan. Japan borrowed culture and spirituality from China so successfully that they entered a Golden Age where Japan rivaled any other nation at any other age with the beauty of its art and the radiance of its people.

Cooking, poetry, music, gardens and architecture were imported with discrimination where Japan maintained its own spirit and character adapting new knowledge to ancient values.

(p 836-837)

The wealth, luxury and intellectual refinement of Japanese families would not be rivaled until the Palace of Versailles or the courts of the French Enlightenment. The whole nation was stimulated to rise to standards of learning and taste and sex had been liberated, adultery was winked at. Harmonies of color wavered on every sleeve, music and dance accompanied life's steps, literature flourished and morals relaxed.

This period of brilliant refinement was brief because it relied on concentrated wealth that could be impacted by virtually any social disruptions or changes in the environment. The ascendancy of the wealthy to the heights of luxury tended to corrupt official rule to the point of offering positions of responsibility to the highest bidders.

As the poor observed the mounting wealth, criminals were allowed to live in open splendor and gangs of bandits roamed all of Japan. Centrally weakened, Japan became vulnerable to attack, a common thread in her history. The sudden decline from the Golden Age encouraged the families to become independent forces fracturing the nation, giving leadership to Shoguns, men accurately defined as war lords.

The Shoguns recognized the Emperor and maintained his family preserving the lineage of the Sacred Islands, but only with the smallest possible investment. Since the Japanese forces could no longer protect the average farmer, taxes were now collected by the Shoguns.

(p 838)

By 1192, Yoritomo of the Minamoto clan established an independent authority called the Kamakura Bakufu. While Kamakura was an important Buddhist city, Bakufu simply means military. Yoritomo died suddenly and his descendent's where weak leaders, giving the adage “the great man has no seed.” Soon after his death another family, the Homos, set up a parallel authority with their Regency which acted as “boss of bosses” family for the various Shoguns.

In China, the Kublai Khan became aware of this fracture and ordered the building of a flotilla which, as a poet said, “made the hills weep for the loss of their trees.” Clever Koreans, forever in fear of Japan, had falsely described Japan to him in terms of the former golden age. He sailed to Japan assured of a conquest but a famous storm welled up in the ocean drowning his armada of 3,500 ships and 70,000 fighters. This storm is, of course, the Kamikaze, the Divine Wind.

Takatoki was the last of the Homos. He was as defective has his ancestors had been clever, he collected dogs instead of taxes, and in this leadership void a series of coups, typically complicated with treachery installed the Ashikaga clan for 250 years intermittent civil war. Towards the end of their rule, painting and other arts became more important than governmental organization allowing Japan to descend into chaos.

(p 839)

An interesting trio emerged from this decline, encouraged by the chaos to attempt control of the nation. Legend has it that they were childhood friends who joined in an oath to support whichever of them succeeded in becoming top Shogun. Nobuaga was the first to try and failed but he had been supported by the second, Hideyoshi, who succeeded in becoming a major force by building on the successes of the first. Hideyoshi is a very important figure but the third, Iyeyasu is the most interesting of the three, and he had to buy his time.

The first, Nobuaga, had accumulated leaderless bandit forces into an army with the help of the second, Hideyoshi. When he died, Hideyoshi completed the coup against the Homos, presumably with the help of the third, Iyeyasu. He made himself the ruler of half of Japan and gained the trust of the largely symbolic Emperor, and convinced him to allow a conquest of Korea, which in turn would allow him to give China to Japan. This plan seemed insane to the three, Iyeyasu, who after debate decided to abide and allow its expected failure to destroy Hideyoshi, allowing him to build on the power of the other two.

The Koreans had innovated naval warfare in a way that was not seen again until the battles of the ironclads of the US Civil War. Their Monitor defeated the entire Japanese navy of 72 ships, those not sunk were burned to their waterlines. This defeat did not ruin Hideyoshi, instead he settled down to life with his concubines and was given the title of Taiko, the antecedent of our word tycoon but he was better known to Japan as Monkey-face. A visiting missionary described him as “cunning beyond belief.” Not particularly religious, he none the less convinced the Japanese to contribute all the metal weapons to a colossal statue of the Buddha, the Daibutsu of Kyoto. Newly disarmed, the people had no choice but to accept his edits, one of which was to redefine the role of the warrior class, the Samauri.

Christians had established themselves in the southern port of Nagasaki and had driven the Buddhists out. Needless to say, this alarmed central Japan and the possible aims of the Jesuits was not lost on them. Monkey-face sent a messenger with five peremptory questions, asking why Buddhism was being repressed but also asked, interestingly, why the Portuguese colonialists ate useful animals, such as oxen and cows. There were also questions about the slavery practices of the Portuguese who were exporting Japanese to foreign buyers. Unsatisfied with their response, Monkey-face sought to crush the Christians, though it would take a few more generations to bring about a repression similar to the Masada resistance of the Jewish Zealots in Middle-eastern history.

Monkey-face died in 1598 and made his cohort, Iyeyasu promise to build a new capital in Tokyo and recongnize Hideyori, Monkey-face's son, as heir to the Regency they had taken from the Homos.

Kyeyasu reneged, mentioning that a technical flaw made his Samauri blood oath invalid, and quickly moved on to the task of consolidating Japan. Monkey-face's son and heir refused to take a hint and abdicate, this required a siege which against the huge Castle of Osaka, Monkey-face's son and his retainers eventually committed ritual suicide. Iyeyasu ended threats to his ascendancy by killing Monkey-face's remaining family, including all the children.

He changed his attitude quickly and transformed Japan into a peaceful and stable nation. Creating a long peace required winning the Sumurai away from the blood violence of the sword. He give them literature and philosophy and prestige, they contributed to the arts and theater.

Once again Japan's brilliant potential blossomed into another explosion of national beauty. Despite denying Japan any kind of democracy he was advanced and socially aware, he declared that the “people are the foundation of the empire.” He maintained patriarchal control and did not hesitate to punish insubordination with death, a rebel could expect to see his whole family killed for his transgressions. He preserved the Shogunate feudal system he felt it allowed a balance between centralized and distributed power and which allowed for the continuity of Japan's traditional structure. Japan under his leadership was unquestionably the best feudal society throughout all the ages of humanity.

**Menenorui... (see Life Giving Sword).

His heirs ruled successfully and amiably for eight generations, and his last ruling heir, **, was an amazingly advanced social innovator.

Iyeyasu was the first of many to declare that worth of a nation is measured in the humanity shown to its convicted criminals. Severe punishment is not the sign of a nation of bad people, but indicates a nation of corruption and incompetence.

The blending of Shinto ancestor worship and the fully modern Buddhism brought together the country in a way that pleased Iyeyas. He was lenient with the Christians based in Nagasaki though the Jesuit and Portuguese colonial designs were transparent. The intolerance and bitter denunciations of Japan's faith was disturbing. Neophyte Christians not only fought a holy war with the Buddhists but dogmatically attacked each other. During Monkey-face's regency, a Spanish Galleon was forced ashore by small Japanese flotilla. The Spanish captain was indignant at what he felt was piracy and complained to high officials. When he entered a minister's office, he was asked how the Christians had been so successful in aligning so many nations to one man, Jesus Christ. Being a load sailor, not a practiced diplomat, he told the Japanese what they really needed to know, “Our kings begin by sending men of religion to the nations they wish to conquer. The religieux induced people into embracing Christ and once there has been suitable progress in conversion, soldiers are sent to combine with the newly converted Christians making infiltration and domination very easy.”

Monkey-face was disturbed enough to bring a death ultimatum but he didn't live long enough to enforce the edict. Eventually, the Christians were persecuted enough to build a Masada type fortress of 37,000 soldiers, and like the Zealots, they were either killed in the rebellion for religious freedom or committed suicide.

Iyeyasu planned well for the long run, and eight generations of his heirs ruled Japan until the upheavals of the modern global age and highly capitalized industry. Some where mediocre but effective, others ruled with a strong hand as did Iyemitsu, third in his line when he eliminated the Portuguese Jesuit threat. Others built new Golden Ages of culture but the most remarkable of his heirs was the last, the socially advanced and aware Yoshimune who brought Japan into line with all the fundamental desires of the Buddha in the most revolutionary sense.

(p 844)

Like every liberal movement, it his initiative was expensive and Yoshimune borrowed from the lower but wealthy merchant class and compensated by reducing the expenses of government. He shocked the gentry by dismissing the prettiest ladies of the court. He dressed in cotton rather than silks, kept is regent apartments like peasant's home and dined on country cuisine. So open was he that he placed a complaint box before the palace of the Supreme Court and commoners were rewarded for their openness now matter how caustic their complaints.

Iyeyasu's Tokugawa dynastic age was the happiest period in Japan's long history. His people lived stable country lives, they were not necessarily wealthy but they were healthy, enjoyed perpetual peace and aimed very high in the pursuits of all their traditional arts. No one could know the effect of the arrival of American warships after 1850, nor expect the sudden excitement that stimulated the Japanese to beat the West at its own game, to rekindle the expansionist insanity of Monkey-face, the senseless cruelty inflicted on the Asian continent during the Second World War. No one could expect the generosity of the American Marshall plan or the results of the ill-planned strategies of the American Federal Reserve which brought much of American industry under the control of Japan.

(p 846)

The Imperial family, descendants of the mother and father gods who created the Sacred Isles, were supported by the Shogunates but in a way that might embarrass a modern family. The emperor was surround with concubines, he was secluded, kept idle and efemenint with silks and perfumes. They submissively played the role but where often forced into common crafts to supplement income.

Shoguns, in contrast, luxuriated, expected treatment normal for kings and emperors. When borne through the streets all the people were expected to kneel with their heads on their hands on the ground. Fires where extinguished, houses shuttered and pets locked up as he passed through, submission was enforced by the police. Cultured ladies entertained the Shogun without reserve and his retinue, including jesters, accompanied him everywhere. Shoguns, also called Daimyo, acknowledged allegiance to the emperor, and some even managed to declare independence for their regions in defiance of the central Shoguns.

Japan, in many ways was a version of China, so much culture had been transplanted, but Japan was a military state, and China was nationally pacifist. Chinese gentlemen where scholars, Japanese gentlemen were swordsmen, and only Iyeyasu interested the Daimyo's soldiers in culture, traditionally there were as likely to try out a new sword on a beggar as a dog.

Samauri did no labor except occasionally die for Daimyo or Japan. They gambled and brawled and their soul was their sword, despite long periods of peace there was considerable sword play in the streets.

Like knights in shining armour, they fought bravely for anyone who appealed to them for help or a just cause. They lived by their own code, despised materialism, never borrowing, lending or counting money. Bushido, the Way, was reminiscent of the early Buddhists and Tao, combined mediation, practice and superior knowledge in to Zen practice which evolves to this day.

The famous courage of the Japanese soldiers could not have been inherited from China, so fearless were they that within the Samauri code there were innumerable reasons for ritual suicide. Hara-kiri, more politely called seppuku, was the first lesson of Samauri youth. A special small sword was carried kept so that Samauri could disembowel themselves. Soldiers forced into surrender were as likely to do this as not, ministers were expected to follow their Daimyo into death with seppuku. Revenge vendettas were always a component of law, but often Samauri would kill themselves after righting wrongs. Peasants and women were forbidden Hara-kiri, but aristocratic women were taught jigaki, which was throat cutting, so they could kill themselves in protest.

**Ronin story...

(p 850)

Japanese law was rough justice, encasing the original evolution from tribal to feudal society, it functioned based on the simple concepts of revenge. Powerful Shogunate codified law but the street level enforcers the Samauri swordsmen took orders from their respective Daimyos.

Entire families were held responsible for the actions of their members, and paid for transgressions in numbers of five, cruelty in punishment exceeds what you have probably heard. Banishment was a common sentence but in many cases families forced to live in mountain hollows consolidated both militarily and spiritually, finely honing martial arts while implementing Buddhism in a very fundamental way.

In the mid 700's the Emperor Shomu abolished the death penalty, beginning a tradition of leniency in leadership, social advances require a committed and holistic approach and when he died his heirs were forced to reapply it since they lacked the ability to continue his initiatives.

Yoshimune, the innovator, was disgusted by prison conditions and punishment cruelty, lapses in justice where prisoners were simply lost in the system, the charges long forgotten. He codified the justice system, abolished family responsibility, and reformed the prisons.

(p 851)

In Yoshimune's Japan the ancient eight layer caste system had been reduced to 4 layers, Samurai, artisans, peasants and merchants, with merchants belonging to the lowest caste. Beneath this layers were a class of slaves, about five percent of the population. They were criminals, war captives, children who had been kidnapped or sold by their parents into bondage, and beneath the slaves where pariahs known as Eta, considered despicable by the Buddhist because they worked with dead animals, as butchers, tanners or scavengers.

Most Japanese were peasants, farming the eight of Japan which will raise crops. The Nara dynasty nationalized the land, and rented it to the farmers, but found that lack of ownership created farmers who didn't care for the land. Private ownership was restored but the state invested in the crops in the spring by providing seed. In densely populated Japan, one square mile fed 2000 people, making farming painfully intensive and farmers had to provide the state with one month of forced labor, where he was treated like a prisoner. Taxes might have been as much of 72% of the farm product, though usually 40% . Peasants possessed a place to cook and some utensils, his home was a shanty and his clothes were scant.

(p 852)

Natural disasters plagued Japan, being volcanic it is vulneralbe to earthquakes. Between 1177 and 1185, there had been an earthquake, a famine, and a fire which almost destroyed the capital, Kyoto. The city was dying of hunger, all the refinements of happier times could not be sold for food that didn't exist. Infants clung to the mother's breast not knowing if she was alive.

(p 855)

At one time, a lady's sleeves reached below her knees, and each had a little bell that tinkled as she walked. On wet and snowy days, women walked on raised wooden slippers an inch or more in height. In Tokugawa Japan, clothes became so extravagant that the shoguns felt they had to step in, outlawing the multiple superimposed robes, whose colors provided rainbows of colors determined by the rank of the wearer. Laws were cleverly circumvented but in time the rage for robes abated and Japanese fashions returned to the simple cotton of the Buddhists.

Japanese of all ages are the cleanest of people, those who could afford so, changed three times a day, and all bathed daily. Hot baths were used to keep warm in winter. Diet has always been healthy whether simple or extravagant, the staple rice was enhanced with fish, vegetables, seaweed, fruit and occasionally meat. Meat was rare except with the rich and the soldiers. They were long lived and known for feats of endurance. Meat was outlawed at times in deference to Buddhist beliefs, but when the wealthy priests were discovered to be eating meat secretly, the Japanese viewed it as a delicacy.

Fine cooking was core to the culture during better times, artists and philosophers divided themselves into warring clans and fought with recipes. Table manners were like a religion, bites were prescribed enactments. Meals were begun with a hot bowl of sake, and sake was long known to be life's single solution.

That which the seven sages sought,

Those men of olden times,

Was sake, beyond all doubt

Instead of holding forth

While, with grave mien,

How much better to drink sake,

To get drunk and shout aloud.

Since it is true

That death comes at last for all,

Let us be joyful

While we are alive

Even the jewel that sparkles in the night

Is less to us than the uplifting of the heart

Which comes by drinking sake

Even more sacred though was tea, imported as a remedy for tasteless hot water it grew, after many false starts, grew into a graceful and complex ceremony. It was a shogun who popularized it first when it cleared a hangover. Rikyu established strict rules of tea, clappers signaled guests that the ceremony was beginning, there was an absolution bowl of pure water, gossip was forbidden, only noble issues were discussed, no deceit was allowed either, and the ceremony was limited to four hours. No tea-pot was used, a beautiful cup of carefully prepared tea was passed from guest to guest, each carefully wiping the rim. When the cup was finished, the guests passed it around again to admire the craftsmanship of the potter. Potters stimulated the tea ceremony by creating ever more beautiful designs helping form the tranquil, courteous and charming manners of Japan. Flowers are loved too and the same Rikyu and the art of flower arrangement grew with the evolution of the tea ceremony. Womanhood in aristocratic Japan consisted of flowers, poetry and dance.

When in spring all the cherry blossoms bloom, all Japan gazes at them, the trees are not cultivated for fruit but for the flower which symbolizes the the faith and bravery of the swordsman. Japan is devoted to flowers and all of nature, they instinctively and carefully cultivate all the moods of nature in gardens and in the home, they love asymmetry in their tiny tortured trees and in rocks brought from volcanoes and the sea. Gardeners dig tiny lakes, build streams, patiently grow gnarled trees and connect them with paths and bridges that spring from a naturally imperfect and beautiful forest. Ideally they attach their homes to the gardens, they are frail and pretty, simplistically and perfectly built with subtlety refined carpentry.

The family lived in tranquility throughout all of Japan's storms and wars surrounded not by possessions but by natural beauty, both rich and poor. All lived modestly and uncompleted by bric-a-brac or displays of wealth, a bookshelf or cupboard containing things necessary to sleep, accented by a natural rendition in the calligraphy of painting and poetry.

(p 860)

Freedom for the Japanese is in the family not in the individual, this is where social stability is derived, where the father is omnipotent. He could be tyrannical, he could dismiss sons or daughters in law yet keep the grandchildren with him, he could even kill a criminal or unchaste offspring, a lower caste father could sell his children into slavery or prostitution. Commoners were monogamous, but the aristocratic cold have concubines as they could afford, Christians grated the Japanese by their assertion that adultery was a sin. In the golden ages, wives could outstrip their husbands in sexual conquests and might even trade their love skills for a poem.

Asian culture universally encouraged family growth, but not in the Samurai. Population pressure reverted previous rules encouraging young marriage to prevent marriage before thirty. They were encouraged to adopt if they had only daughters, since girls could not inherit in a warrior class.

(p 866)

In the give and take relationship with Chinese culture, a young monk from a major family became aware of more philosophy than the accepted Buddhism, trade at that time was forbidden with China but the youth determined to learn about the Chinese sages. Fugiwara Seigwa visited sea going communities in an attempt to smuggle himself to the Chinese mainland but actually found in one of these towns another youth reading from the Confucian text which is “The Great Learning.” He obtained this and other texts from the literary smugglers and founded a group dedicated to Confucian scholarship. He was so popular that the spoiled Buddhist monks ok Kyoto, the capital, thought him an outrage and tried to silence him.

(p 873)

Since Seigwa had died suddenly, the Tokugawa shogunate was happy to adopt his star student, Hayashi Razan, and granted him an important advisory position in their Regency. He denounced Christianity as an irrelevant mess and Buddhism as a weaking influence for Japan and a threat to the family fabric. Typically open and impressionable of the Tokugawa clan, the present Shogun, Iyemitsu created a fashion out of Confucian lectures and allowed its influence into the Japanese cultural spectrum. One later Japanese Confucian, Ogyu Saorai, proclaimed his greatest joy (besides reading) was to “eat beans and criticize the great men of Japan.” Other priests complained that Ogyu “thought he knew everything there is to be known”, to which he responded that “if there is anything to be said, it has already been said by Confucius.” Samurai raged at his conceit, but the open and aware shogun Yoshimune loved his courage and protected him from the intellectual mob of priests and scholar-soldiers.

(p 874)

Those who admired Confucius and China eventually fell into a wasteful and unfortunate struggle with the traditional admirers of ancient Japan. In the battle a reactionary and anti-Chinese movement formed, and a literal and fundamental version of Japanese history was formulated and published. Not just Confucius but the Buddha became a target for a movement known as the Sonno Jo-i. They targeted any nationality they were aware of and incubated nationalist hatred which would return Japan to the historically suicidal expansionist needs of the conquests of Korea and China.

(p 877)

Higher education in Japan was founded by Hayashi Razan when the Tokugawa clan allowed him to create schools for administration and Confucian studies. His school eventually became the University of Tokyo. Confucian teachers were allowed the status of Samurai and wore swords, an important and tolerant allowance by the Shogunate. By 1750 there were 800 similar schools but only for the Samurai class, merchants, be they rich, were of lower caste and had to learn from public lectures.

(p 878)

Poetry

The real artist must not try to think for the audience but to lure them into active thought, he must find one fresh perception that will reflect all the ideas and emotions. Each poem must be a quite record of one moment's inspiration.

When Lady Kaga no Chiyo lost her husband,

All things that seem

Are but

One dreamer's dreamer's

I sleep, I wake

How wide the bed with none beside me

Having also lost her child,

Today, how far may he have wandered,

The brave hunter of dragon-flies!

Fiction

As brief as the poems were, novels could run to twenty volumes, 4000 pages. Lady Murasaki no-Shikibu wrote the Gengi Monogatari, The Gossip about Gengi. She was a Fujiwara who married another Fujiwara but was left a widow. She turned to writing, at a time when paper was so scarce she actually, sacrilegiously, recycled the Buddhist sutras for her novel. Gengi, the son of a Daiymo and his favorite concubine leads the life of the woman's idea of a man, sentiment and seduction, always brooding and languishing over love as he goes from one woman to the next. Gengi, in reflecting over his life seeks repentance with a monk but then sees a lovely princess and once again falls in love. Gengi's first wife dies in childbirth, and is free to remarry, he falls in love with a princess, Murasakai. The author installs herself in her own novel and maybe she found happiness within her own fantasy.

The jollyist writer of Japan was similar to Dickens. He could not escape poverty despite is talent, but he accepted poverty with good humor. Instead of furniture, he had paintings of furniture on his walls, on holidays he sacrificed to the gods with pictures of excellent offerings. He was given a bathtub so he wore it on his head on the way home and knocked down the pedestrians who came his way. When a publisher came to his house for business and offered him a bath, while the guest was washing he borrowed his clothes and was able to present himself at new years ceramonies in proper dress.

On his deathbed he made his students promise to place packets on his chest just before his creamation. What they didn't know is that the packets were firecrackers.

Essays

Pillow Sketches

Lady Sei Shonagon was a Fujiwara in the time of Lady Murasaki and wrote casual sketches of the refined and scandalous life during one Japan's better times.

Her list of likes and dislikes

Cheerful things,

*Coming home from excursions with the carriages over flowing

*To have lots of footmen to make the carriages speed along

*A riverboat going downstream

*Teeth nicely blackened

Dreary things,

*A nursery where a child has died

*A brazier with the fire gone out

*A coachman who is hated by his ox

*The birth of only girls in the house of a scholar

Detestable things,

*People who break into your story with their own version quite different from your own

*While chatting with a friendly man, hear him talk admiringly of woman he has known

*A visitor who tells long stories while you are in a hurry

*The snoring of a man you are trying to conceal, and has gone to sleep in a place in which he has no business

*Fleas

(p 899)

Pottery

Asian pottery was purely functional and unglazed until the 8^th century. Experimenters in China and Korea and Japan in a short period mastered glazes and pastes of porcelain which what is now called “China” today. Japanese potters traveled to China over several centuries to learn ceramic secrets, and eventually rivaled the Chinese. With the arrival in Japan of tea in the 1500s, the new and indefensible religious practice of the tea ceremony created demand for the most delightful pottery possible for the central tea cup. The founding tea master, Rikyu, initiated the art of the tea-cup with a huge order sent to a Korean potter's family living in the capital of Kyoto. A Kyoto pottery craze followed, its style being the famous Raku, and a district was founded where virtually every house was a pottery.

(p 908)

Painting

Japanese painting is closely linked to calligraphy, the brushes are the same. It was a religious or instructional expression for most of Japan's time until in the late 1700s artists stunned the ruling Samurai with depictions of normal people in real life. Artists moved on to immortalizing actors and then visited the brothels to create seductively disarming works of female beauty in ways that had been purely for religious depiction in previous ages. Printing advanced from monochrome to true polychrome allowing two very popular and familiar artists into many homes, Hokusai and Hiroshige.

Hokusai was born in the artisan class, the son of a mirror maker, he is known today to the world for his Thirty-six views of Fuji, the most famous print being the boat in the wave before the mountain. He lived very long and created so much work, and at the age of 89 he reluctantly surrendered life with this phrase, “if the gods would only give me ten more years, maybe I could become a great painter.”

In the Mangwa, he illustrated every detail of everyday life, humorous, scandalous, and percept to every detail. He created the images a dozen a day and this work numbered fifteen volumes. He was looked down upon in his time and his poor family survived by selling food and almanacs.

Hiroshige was more respected in Japan, whereas Hokusai has been more accepted in the West. Hiroshige painted scenes more realistically and gave Japanese print owners views of their country in such volumes that it allowed everyone to travel as the National Geographic does today. His most famous volume was the 56 Stations of Tokaido, drawn along the post road between Tokyo and Kyoto. In his last phrase before death he went much easier, “I lay my brush down at Azuma, I journey to the Holy West, to see the scenery there.”

(p 912)

Japan leaves Peace

Japan left this joyful period of paternal militancy and guidance, brilliant celebration, almost comic renaissance, intense concentration and fascination with all things orderly and irreverent just as these two painters died.

Japan had been isolated and was unaware of the mechanization of civilization happening around the Atlantic, and was unprepared for the shock of the cheapening of everyday and colossal things produced beyond rational expectations of consumption by the highly capitalized factories and their mines.

Her beautiful crafts could not compete in price with the dour and utilitarian implements of the age of coal and iron and the big ships of global trade. The cruel beauty of war encapsulated artfully into the culture of the Samurai could in no way compete with the chemistry and metallurgy Western destruction.

Japan leapt awake, and accepted science and industry, having been humiliated repeatedly by the intimidating West, she committed to beating her abusers at their own game and has done so with amazing success. She lost so much in the change, and awakened a dark and dangerous desire to expansion into China and Korea which the Tokugawa's had successfully repressed.

By the time this book was written in the 1930s, she had invaded the mainland countries, with cruelty. There is no comparison between these criminal behaviors and the joy of the life giving swords. Could have Iyeyasu prevented the colonialization of the Asian mainland, and the bombing of Pearl Harbor ?? Would that have prevented the most pain and humiliation of the first and last nuclear attack on the human race ??

The Life-Giving Sword by Yagyu Munenori

Secret Teachings of the House of the Shogun

Yagyu Munenori, translated by William Scott Wilson

As I was browsing a shelf of cookbooks in an Asian grocery in Denver, you can imagine my surprise when I found a title called the Life-Giving Sword. How ironic and contradictory, and appropriate. Having trouble starting my study of Asian empathy, I greedily starting absorbing many contradictory concepts of Zen and suddenly realized that I, myself, as a child had practiced the core technique of the author's school, the art of no-sword during the endless race riots that permeated my youth. In its simplest form, no-sword means fighting an armed enemy without a weapon of your own, where the weapon is really a distraction to its bearer. When the opponent tries to kill, you preempt his strike with a planned maneuver which places you inside the swing path of the sword, enabling you to disarm the enemy with killing him. Saving his life thus is empathy of the greatest degree. Not the facilitation of healing in groups seeking peace as Carl Rogers practiced, but the true practice of healing learned and proved on the battlefield. Both self survival and the karmic joys of healing are derived from the concept of letting-go. The author, his friends and mentors, and successors cannot seem stress the need for emptiness and fluidity enough. Poems, anecdotes, mysterious and contradictory advice all seek to bring the disciple to.. nothingness. The goal is the moon in the water, a perception of something that doesn't exist, yet is such a beautiful metaphor and image.

Buddhism is of course the religion of life and respect for all in your environment, a rebellion from Hinduism which brought much more practical meaning to spirituality. But the practice of no-sword tempers the need for peace with a need for creating peace out of disorder, there are definitely times when killing is appropriate, when killing is necessary to preserve life, especially in governmental conflict. The life giving sword is sometimes the killing sword, but only when absolutely necessary. In one incident, the author himself deposed an unstable leader who, in the 1600s, was planning an invasion of Korea and China. Had the author been alive and influential prior to the second world war, Japan would never have bombed Perl Harbor in Hawaii. Knowing Asian history, the endless conquests, up to the cruelty and corruption of the present Chinese government predisposes one to think Asian psychology would be ineffectual and childish but thinkers like the author cut through that life giving principles and make you wonder why Asia consistently ignores its teachers.

Growth of Martial Arts in Japan

(p 8 - 36)
During the early Edo period in the early 1600s martial arts took many steps forward, three important texts were written by contemporary samurai and priests. Takuan Soho had written The Mysterious Record of Unmoving Wisdom which philosophical piece looking at swordsmanship from the perspective of Zen Buddhism. The mind must be kept free from attachment and fixation, stopping the mind, abiding, meant certain death from the opponent's sword. Takuan had been banished by the hated Toyotomi government for disagreement with its policies on religious leadership.

Swordsman/artist Miyamoto Mausashi had written The Book of the Five Rings with a practical approach to swordsmanship, on how to use the sword, where to stand and use the sun or shadows. The point of battle was not showmanship it was winning, but he stressed all the same philosophies that Takuan had where stopping and fixation were certain death, to the point where historians can assume that they had met and compared thoughts.

The continually moving mind is philosophically symbolized by the avatar Fudo Myo-o, the Unmoving Brightness King, often depected holding a sword in one hand for cutting through ignorance, and a rope in the other for tying up passions. The philosophical Takuan had dedicated his work to this to Fudo and the artist Musashi sculpted a statue of this Buddhist that still inspires awe.

The final text of this triad is this book written around 1632. Munenori found the middle ground between technique and spirituality and especially applied them to everyday life as well as national crisis.

Munenori had inherited the ideals of no-sword from a long line of ancestor priests and samurai. The martial arts school his family ran had won over a very important student, the third shogun of the Tokugawa government and Munenori as his teacher became amazingly influential in the stability of Japan. Munenori saw in the sword a way to forge his students into humans aware of the Buddhist way, the sword was a medium for life rather than death.

The samurai and priests of the time where wanderers as well as scholars, teachers and soldiers. They created a huge matrix of friends and mentors that went far into China, their devotion to the Chinese psychology is woven into their texts where Chinese characters are more important than their own Japanese. Their poems are adapted from the Chinese style. This contrasts much of what I have read about animosity between those nations. Travels to China involved sea voyages, the motions and rhythms of the ocean give more depth to the concepts of fluidity and emptiness.

The Zen networks also amalgamated resistance to the corrupt and psychologically unstable Toyotomi government, Munenori's family had suffered loss of their lands and subsequent poverty at their hands. The Toyotomi were planning a disaster reminiscent of the second world war, an invasion of Korea and Ming China.

Munenori's family was from a mountainous area only barely accessible via obscure paths and virtually isolated during winters. These Krakatoa's regions were perfect refuge for vanquished samauri who were unable to return to their cities and fiefs. These hidden communities where famous for their samurai and were often drawn into conflicts despite their isolation. Munenori's family had the added reputation of talent in covert action, his mother was descendant of the foremost Ningas. Political winds forced his village of Yagyu to excel in every aspect of life, not just military. Through many services to the various controlling forces, Munenori had been invited with his father to instruct an important leader, Tokugawa Ieyasu. Ieyasu was very impressed with their Buddhist principles of peaceful swordsmanship and brought them close in his circle.

Under the corrupt control of the present shogunate, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, it became clear that vast armies would eventually face each other and it was Ieyasu who would challenge the control of the Toyotomi. In the battles that ensued Munenori's family vanquished many of the Toyotomi forces and their bravery was well documented. Undocumented where their covert actions and persuasive powers over the many Japanese lords. As sword instructors, the clan members were installed in virtually every regional army and worked as a unified force to defeat the Toyotomi. Munenori thus had power in the shogunate government far beyond the dojo of a sword instructor. Tokugawa Ieyasu pressed Munenori well into his old age for knowledge, he admonished him for not teaching him enough.

** Sickness

** Emptiness

** Takuan Soho – polymath, pickle

if you follow the world you turn your back on the Way

Takuan Soho, No-Mind

(p 43)

Cast away all attachment, become enlightened and establish yourself in No-Mind.

**

The Heiho Kadensho

Shoe Presenting Bridge

The Death Dealing Sword – one meets an opponent head on, bringing death to his sword.

The Life Giving Sword – one gives life to the opponents sword, leading the opponent to a place where he gives up the sword, hence giving life. An opponent should be subdued without killing him. In some cases, an especially evil swordsman may be killed to save countless others in the future.

(p 44)

The mind is the foundation and the mind is initial. The very first thought is the initial act. It initiates the initiative.

(p 45)

Training in technique is done to transcend training itself, by taking training to the ultimate the swordsman goes beyond the fetters of technique. Swordsmanship can be executed with interference from the mind.

At this point you don't know where your mind is, daemons and heresies will not be able to find it

Fixation is Sickness

(p 46)

To think only of winning is sickness, to think only of martial arts is sickness, to think of making an attack or waiting for one is sickness, to fixate on eliminating sickness is sickness.

Emptiness is a concept that transcends conceptual thinking. With Emptiness a swordsman is able to see the inside and the outside, the active and the pre-active. To be able to judge an opponent's actions before they are manifested. This is achieved through tremendous meditation.

Emptiness is the mind of your opponent, the mind has no form and no color and is a void. Buddhism teaches you that the mind is Emptiness.

(p 49)

Having no conflicts in association with friends from beginning to end is a matter of seeing into the principles of a relationship, this too is a martial art of the mind.

(p 65)

Victory is determined a thousand miles away

(p 68)

Weapons are instruments of ill omen, because the way of heaven brings life. But killing when it cannot be avoided is also the way of Heaven. There is a time when ten thousand will suffer because of the evil of one man. Therefore killing this one brings ten thousand lives. The death-dealing sword may be the life-giving sword for many others.

(p 70)

Armies oppose each other in vast battlefields but a general opposes an army in the few square inches of his mind. He models how he will lead his army into battle.

It is essential to understand the inner workings of a society to prevent chaos, to observe the personal agendas of officials so that they do not throw a society into chaos.

(p 71)

A man who is close to a lord, may plunder far away.

(p 72)

Arranging things in your home is a matter of finding what is right for each place, this is a matter of seeing into the principles of places, not unlike the heart of martial arts. The arena may change but the principles are the same, even in national affairs.

It is missing the point to think that martial arts is about cutting people down, it is about killing evil. The stratagem is about killing one to give life to ten thousand.

What is written here is not to leave this school, but it is not about making secret of the Buddhist way. To keep it secret is the way to make it known. Not making it known would be the same as not writing it down.

Do not read and think “this is the Way”, reading books brings you to the gate of the Way. Reading may make you as knowledgeable as an ancient but it will not help you make the Way your own. It will be difficult to approach the way with out reading but then there are many who have achieved natural harmony without studying at all.

(p 74)

In the Great Learning it says to extend your knowledge to all things, to know people of the world to and understand the principles of all existing things. If you do not understand the principles of things then nothing will come of your actions. If you lack knowledge, you harbor doubts and these doubts will never leave your mind.

Studying is a way of making a clean sweep of your mind. What you don't understand obstructs your mind and everything becomes difficult. When questions are cleared up they become nothing, you will achieve an emptiness and your actions will be in harmony with what you have learned without your being aware of it.

When you have run the length of various practices, those practices will no longer remain in your mind and that lack of mind is at the heart of all things. By then forgetting your training and casting off your mind, you can become more aware of yourself and your environment. You enter through training and arrive at absence.

(p 76-78)

The mind that takes a stance and intently considers is called the will, it is internal but when it manifests itself it is called the Ch'i. Will is the master and Ch'i is the servant, if the Ch'i overruns its bounds it stumbles, the will reins in the ch'i and makes it take its time.

It is essential to remain calm so that the Ch'i is reigned in by the will and the will is not dragged by the Ch'i.

Deception is strategy, from false the truth is arrived at. Deception is such that, even with his knowledge, the opponent is taken in by it. If your opponent it not taken in, the devise another deception. The truth is hidden within the deception and through the deception the opponent is drawn down the path of truth. In Buddhism this is the expedient way, in Shinto it is the mystery. In military terms it is through deception that victory can be obtained without hurting others, by putting things in order by applying the contrary.

Once surprised, your opponent's mind will be taken, his skill undone. Tossing aside your sword is a martial deception, if you have adopted the skill of no-sword, what use is a sword to you? It is your opponent's sword that is your weapon.

Grasping the opportunity is always grasping the moving power from your opponent, this is kizen. Ki refers to Ch'i concentrated in the mind. Observing the opponent's ch'i before it can function is grasping the opportunity. Ki is manifested Ch'i and is hidden within.

Sickness

(p 89-90)

To think of only winning is sickness. To think only of martial arts is sickness, to think only of expelling sickness is sickness. What remains stationary in the mind is sickness, as these sickness manifest in the mind, you must expel them.

Expelling Sickness

Use thought to arrive at No-Thought, use attachment to become un-attached. Thinking of expelling sickness is a thought, the thought of expelling a thought is using a thought, though it is sickness to be consumed by this thought.

If you can expel the sickness of any remaining thoughts with thought you arrive at No-Mind. It is like using wedges to fell a tree, one wedge can be used to release another to be used again, and when the tree is felled, no wedges remain in the tree.

Sickness is expelled by abandoning your mind to it and carrying on in its midst.

(p 91)

What is called sickness is fixation, the monk who as left fixation behind can mingle with dirt of worldly affairs without becoming stained. He is free in whatever he does and abides in no single place. A monk asked an ancient “what is the way?”, the ancient replied “the way is your ordinary mind.” Expelling all sickness from the mind, living in the ordinary mind, abiding midst sickness, that is the state of being without sickness.

When you have made great efforts to attain skill without really noticing, you have put aside thoughts of doing things well and have attained the realm of no-thought / no-mind. You will not be self conscious and your mind will not be occupied with your actions. You will make no mistakes, but if your mind slips, you will miss your aim. If you maintain no-mind you will always hit the mark.

(p 95)

The mind that releases the mind. If the mind is released yet always brought back, it will not be free. The mind that releases the mind is one that is let go and does not stop moving. If you keep a released mind, your movements will always be free. Even pets are better raised unleashed. Confucians become fixated on reverence, placing this concept above all others, and live their lives by it alone and their mind resembles a pet on a leash.

(p 99)

When the hand lies flat, existence is hidden, when the hand is held open, non-existence is manifested. When there is existence, you should see it and strike at it, when there is non-existence you should strike at it, existence and non-existence are not two,

(p 100)

you should strike at the moon in the water

If there is a distance between you and your opponents sword, stealing inside without your opponent knowing is like piercing the reflection of the moon on the water

(p 101)

Shinmyo, Two Chinese Characters (self-actualization)

Shin exists within Myo without. This is Shinmyo the mysterious. Because Shin exists in the trees the leaves turn green and the flowers bloom, they are Myo. Split the tree and look within, you will not be able to see this Shin, yet without it the flowers will not bloom.

Shin is placed at the center of the Mysterious sword, Myo is manifested in the hands and feet, and flowers are made to bloom in the midst of battle.

(p 102)

The middle ground is the balance between going to fast and too slow, going fast is the result of fright, going slow results from being overwhelmed.

(p 103)

Do not lose the ordinary state of mind, if you think “I won't move”, you have already moved. Moving is in itself the principle of not being moved. If a man blinks normally, that is natural, if he stops blinking, his mind has moved.

(p 110)

Returning the mind after striking a blow means you have not left your mind where you have struck. If your mind stops where you have struck, a second blow from you opponent will defeat you.

If you strike your opponent he will rally and become cautious, you will not be able to strike him with the same mind, you must pull back forcibly to yourself and observe your opponent's countenance.

In the ultimate state of mind, the return is so quick there is not the space to slip a single hair between blows to your opponent. You hit, hit and hit again.

This ultimate state of mind is the clarity of victory and defeat. It is the mental state of one expulsion, of emptiness, and the firmly held mind.

One expulsion is ridding the mind of obsessive sicknesses, attachments, the stopping of the mind to a single event. Emptiness allows you to see the mind of your opponent, it has no color, no form, it is a void. The firmly held mind is also empty and cannot be seen, it strikes at the point where the hand has not yet moved.

The wonderful moves of the hands, the steps of the feet are the manifestations of the emptiness of the mind.

(p 115)

The Right Mind is the Original Mind, also called the Mind of the Way. A twisted and strained mind is deluded, it is the human mind. A successful man is in his Original Mind and conforms to it. Movements that don't conform to the Way will not be successful. When you can consciously translate the Way to all the movements of your life you will become accomplished in the Principle of things. Skills can applied to only a single art or ability but it is difficult to become accomplished in the Principle.

It is the very mind itself

That leads the mind astray,

Of that mind, do not be unmindful

The deluded mind is the impetuous mind, it is self-interested. Impetuousness is the flow of the blood which changes your complexion and shows anger.

If something you love is detested by someone else, you grow resentful and angry. If what you detest is detested by another you will enjoin and twist what is wrong and convert it into a deluded version of the Principle of things. If someone gives you money, your face will broaden into a smile and wells with the complexion of an impetuous mind, only bad things can come from this.

(p 119)

The significance of No-Sword is not necessarily taking the sword from an opponent, No-Sword means not being cut by another although you have no sword. If your opponent does not want his sword taken, you should not insist on taking it. When he has this attitude, you should not insist on taking it, when your opponent is thinking only of having his sword taken, he will have difficulty cutting you.

(p 125-126)

Potential is Ch'i, Ch'i is the entrance to the mind. Because of Ch'i, the mind can play outside. Good or evil of the mind is understood only by this potential coming to good or evil after having left the mind. Ch'i guards the entrance to the mind and is called potential.

Good or evil or even supernatural acts depend on thought given before the door is even opened, the potential acts and goes outside and a great function is manifested. You can think of it as Ch'i and not be wrong, the different names depend on location.

The mind follows the ten thousand circumstances and shifts accordingly,

It is the shifting mind that is truly undefined.

“Ten thousand circumstances”, means the moves of your opponents, your mind will shift with each of them.

If your opponent lifts his sword, you mind shifts with the sword, if it moves to the left or right, your mind shifts accordingly. The shifting that is undefined is the core of martial arts. “Undefined” means vague and unseen, the mind is absolutely undetained. If your mind stops you will be defeated in the martial arts, if it remains in the place where it has shifted, the results will be merciless.

(p 128)

Having heard you were the one

who rejected the world,

My thought was only this,

Do not stop your mind

in this temporary stay.

(p 129)

You should toss away the Law,

And so much more the false Law

The law of reality is the true law, even so it should not stop in your mind once you have become enlightened, if you keep it in your mind, it becomes rubbish.

It is sickness if you do not leave the mind of the martial arts behind, use only your ordinary mind.

Confucians do not understand the ordinary mind, they are carried away with “reverence”, it is not the highest principle, only the first rung in the ladder.

(p 132)

In a chaotic society many people are killed for no reason, the death-dealing sword is using to bring chaos under control. Once this is done the same sword can be a life-giving sword.

Emptiness, wind, fire, water and earth.

(p 172)

The Hidden Flower

Knowing the Hidden Flower. If it is hidden, it becomes a flower. If it is not hidden, it will likely not become a flower. Knowing one's self is the essential flower. IN all things, in all Ways, the reason for keeping things secret within the hereditary line is that great performance depends on this secret.

The methods used in the Way of War are an example of this. The schemes, plans, and unexpected methods of a great general will defeat even a strong enemy. This is because the losing side will be confused by rare principles and be destroyed.

(p 178)

The Ordinary Mind is the way, you cannot track it down, as soon as you look for it, it departs. It is not bound to knowing or knowledge, knowing is confusion, not knowing is being blindsided. If you arrive at the Way of no doubt is like a void or a vast vacuity. How can it be confirmed ??

The Way does not use practice. Simply have no blots or stains. If you have the mind of life and death, if you are planning something, your mind is all blots and stains. The everyday mind encounters the Way directly. The everyday mind does not distinguish plus or minus, does not grasp or throw away, finds nothing regular or irregular and sees no holy or secular.

Carl Rogers on Personal Power

1977
Delcorte Press, New York


(Actualizing tendency)
P 7-8
There is in every organism, at whatever level, an underlying flow of movement toward constructive fulfillment of its inherent possibilities. There is a natural tendency toward complete development in man. The term that has most often been used for this is the actualizing tendency, and is present in all living organisms. It is the foundation on which the person-centered approach is built.

The actualizing tendency can be thwarted, but cannot be destroyed with destroying the organism. I remember that in my boyhood the potato bin in which we stored our winter supply of potatoes was in the basement, several feet below a small basement window. The conditions were unfavorable, but the potatoes would begin to sprout--pale while sprouts so unlike the healthy green shoots they sent up when planted in the soil in the spring. But these sad, spindly sprouts would grow two or three feet in length as they reached toward the distant light of the window. They were, in their bizarre futile growth a sort of desperate expression of the directional tendency I have been describing. They would never become a plant, never mature, never fulfill their real potentiality. But under the most adverse circumstances they were striving to become [self??]. Life would not give up even if it could not flourish. In dealing with clients whose lives have been terribly warped, in working with men and women on the back wards of state hospitals, I often think of those potato sprouts. SO unfavorable have been the conditions in which these people heave developed that their lives often seem abnormal, twisted, scarcely human. Yet the directional tendency in them is to be trusted. The clue to understanding their behavior is that they are striving, in the only ways available to them, to move toward growth, toward becoming. To us the results may seem bizarre and futile, but they are life's desperate attempt to become itself. This is the potent tendency, which the underlying basis of client centered therapy and al that has grown out of it.


(Freud and control)
P 16-17
The great majority of people have a strong need for authority which they can admire, to which they can submit and which dominates and sometimes ill-treats them.
A group is extraordinarily credulous and open to influence, it has not critical faculty, and the improbable does not exist for it. It respects force and can only be slightly influenced by kindness, which it regards merely as a form of weakness. Anyone who wishes to produces an effect upon it needs no logical adjustment... he must exaggerate and he must repeat the same thing over and over again.
It wants to be oppressed and to fear its masters... groups have never thirsted for the truth... a group is an obedient herd which could never live without a master... it submits instinctively to any one who appoints himself as its master.

Freud-- the human is at its deepest level untrustworthy, sick people have an innately destructive core.

(Skinner / Walden II)
P 18-20
For the good of the person, an elitist technocracy of behaviorists sets the goals that will make the person happy and productive. Secretly, through operant conditioning, the community achieves these goals, because, after all, behavior is completely determined by the environment and this might better be planned so as to make everyone happy socialized and moral. Who sets the environment is always deftly avoided.

(Twin Oaks-- Skinner commune)
Residents choose for themselves which behaviors they wish to change, and select the rewards, which will be most reinforcing (a playboy model??). This completely opposes the politics of Skinner since is it self initiated and self evaluated.

(Ideal therapist)
Six in-depth interviews with well-known therapists were recorded and rated by eighty therapists from twelve different therapeutic orientations. Variables such as "therapist directed" or "systematically reinforcing" were linked to controlling behaviorists whereas "warm and giving" and "equalitarian" and "empathic" indicated therapists who would give control to the client.

The eighty therapists uses these kinds of variables to give their picture of an ideal therapist there was substantial agreement that the outstanding characteristics where non-controlling and there was a desire to treat the client as an autonomous person. Of the six studied therapists, only two where client centered, the remainder used controlling techniques.

(Self actualizing behavior)
P 99

• Engages in personal fantasy, daydreams, and fictional speculations
• Expresses hostile feelings directly (Is this safe ?? Would it not start fights w/ non-centered people)
• Enjoys sensuous experiences; touch, taste, smell, physical contact
• Thinks and associates to ideas in unusual ways, has unconventional thought processes
• Is concerned with philosophical problems, religion, values, meaning of life
• Has insight into own motive s and behavior
• I skilled in social techniques of imaginative play, pretending and humor
• Values own independence and autonomy

** In other words, a kid

(Management)
The self actualizing person is warmer and more original, open, expressive, with broad interests. The stereotypical manager holds back all feelings (in preparation of firing employs for any or all reasons)

The ideal leader is dependable, productive, serious, candid, someone you can lean on but not a dreamer nor an entirely autonomous person.

On the surface, the self actualizing person would not be a good leader or manager. According to GW Cherry there are clusters of traits associated with the capacity for close relationships such as compassion and considerateness that correlate with productivity, creativity, cooperativeness, and job satisfaction. On the other hand, a cluster of traits associated with corporate behavior such as power hunger, aggressiveness, a willingness to exploit, deceive and manipulate to reach personal goals is not in anyway related to productivity and is more closely related to frustration, poor social conditions, and very likely to dangerous health conditions.

(Perfect factory)
According to Rogers, friend of his, a social consultant for a major factory operator, was allowed to apply the humanistic approach to a series of plants while holding other plants in the stat quo as control groups. The emphasis was on building two-way communication in all directions and the fair delegation of the responsibilities of making decisions. In a word, productivity tripled. The managerial staff was reduced to twenty percent. It is not surprising that cooperation among the staff would produce such increases in output and likewise reduce the need for straw bosses, but it works against the basic concepts associated with the management of the wage slave and how productivity is encouraged, usually, in the slave-wage with the negative reinforcement of the fear of homelessness.


Unfortunately, the level of success was so great that the consultant only reported this to Rogers with the agreement that no details be revealed.

(Helping the oppressed)
P 113
To help facilitate meetings of folks under the gun:

• Facilitative attitudes (and skills) can help a therapist gain entry into the group
• Freedom from a desire to control the outcome, and respect for the capacity of the group, and skills in releasing individual expression
• Openness to all attitudes no matter how extreme or unrealistic they may seem
• Acceptance of the problems experienced by the group where they are clearly defined as issues
• Allowance of the freedom of choices in direction, either for the group or individuals particularly in the near future

This openness and flexibility will produce:

• An outpouring of long suppressed feelings, in particular negative, hostile and bitter expressions
• An acceptance and understanding of attitudes as more and more members feel free to express a range of experiences
• Recognition for individuals' uniqueness and strength, mutual trust will develop
• A defusing of irrational feelings as they are fully expressed and as the group the experimental knowledge of the members overlaps through welcome feedback
• Feelings based on common experiences by group members will clarify issues and strengthen resolve
• Growth in the self confidence of the members and confidence in the unity of the group
• More realistic consideration of the issues with less irrationality
• Greater mutual trust and fewer ego trips, as in the completion for leadership
• Motion towards innovative, responsible and revolutionary steps
• Dispersion of leadership in the group as individual members realize what specific leaderships skills they have
• Constructive and actionable steps, where there is significant progress in changing the situation
• Enough mutual support within the group to assure members that the group will support them even when taking steps that might be perilous.

(Global peace strategy)
P 116
Finlay and Hovet-- To deal constructively with world problems, a global strategy is necessary. Such a strategy must attempt the seemingly impossible: to establish a sense of common cause amongst the vastly disparate and competing nations f the world. It requires that nations move beyond self-interest defined in terms of power and concentrate on common interests defined in terms of realizing man’s fullest potentialities.

(Gestation of social evolution -- slow)
P 117
In major social change there is a long quite period of gestation, experimentation and model building before anything happens. Information is gathered solutions are discovered and often unsuccessful attempts are made to promulgate these solutions. Meanwhile the average citizen is becoming frustrated by superficial attempts at correction. Then the public may discover that the solutions are available already on a small scale.

Since most social problems are highly complex no miracle will appear, but the public can develop the ~will~ to put positive solutions into action and put the enormous efforts needed into motion.

Technological problems are complex too, especially when involved with the information society where many unforeseen difficulties have arisen.

The telephone, radio, and car all went through slow gestation before the public was able to realize their value and demand their development.

Effective birth control was described along with the discovery of the process of human reproductively, and in the early 1900s it was made available in an organized format yet it was not until the 1960s that it started to impact the problems of overpopulation. Its final popular acceptance came from the persistent efforts of a small number of dedicated and expert activists.

Pollution has been a problem as long as there have been mines and smoke stacks, yet strict controls only came in the 1960s with the deaths of huge lakes and the asphyxiation of major cities.

(Power struggles, within and without)
P 119
Just as it seems too late, society grasps the seriousness of the problems and begins to gain momentum. Sometimes changes occur with tragic slowness, sometimes with surprising speed.

Political policies are destructive, yet the person centered approach provides an alternative by making the public truly aware in a way that relates the effects of society on each individual. By becoming more aware, people may start to look for alternatives, partially based on the experiences of the past and also based on the openness for new and imaginative solutions.

(Each has two, one inside, one out-- schism)
** I thought so !!!
Internal conflict is the most basic of all struggles. One of the commonest problems in therapy is provided by the individual who feels at war within himself yet is well accepted as a person by society. Able to make a living, and have a degree of recognition in the community, there yet exists internal fear. Feelings for worthlessness, bad impulses, and evil intentions create an irreconcilable discrepancy between what I am perceived as and how I perceive myself. If people could see me as I do, they would reject me.

Rogers learned to accept these flatly contradictory feelings, the contradictory internal and external parts could each be accepted and live comfortable in one person, that they are not fundamentally incompatible. It is not true that one part is bad and one is good, one right and one wrong. One can work openly for approval of others and strive for recognition, yet one can also resist being controlled and do as one wishes and not simply do what is expected by management or others. Elements within the emotional range, which seem incompatible, even out of touch with each other, can live comfortably within the person.

(Bridging individuals)
Human beings trying to cope with life have vast pools of common experiences to draw on, if we are all open sharing these commonalities, then race or gender or other separators make no difference. There is a large area in which understanding is possible. Even people on opposite sides of conflict can find pathways to constructive resolution if they can tap the pool of common experiences. They can resolve the issues of economics, ideology, civil justice, and revolutionary violence.

P 137
International groups are very similar to encounter groups. As soon as the person is discovered the national and racial difference become unimportant. When people start to openly communicate, they talk of family, honesty, showing emotions, changing circumstances, improving attitudes and developing self confidence. Who is to say which idea would come from which person, there is no way to differentiate these expressive ideas based on culture or race. These are human concepts.

(Case of sexual abuse by a youth-- schism)
P 247
A teenage boy brought up in strictly religious home, where parental acceptance meant that sexual thoughts, impulses and behaviors had to be viewed as evil was caught one night in the home of a next-door neighbor, trying to tear the night dress off a sleeping girl. He said, with firm belief, that he had not done this act, it was not his behavior. His natural impulses and curiosities had been so thoroughly denied that he was unaware of their existence, yet they existed and they went on to satisfy natural needs, but outside of the scope of his awareness. His conscious mind could honestly say, as a result of parental conditioning, that he had not done these evil things.

Introjected beliefs or constructs can be so rigid because they pushed in from the outside. They are not part of the normal process of the evaluation of experience and growth in a fluid, dynamic way. A child can reject his own growth process when it is superceded by an introjected construct, cutting him off from his natural internal self, creating a schism that can cause problems. If the disassociation between internal growth, now driven into the subconscious, and the world of rigid constructs becomes too great, very tragic results may occur.

Individuals are culturally conditioned, rewarded or punished, reinforced for behaviors that are misdirections or terminations of self actualization which can be perverted into horrific directions.
** Rape by homosexual priests

(Constriction today)
P 225
Constitution and Bill of Rights are both decidedly person-centered in their values. They values are increasingly questioned by a disbelief, however cynical, that political democracy is workable in our society. It seems hopeless that the diffusion of power could be accepted. There is evidence that the Bill of Rights, if written today, would be rejected by popular vote. Concepts or rights and responsibilities are no longer precious.
** Rights cannot be added to, yet they cannot be removed either, rights are often perverted to actually increase control -- religious freedom was often an escape from reformation, social contributions by individuals can be co-opted by some control faction to create veils of "political correctness" and even democracy can be the vehicle of repression if the population can be controlled enough, usually with some artificial perception of freedom carefully constructed to repressive damage, or, in corporate cases, monopolistic market controls. Property rights developed in the early history of the US were used to justify the ownership of slaves, ignoring rights of the slaves.

(Religion)
P 257
Churches are lacking in any significant societal influence, they are opposed to the person centered approach and they are completely hierarchical with strict rules laid out for the faithful in an leader/follower (sheeples) relationship where the leader is prized only for charismatic qualities over the skills needed to advance society. To the extent that it exerts any influence, it is in support of authority rather than democracy.


(Inner space)
P 272
The emerging person, the quiet revolutionary, clearly desires to explore the vastness of inner space. They are more willing to be aware of self, of inner feelings, and inhibitions. Internal communication between the various aspects of self is accepted now, easing the possibilities of communication across cultural lines. Barriers of repression, which cut off internal communication as much as societal openness can be kept at a distance and the people of today can potentially be much more aware than previous generations. This describes the emerging persons of the quiet revolution.
** As with all gestation, psychic growth took many odd and experimental turns, but the basic concepts of openness have empowered the information society beyond any expectations.

Einstein-- the supreme task is to arrive at those universal laws from which the cosmos can be built up by pure deduction. There is no logical path to these laws, only intuition, resting on sympathetic understanding of the experience can reach them.

** Meditation can derive truths by allowing consideration and comparison between concepts and possibilities in an open and flowing consciousness. As free comparison strengthens concepts with the overlapping evidences of experiences a model is internally built within the mind and, until now, only in the mind. Linux can change that with the LinuxBIOS as a tool to effectively and cheaply create the necessary computational power to actually make all these experiential comparison based on vast and fluid data.

This experimentation has an almost Elizabethan quality, everything is possible and anything can be tried
** The openness of this emergence is then hardly a new concept

Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford

1934
Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York, NY

Comments on the author:
Mumford coined the term "technic" to define development of technology as it has grown with society and changed humanity. With in that term he defines three periods; eotechnic, paleotechic, and neotechnic. He credits another for these well defined periods in human growth, yet he shows a social and technical cycle that occurs with clockwork precision which most recently occurred in the year 2000 with globally disastrous results. This book was written in 1930 just as the airplane and radio communications began to define what is now called the "information communication technology." He paints a very not-pretty picture of exploitation by controllers and owners, something I experienced in more than a decade in the financial services industry. He supports Marxian economics as a viable approach, and Marx certainly describes economic problems very accurately.

Missing from his range of knowledge is the concept of cooperation only now possible with the growth of neotechnic phase into the truly democratic "Information Society" of the Internet. This new market concept is called e-mutual ism, sometimes known as "open source", and the single most powerful free market organization, Microsoft, credits it as its greatest threat.

He defines the social foundation of our technological world so accurately it is a wonder that his concepts are not household words. Even within e-mutual ism, which I coin the "opentechnic", he offers clues to the forces at work within its micro-society. According to Milton, he was a close ally of my sociological and therapeutic influences, Maslow and Rogers despite his technological slant.

He was an urban planner by trade and knowledgeable about art, especially photography. In photography he found harmony between human creativity and the machine. While the camera is technically speaking an ICT, or information communications technology, and the motion camera by Carl Rogers was important in linking humanistics with the Information Society, the focus of the Information Society continues to be scientific study and communication, especially with the technology of the Internet.

When reading Mumford's Tenics and Civilization, it may be helpful to simply substitue the phrase _the machine_ with the term technology. However, he often uses the phrase to include the systematic side of society meaning an _economic machine_ similar, possibly to a _political machine._ He also often refers to the _economic man_, possibly as the operator of _the machine._

(Will to Order)
P 3
The machine had been developing steadily for the past seven hundred years [in Western Civilization] before the industrial revolution. Men had become mechanical before they perfected complicated machines the will to order had appeared in the monetary, the army and in the counting house.

(Birth of Science)
P 39
No one can put his finger on the place where magic became science, where alchemy became chemistry, where astrology became astronomy

P 40
Alchemy creates the tools of science, the herbalist becomes the botanist; magic was the bridge that united fantasy with technology.

(Beginnings of Factory Control)
P 42
compulsively drawing society into a regimented mold, was the methodical routine of the drillmaster and the book-keeper, the soldier and the bureaucrat [who] gained full ascendancy in the seventeenth century.

(Work Ethics of the Bourgeoisie)
The new bourgeoisie, in the counting house and the shop, reduced life to a careful, uninterrupted, routine ... Waste of time became one of the most heinous sins ... mere sociability, or even sleep, was reprehensible.

P 50
Isolation and abstraction, while important to research, are conditions under which organisms die the rejection of experience in its original whole had a grave result the belief in the dead. [science required organisms to be dead for dissection] they substituted the dissected corpse for the living body, dismantled individuals for men in groups to
achieve a limited mastery at the expense of the truth

P 82
The call of the hunter for weapons was to increase the food supply he is the beast of prey, and the needs of his appetite as well as the excitement of the chase cause him to inhibit every other reaction-pity or esthetic pleasure in the act of killing. The herdsman domesticates animals and in turn is domesticated by them the lessons of the crop and herd are in cooperation, solidarity and the nurture of life. The hunter can have no respect for life as such. He has none of the responsibilities [of] the farmer. Trained in the use of the weapon, killing is his main business. Shaken by insecurity and fear, the
hunter attacks not merely the game but other hunters. The predatory mode of life not die out with the success of agriculture it tended to direct their animus against other groups.

Unarmed hands and feet are relatively innocent, their range is limited; their effectiveness is low. It is with the regimentation of the army that conflicts have reached heights of beastiality and terrorism

P 83
Robbery is perhaps the oldest of labor saving devices, to obtain women without processing charm, to achieve power without processing intelligence, to enjoy the rewards of labor without lifting a finger in work or with out a single useful skill. As civilization advances, the hunter turns himself to systematic conquest: he seeks slaves, loot, power, and he founds the political state.

P 105
The machine had come into our civilization, not to save man from servitude, but to make possible mass servitude to the immoral standards of consumption that had grown up among the military atrocities.

(Eotechnic)
P 109
Three phases: eotechnic, paleotechnic, neotechnic
Eotechnic, dawn age of modern technics. 1000 to 1750, climax with Leonardo.
Paleotechnic: Coal and iron, mining and factories, the world of Oliver Twist
Neotechnic: A joining of concepts such as the designs of Leonardo with the age of today by the benefits of the machine with social advancement.

**Many nations skipped the suffering of the paleotechnic age to join the eotechnic with the neotechnic. Holland and Switzerland are examples.

(Glass)
Glass typical neotechnic advance, allowing light in, modifying it with color, creating
glasses to see better, telescopes and microscopes. The mirror allows introspection, the
better the technology of the glass the better one can see things as they really are.

(Oceans)
Clipper ships, ready to wear sailors clothes, ship biscuit factories


(Eotechnic Organization)
P 132
Guild monopolies, cave way to the bestowed monopolies of chartered companies and
then to the owners of patents for specific inventions.

Invention was a way of escaping from ones own class, amateurs can make decisive
changes. Inventions broke the caste lines of industry and they were to threaten the caste
lines of society itself.

P 133
The experimental method was the most important innovation.

P134
Clock first instrument of precision, pattern of accuracy for all other instruments.
Clockmakers, blacksmiths and locksmiths were the first machinists.

Its perfection delineates the eotechnic phase, to this day it is a symbol of fine automatism.

The printing press is vital to the Information Society. Block printing came from the
Middle East, and paper from Asia. The Germans create moveable type with Gutenberg
and perhaps a more primitive mode was used by Coster in Haarlem.

It saturated society in fifty years despite attempts at secrecy and monopoly and it was
encouraged by government which freed from taxes and guild regulations. Print became
the means of communication and discussion.

(Laboratory)
P 138
Invention of the laboratory combines the monks cell, the study, the library and the
workshop.

(Factory)
P 139
Creation of the factory simplifies the collection of materials and the distribution of
product. Concentrated skills by dividing the processes of production and provided a
common meeting place for workers allowing them to overcome the isolation and
helplessness of the cottage based handicraft worker when the guilds had become
dilapidated.

Factory had two roles, it gave a vehicle for capitalistic investment in the form of the joint
stock company giving the powers that be a significant weapon; it also created a meeting
place for the worker and gave him the opportunity to participate in efficient production
and presumably benefit in this highly profitable system.

(Eotechnic Decline)
Energy Shortages: As society becomes more coordinated on the basis of time, delays and
stoppages caused by variations in nature especially with respect to wind and water mills,
were very costly.

Lost Social Controls-Guilds: New industries were outside the controls of the old order.
Glass making was near the fuel supply, wood, which was in the forests, beyond the reach
of guild regulators was semi-capitalistic. Mining and iron-making defined capitalistic
structure by being capital intensive, printing escaped guild regulation legally, and other
industries escaped out to the country. Industry escaped the regulations of the guilds and
the state itself such as the statue of app
rentices allowing capital industry to grow with out
social controls. Mechanical improvements flourished with out improvements for the
worker that had been introduced by the craft guilds. These social voids allowed a
widening gap between the owners and workers, masters and men.

The progressive character moved to more naked forms of human exploitation.

(Manufacturing)
P 145-146
Manufacturing, organized and partitioned handwork carried in large establishments with or
without power-machines, breaks down the process of production into a series of
specialized operations. Dividing the operations is a form of analysis of the working
process; the series of human motions can be translated into mechanical operations.
Rebuilding the entire process into a machine is now possible.

The machine becomes humanized by developing the mechanical equivalents of human
actions. Humanizing the machines is the dehumanization of humans. The works tasks of
craftsmanship cannot be compared to it. The human is, in effect, divided up by assigning
repetitive motions to a specific part of the body in an unnatural and hazardous way. All
the beauty of being human is left behind, manufacture forces the worker to become
specialized at the cost of a productive world of impulses and facilities. (Marx)


P 148
Energy surpluses create renascence, in Holland where the dikes and windmills had
created greater and more reliable energy, and canals new cities aided social
communication, vast fields of tulips where a hungrier nation would have had to grow
food.

Fine textiles from other countries replaced course linens, water systems created a clean
environment by bringing natures streams into the cities. Cooking comes into its own as
an art form as copper pots and pans replaced rough iron pots. Fine glassware allows the
wine taster to appreciate color as much as taste. Block printing brings art into every
house, even second-rate common prints had the content of great works.

(Paleotechnic industry)
P 153
With the breakdown of European society there was a shift from life values to pecuniary
values. Work was no longer a means for enrichment and necessary for a livelihood, but
became a means unto itself. Industry moves out of the cities to the country to avoid the
influence of culture and to be able concentrate on its capital intensive purposes. People
caught in the shift from crafts and farms drifted towards work in mining or
manufacturing. Vast areas become bleak with the after effects of high energy production
supplied by coal. Progress having removed any cultural memories and social meaning
allowed for only one activity, steady toil. Any popular traditions were erased, one lived
and died within sight of the coal pit or factory. Competition with mechanization drives
wages further down, and if wages could not support normal families, paupers could be
pressed into service.



(Iron and Coal)
P 156
The invention of the blast furnace where coal instead of charcoal is used to create iron.

(Energy for free)
P 157
The heritage of past ages in the Earths history provide energy in huge amounts. Instead
of intense investment in drawing active energy from nature such as in windmills or dams,
potential energy stored in the distant past could be released in a reliable stream allowing
much closer coordination of factory processes by owners.

Coal allows the creation of more iron, iron becomes the steam engine, increasing the
demand for coal. Trains as a combination of locomotives and trains of cars begin in the
mines and are adapted to passenger and cargo transport a generation later. Iron rails give
eventually them unlimited life and the steam engine is applied to the waters, though
sailing ships, an eotechnic invention, survive almost to the modern age.

Coal and iron benefit capitalized industry so much that it creates a fever of exploitation
where coal and iron are the pivots of all of society.

Energy and material mining is a robber industry, the mine owner is constantly
consuming the resource and the end result is a befouled pit and an abandoned town. No
pit lasts forever and the land was never returned to its original uses.

(Blood and Iron)
P 163
Iron and coal dominate the paleotechnic period. Their color, black, dominated the era,
coaches were black, top hats were black. The landscape of the period was covered with
soot and cinders and the center of English industry was called the Black Country.
Pittsburgh in the United States, similarly had a black cast over it during this period.

**Some nations such as Holland and Swizterland barely experienced this era. They
advanced from the developmental

P 164
Military demand created cheaper more efficient iron production facilities and techniques.
The Bessemer process of de-carbonizing cast iron to create steel made it feasible to create
bigger weapons, cheaper transport systems such as the rail and its engines, and cheap iron
enabled nations to build vast fleets of warships.

From the middle of the 1800s onward, the paleotechnic regime specialized in a newly
defined extrema of war. Mass weapon builders successfully created paranoia and
competition between nations, with the loyal support of their stock holders. They wrecked
peace conferences as part of a century long strategy consisting of thousands moves to
create demand for their lethal products.

P 167
There was crudeness in the production and use of iron. It rusts when exposed and melts
under heat but it is the second most available material on Earth and the energy need to
produce it was cheap. The engineering was weak and much of the paleotechnic structure
was purely dead weight. As early as the American Revolution, Ben Franklin suggested
re-burning coal smoke to garner more energy and to eliminate pollution. He was, of
course, ignored. Coal was burned only once and chimneys were erected so the wind
could carry the unburnt waste somewhere else. While small individual mills could trust
nature to absorb their atmospheric sewage, conglomeration of twenty or so instantly
destroyed the local environments.

P 172
This age defines the ultimate degradation of the worker. Humans were treated just as the
environment, a means for cheap production. The poor propagated like flies, matured at
twelve years, promptly served in mills or mines and died inexpensively.

P 173
castration of skill, discipline of starvation and the closing of alternatives by means of
land monopoly and dis-education.

With landowning, education and travel options cut off, the worker becomes part of the
machine.

starvation, ignorance and fear

(Factory Regimentation)
P 174

Richard Arkwright creates the code of factory discipline. He ends the happy-go-lucky
habits of the craftsmans' traditions, the prerogative of stopping when he pleased,
eliminating any threat to the clockwork of production.

As the machine grows, the worker becomes an attendant to the machine, fixing its
failures. Children are just as useful now, providing behavioral control is harsh enough,
and vastly cheaper. Increased automation is the answer to the factory discipline and
striking workers actually increased the need for more automation as often as any other
need.

P 175
In 1770 the House of Terror had been proposed to put paupers to work, effectively a
prison for fourteen hours a day the workers were controlled by starvation. This became
the model for the paleotechic factory.

Industrial disease increases with the increases in the speed of production, from
contamination to accident.

The sudden increase in population creates labor as a new natural resource. The industrial
owners feigned moral indignation at the introduction of contraceptives, philanthropists
and health specialists were a threat to an important resource. The breakdown of
humanity through handicap and stupefication didn't necessarily harm industry, the
factory only uses a portion of the human, the rest isnt necessary to production.

The owners drove themselves as hard as the workers, the gospel of work applied to
themselves as much as the wage-slaves. Will to power drove them as much as the fear of
starvation drove the workers.

(Wealthy Repent)
P 177
Economic Man: Penny in the slot automation ... bare rationalism. Sacrifice everything in the "untrammeled pursuit of power and money"

With more money can can be used and more power that can be exercised, they repent. Nobel, explosives to peace, Carnegie, Rockefeller.

Privately become victims of art dealers, mistresses, tailors.

(Starvation of Life)
P 178-180
Homes of workers so far away from nature, that it would be alien to them. Adulterants become commonplace. Flour and plaster, pepper and wood, bacon preserved with boric acid, milk with embalming fluid. Medicines were bottled from bilge water. As the palette dissapears, hard liquor and tobacco further befuddles the senses and becomes the "quickest way out of Manchester." Rather than "religion being the opiate of the poor, opiates become the religion of the poor."

poor begin to imitate the clumsily "the graceful boredom of the idle and the leisured"

Sex, above all, was starved and degraded in this environment. IN the mines and factories, indiscriminate sexual intercourse of the most brutish kind was the only relief from the tedium and the drudgery of the day: in some English mines, the women pulling the carts worked completely naked -- dirty wild and degraded as only the worst slaves of antiquity had been ... girls and boys [where thrown] into the same sleeping quarters ... power [was given] to the overseers of the children which they frequently abused: sadisms and perversions of every kind were common ... home life was crowded out of existence [while] moralists looked upon [the nude] as a lewd distraction that would take the mind of work and undermine the systematic inhibitions of the machine industry.

Clothes eliminate the legs, arms, sexual organs, they even misshape the human figure.

P 185
The laborer sells himself to the highest bidder. The market has no other standard than buying cheap and selling high. Even law and medicine are undermined. The mines that used Watt's steam engine refused to pay him the royalties they owed. Shuttle clubs were formed to by [textile] manufacturers to assist members sued by Kay for royalties on his invention.

P 203
Visual world of the renascence has been obliterated. Art declines but music grows in the concert halls. France alone does not succumb to decay or progress, where painters like Delacroix and Renior survive. Despites its distance from the centers of music, Coketown's residents at least had a glimpse to the nourishment of music over its spoiled and adulterated foods, shoddy clothes and jerrybuilt houses.

(Neotechnics)
Links the renascence to the world of modern living. Visions of Leonardo are now turned into engineering drawings. Society now does what could only have been done by solitary individuals. Neotechnic phase failed to transform the iron and coal complex.

Transformed by many inventions either creating or making use of power, especially electricity.

P 225
Size of production is controlled by the operation itself. A small unit can compete with a big unit, it is the process not management that determines efficiency and therefore profitability.

P 231
Aluminum sets lightness standards, develops airplane and electrical transmission. Most abundant material on earth, requires huge electricity to produce. Efficiency of the water turbine (92%) provides that.

P 235
Petroleum evolves from snake oil to distillates -- transportable energy.

P 241
Instantaneous communication over long distances, radio TV links leaders and groups, creates political unity, risk greater than benefits. Secondary personal contact with voice and image may increase mass regimentation.
** one way communication, challenged by the matrix of the Internet

(Contraception)
P 260

Fallopious, discoverer of the fallopian tubes, describes both male and female contraceptives. Until the 19th century, contraception remained the property of the upper classes, and its practical use had to wait for discoveries in the processing of rubber. The first great decline in the English birthrate took place between 1870-1880 when the gas engine, the generator, the telephone and the light bulb became practical. Neotechnology provided an answer to the irresponsible birthing of humans. It also allowed sexual relations to be an art or recreation available to all including the poor despite repression by industrial owners.

Contraception stabalized family relationships by removing possibly tragic results until a more mature decisions could be made by potential parents. It restored sex to a more central role in the human personality allowing the personal relationship to have influences on society.

An economic equilibrium as has been established where the size of the population can tune itself to the rescources locally available. Planning on the mass scale becomes possible and waste and suffering can be elminiated. Unfortunately, it has come too late and now, in the 21st Century, is still being discouraged by those who benefit from a high human birth rate who have been able to define morality to this end.

(Speeding Machine)
P 283
**This provides clues to the yet-unexplained disaster of the technical bubble of Y2K
Machine was an attempt to substitute quantity for value in life. Because social evaluation is absent in the development of the machine, it raced like an engine without a governor, overheating and wearing out without any benefit to society.

Those who might object to this wasteful pattern lack the knowledge to make their points and publicize them. The problem of the equal distribution of products is supposedly offset by creating a wasteful abundace of them. The process is justified solely in terms of production and profits. Purchasing power, however, fails to keep up with produciton and the machine suddenly goes into a meltdown, sucking down the economy in its downdraft.

The machine is both an instrument of liberation and one of repression. While creating apparent order it has caused global chaos. An this has not gone unnoticed, humanity will object and attempt to slow the uncontrolled process.


P 284-285
The most direct resistance to the machine is to smash it and kill its inventor, but the power of the industrialist and the military makes this an uneven battle. Soldiers with machines protect the machines. Only in the attitudes of those who work the machines can the machine be influenced to where the machine is working for the worker rather than vice-versa.

Utilitarian: The spreading of the ideals of manufacturing, money, power, comfort, technology and science through free trade with other societies. With some filtering down of the benefits from the owners to the "under privaledged" classes done prudently enough to keep them in a state of respectful submission.

P 286
The sentiments that clustered around an old house may sand in the way of opening mine that ran underneath it, the affection between master and servent under the old order might stand in the way of self-interest which could impact the dismissal of the worker. However the belief that honor and affection might be more important that cash in adding value to life prevents a clean victory for capitalism and the ideals of industry. Not just modern activists, but old school aristocrats balk at the concepts of the the purely financial model. Ancient thought is still alive and rebels against the uncontrolled machine.

(Sport)
P 303
Unlike play, mass-sport requires an element of mortal chance or hazard. Instead of chances occuring spontaneously, as in mountain climbing, it must take plcae in accordance with the rules. Play is found in every human society and among most higher species, but sport in the sense of the mass spectacle, with death to add to the excitment, comes when a population has been drilled and regimented and depressed to the point of needing vicarious participation in feats of strength or skill. The demand for sadistic expoits and for blood is characteristic of s civilizations that are losing their grip: Rome under the Caesers, Germany under the Nazis. These are signs of impotence and a death wish.

P 306-309
Sport which was originally a drama becomes an exhibition. Instead of fair play, the rule is now "success at any price."

Sport in this mechanized society is no longer a game but a profitable business where the maintainence of the sport is as important as any other profit making mechanism.

Thus sport which began as a sponteaneous reaction against the machine, has beomce one of the mass-duties of the machine age. It is aprt of the univerissal reginmentation of life, for the sake fo private profits or nationalistic exploit.

Sport has turned out to be one of the least effective reactions against the machine, the other less effective in its reaction to the machine, more ambitious and ultimately disasterous, war.

(The Cult of Death)
Conflict is a component of human societies and war is a specialized institutional drama of conflict where the aim is not to resolve differences but to annihilate the defenders of opposing views or at least reduce them to submission. Whereas conflict is the inevitable in any active system of cooperation to be welcomed for the diversity it introduces, war is a speicalized perversion of conflict descentant of predatory hunting groups which is no more necessary to society than cannibalism or infanticide.

Ranging from the ritualistic warfare of primitive societies to systematic combats between entire nations, it now occupies the majority of time an resources of "advanced" and "peaceful" industrial nations. Our food gathering ancestors were more peaceful before the invention of the hunting weapon than the civilized peopels of today.

It indicates a throwback to the infantile psycal pattern on the part of people who can no longer stand the exacting strain of the life in groups with all the necessities for compromise, give and take, live and let live, understanding and sympathy that life demands, and with all the complexities of adjustment involved. They seek by the knife and the gun to unravel the social knot. They are collective competitions where the the battlefield takes the place of the market.

War is the supreme drama of a compltetely mechanized society; what puts it above all the predetory forms of mass sport is that it is real. In sport it does not really matter who is victorious, except to the gambler. In war, there is no doubt to the realness of it. Success may bring the reward of death just as surely as failure and it may come to the remotest spectator as likely as the gladiators in the vast arena of global war.

It brings about a release from the sordid routine of profit making and self-seeking that govern the business enterprise. It has the significance of high drama.

The death or maiming of the body gives the drama the element of sacrifice. The effort is sanctified and intensified by the scale of the holocaust.

For peoples who have lost the values of culture and can no longer respond to the symbols culture, the abandonment of the whole process of life and reversion to non-rational dogmas is abetted by war. If no enemy exists, than one is created to further this de-evolution.

War breaks the tedium of a mechanized society and relieves it from daily efforts. War sanctions the utmost exhibition of the primitive at the same time deifies the mechanical; the raw primitive and the clockwork mechanical become one.

War is the most disasterous outlet for the repressed impolses of society that has been devised, with the dead, crippled, insane people, devestated regions, moral corruption and anti-social hatred and gangsterism. The difference between the ritualized battle of the primitive tribes and the armies who face each other with weapons of mass destruction is the difference between the ritual of dance and and the routine of the slaughterhouse.

War, like a neurosis, is the destructive solution of an unbearable tesnsion and conflict between organic impolses adnt the code and circumstances that keoop one from staisfying them.

The destructive union of the machine and the savage primitive is the alterantive to the humanized culture capable of directing the machine to enhance life. If our life were an organic whole this perversion would not be possible. The primitive impulses which we have repressed by excessive preoccupations with the machine would find natural outlets in appropriate cultural forms.

Until we are able to acheive an open culture, war will remain the constant shadow of the machine. Wars between armies, gangs, classes all driven by the drill of regimentation and propaganda of war. Society that has lost its life's values will make a religion of death which satisfies the paranooiacs and sadists that a disrupted society produces.

We cannot give up the hope that it will be possible to unite technics and art in a higher rhythimical unity. We must see, feel, touch, sing, dance, and communicate before we can extract from the machine any further sustenance for life. If we are empty to begin with, the machine will only leave us emptier.

The Information Society by Christoper May

2002
Polity Press, Malden, Massachusetts


(Consequences of ICTs)
P 26
Digital divide, data theft, loss of privacy, increase of surveillance,

(Luddites)
P 27
Luddites were correct in their immediate analysis of the impacts of technology despite the long term-benefits of advances in the textile industry.
** What were the immediate impacts ?? What did the Luddites do ?? How was the textile industry important to the Information Age ??

(Authoritarian and Democratic Technics)
P 28-29
Mumford: Father of the study of the history of technology Technological Determinism: Danger of allowing society to be controlled by technology rather than democratically shaping its path.

Technics: Crossover between technology and society. Authority uses technology to centralize power but technologies can empower resistance against authoritarian power; Democratic Technics.

Authoritarian Technics
First Wave, Egypt, Rome
Starts with pyramid builders in Egypt, collecting labor, they utilized communication, writing, math to collect and control labor as well as engineering the structures. Could only support technology in urban areas, since control was dependant on fragile communication. Failed communication collapses empires and authority ceases. Barbarians
initiated Democratic Technics by allowing localized societies free from centralized authority, service and tribute. Evolved through the dark ages to the nation/state, a more resilient social structure.

Enlightenment and scientific revolution promise democratic societies but fail when authority implements the tools (weapons) of technology to re-centralize power, industry and the military.

No longer sovereign location of power, the control systems self-actualize authority. Power is no longer locatable and attempts at democratic change are diffused for lack of focus while the system generally provides the majority an
abundance of material goods further diffusing a need for social growth. If the needs and wants of the population are failed by the supply system, the population challenges the systems.

Self-discovery, changing process of the individual (self actualization, healing) undermines authority when the systems fail or fail to satisfy more human needs. Supply by the system is a bribe that undermines individual growth and social
change.
**Authority only fails when it fails to supply the needs and luxuries of the population?

Democratic is localized, it has low organizational needs
Authoritarian: centralized which allows ambivilance to local needs, and it has the overhead of distant between organizational nodes

Democratic productivity fulfills needs, allowing the luxury of leisure time for creativity,
Authoritarian productivity defines work for work's sake (work: factory rather than community ethic?)

When technology is beneficial, it incorporates all the person, not just (some of) the muscles. Effect of technology is simply in how it is applied, it has no character itself. (Luddites were wrong)

Passivity in the face of technology is pointless since the Authoritarian Technic self-actualizes.

The piracy of MP3s represent a reassertion of the Democratic Technic, is sharing the crime of stealing??

(Capitalism)
P 38
For capitalism to exist, there must be capital and capitalists. Capitalism consists of finance, the means of production, land and the relationship between property holders and laborers.

**Added to these properties is intellectual property, only suddenly a big issue with respect to the information society. New patenting laws create a system patent lawyers of 50 years ago would not have recognized.

Stephen Marglin: division of labor results from a need to hide appropriated surplus by claiming only they can organize complex processes. The workforce is controlled with the division of labor and the bigger picture is hidden from labor
by limiting workers to specific tasks and by periodically recycling them into the market (especially as soon as they openly identify w/ the Democratic Technic, which was a prerequisite for the new-economy).

Companies wish to separate workers from their skills by identifying skills as intellectual property (ATT/SCO) and returning workers to the market pool of the unemployed.

Information and processes are commodified by government representatives influenced by lobbyists to create increasingly cryptic copyright and patenting law. Universalization (Wood, 1997) is the self-actualizing tendency of capitalism to impose it's own logic on more and more aspects of life. (Time is money even within leisure)

But who is doing this ?? What unwritten conspiracy is behind this process. How do managers communicate this philosophy to underlings, without being detected. How is the market corruption passed from generation to generation
without the knowledge of the population. Is there a different kind of person who naturally imposes these capitalistic conditions. An authoritarian gene (flaw) perhaps ??

(Contracting vs. Full-time Employment)
P 51
Knowledge work will move towards the Hollywood project-based economy as workers become more creative

** Contracting, free of parasitic problems w/in corporations, able to provide for own services without overhead of go-betweens, work in comfort of home and have flexibility to retain position through various employers. Person attains corporate status giving considerable tax advantages.

** Lacking purchasing leverage of corporations, at mercy of service suppliers, not as influential within corporations and vulnerable to competitive slander, much more easily dismiss-able, as every information technology contract includes any "cause" to terminate contract. Workers often feel guilty for being at home causing harder work, no health related breaks. Typical jobs, data entry or directory inquiries, not ideal jobs. Labor is truly divided and unable to achieve collective bargaining.

(Automation Creates New Jobs)
P 54
EU: New jobs will offset jobs lost through automation (and job export?)

P 70-71
Rights to privacy are suspended as companies have access to data passing through their systems.

Indirectly, behavior may be analyzed by software designed personality profiles based on all collectable data, such as absences, resulting in arbitrary dismissals.

P 72
The Hollywood model brings back all the problems of early capitalism; short-term hiring, lockouts, no worker's rights, and cyclic lay-offs. (de-centralization of workers prevents labor union formation)

** Technology workers, especially in finances, universally opposed to united labor.

P 72-73
Corporations are quickly claiming knowledge that has been freely available just as the landowning aristocracy laid claim to common lands during the growth of intensive farming.
** See appendix I
** GNU strategy of copy-lefting

Companies force contractors into a relation with owners by owning (patenting, copyrighting) the means of production. All the advantages of the Information Society are lost, as innovation and creativity are the sole domain of organizations best known for control, exploitation and uneven distribution of profits.

** Forces piracy, criminal activity to maintain individuality

P 74
Skills workers have developed as a result of the tasks they performed for their contract holder or employer is rendered the property of the employer.

Creative contracts can include the transfer of property rights from artist to company simply because the artist will never have the means to reach audiences.

Even government fees for patenting prevent creators from owning processes.

**Sue them to death -- definition of individual and company as same thing

P 75
Taylor's codification of the workshop floor Taborsky put on chain gang for "stealing" technology he developed in parallel to work he was doing while contracted by University of South Florida. Utility owned all output and brought criminal charges against inventor.

** Loss of differentiation between civil and criminal crime

(Loss of Unionization)
P 77
Simply the threat of relocation to lower cost areas is enough to get concessions from labor. The promise of re-employment by the service economy has given slipped to lower cost countries.
** These countries are supplying service to the host nations, causing a further deficit and are not developing business that they can depend on.

** Developing nations complain about brain drain while absorbing jobs through globalization. Calling for global unionization while helping multinational corporations break first world unions. The solution is to bring all the worlds nations up
to the same standards with nominally equal rates of exchange rather than bleeding one to support another for any reason.

(Online Society / Internet Communities)
P 86
Technology has the most profound effect when it alters the way people come together and communicate. Online communities meet any reasonable definition of community. They offer improvements in organization and communication over the traditional community. In particular, anti-globalization and environmentalism have organized exclusively through the net and in at least one case it has enabled local revolution, the Zapatistas.

These communities define the Democratic Technic and they will probably never be co-opted by authoritarian rule, breaking the historical cycle of the Technic. In fact, they all seem to be organized specifically to defy centralized
authority.

They entirely consist of the minds of the members and operate at negligible cost. More traditional communities exist based on where we live or work, our class or race and the existing hierarchy tends to be self-succeeding.

Very few identify exclusively with one community, but they may define themselves with their own web presence, through web pages, web logs or by developing communities based on their own personality. Nobody will stop them,
and, usually, if they are interesting in some way, they will develop a following, which it will remain individualistic. Taken for granted today, these new possibilities for independent and group expression are unique in the history of human society.

Achieving online life also requires a personal motivation, passive followers probably won't find themselves online very much.

E-mutual communities will resist any kind of greed that typifies corporate acquisition protecting itself from the kind of information absorption that threatens fair competition in the free market economy.

P 86
Zapatista revolution, globalization and the MAI in Seattle, examples of revolutionary actions that completely depended on ICTs for global validation and coordinated organization.

P 88
Technology itself has no leaning and democracy will not spring forward from it, but the new Information Society has advanced multiple factors over previous forms communication technology in that it is not just two-way in nature, but
communicates over a matrix defined by the numbers of users, which are presently in the hundreds of millions.

In a typical online community, exclusion is rare though it may be difficult to gain credibility with the other members. Exclusive lists lack the dynamics to draw members and generally die. Many people, or even most, may choose not to
participate in the global dialog, but the Information Society now defines democracy better than any previous system because anybody, literally, has their say, and others will no doubt be exposed to it, even if by accident.

Existing studies of Internet communities have been limited to mailing lists and the UseNet. Web logging and software specifically designed to support and analyze complex topic and thread based communication will be invented to make
all the users experiences more meaningful.

The only entry fee is access, which at 20 cents per minute at Kinko's is still expensive.

(e-mutualism)
P 97
The most remarkable product of the Internet is the Linux OS, a student project that has grown into Microsoft's biggest nightmare. If Gore had one and Congress persuade the anti-trust allegations against Microsoft, their operating
system and office software divisions would have been split. Microsoft Office would have be ported to Linux and NT would have died on the vine. In fact, early on, Microsoft considered abandoning NT (which has evolved into XP and
Microsoft Server).

The primary advantages to software created by e-mutualists are that anyone can use the code and develop from it. So find achievement in dissecting the software to for weaknesses, publishing their findings along with the solutions.
The weakness become common knowledge and the aware technicians apply the fixes. The rest may or may not suffer the consequences of laziness, but everything is out in the open and the solutions are provided free of cost.

By comparison, knowledge of the inner workings of Microsoft software is not just a civil violation but also a federal felony, making individual protection of a system you own a crime in of itself. Users must wait for fixes, which are
provided at Microsoft's leisure. For this reason, the vast majority of security breaches are with Microsoft systems, since profit figures into every action they take.

A recent modification to the most popular e-mutualist code compiler, the GCC, has halted the most common form of weakness in public software, which is called stack smashing. Another software giant, IBM, which has embraced the Linux OS, has provided the most recent fix of this type.

The open software model is simple. The builders hope not to charge for the software but for its implementation. Initial creation is only a small part of the software economy, distribution, testing, configuration and customization are necessary just to get started. Then companies are faced with the expense of their own development. Open software technologists are highly available and are able to train each other on freely downloaded software systems making them
more competitive in comparison with proprietary solutions. Nonetheless, the free software model is the antithesis of the capitalistic and authoritarian models. Recently, in typical capitalist maneuvering, a failed Linux company acquired the Unix licenses initially copyrighted by ATT. ATT had a decade before alleged that any person having been influenced by Unix owed their knowledge to ATT and therefore ATT owned considerable portions of their
minds. At the time, it seemed laughable and ATT wisely sold their licenses to disable the legal departments. Novell briefly owned the licenses, which was unable to create usable Unix products. Eventually they wound up with Caldera/SCO, also unable to provide competitive software products, they are now resorting to the same predatory tactics. Somehow, a decade later, the threat seems more real. In Europe the EU parliament has supported the open model and hopes to fine Microsoft for anti competitive practices, but another sector, the EU commission has go the opposite direction, and is creating a model where every single software component is, by law, owned and for which royalties have to be paid. Since even simple systems consist of thousands if not millions of individual components smaller corporations and individual developers and instantly eliminated from the software market.

(Repressive copyright laws)
P 101
Photocopying newspaper articles, sharing books and making cassette tapes from recordings has never been illegal and didn't pose any kind of threat to publishers and music labels. The invention of the MP3 music compression format
changed that by enabling the efficient transmission of music over the Internet. Two college students formed the Napster file sharing service and the rest is familiar history. The record industry claims losses of 10 percent of its revenue and the numbers of users sharing files could be a significant percentage of the online population. The public software community has entered the arena by producing libraries for a system, which uses no central services. Instead a matrix of users is formed providing no single target for the industry to pursue as they did with Napster. Instead it would have to sue millions of users, in courts where judges no doubt have themselves family members who have been sharing files.

Besides the RIAA, two active voices against file sharing have been the band Metallica and the singer Neil Young. Having been a fan of both, I was surprised at their enforcement stances because both have developed their followings as being voices of the counter culture. These particular musicians are successful and wealthy and probably do not literally feel any pain as a result of the sharing of their songs. Most other musicians and, in particular less wealthy ones, either are not too concerned about these copyright infringements or wholly support file sharing. New musicians see file sharing as the only way they can get the exposure necessary to succeed as other channels to the market are controlled by the recording industry in the style of the robber barons on the Danube.

(Music industry)
The music industry has a history of excesses, best illustrated recently on television, by rap stars dumping bottles of Crystal Champagne on the floor to demonstrate their rises from poverty to wealth. Despite decades of extreme and
hypocritical examples of waste sometimes even resulting in death by the music industry in this way, the legal system feels morally obligated to protect the industry on the principles of the law. Suddenly copyright infringement becomes
more aligned with an economic and moral stabilizing effort which supported, by a vast number of Americans by breaking these laws. This effort would be characterized as typical of "Democratic Technic" rebellions against the
"authoritarian Technic."

Digging deeper into the realities of the music industry one increasing has to wonder if there is any benefit to music itself by the industry. I find it doubtful, that in a country of two to three hundred million, there would be only such a small percentage of musical talent as represented on the radio. Musicians have always been activist and one of the most popular genres of music today on the radio grew from the political upheaval of the sixties, more recently however, a very rich singing group known as the Dixie Chicks met their demise by questioning the recent presidential decision to hurry into Iraq, a move questioned by many Americans. The group was banned by a large radio conglomeration and lost popularity and was boo-ed on stage as being traitors against the nation.

(MP3 sharing, global de-centralized model defined by rebellion against Internet copyrights)
The technology itself, is now considered the future of computing, allowing computer nodes to support each other without necessarily relying on central servers. The MP3 crisis is unique in that is embraces legal, moral, economic
and technical issues that may in the end revert the entire Information Society to a democratic de-centralized control model where the entire globe is the matrix but globalize is irrelevant.

If information control is decentralized, then what do centralized organizations process beyond the technology of control, meaning weapon systems, without any profitable use for them.

(Psychological profiles derived by trusted systems)
P 109
Statistical collection of the types of information viewed by paying customers (or authenticated users) allows information publishers to create a profile, which can be used to create a presumption of guilt based on a guessed-at psychological analysis.

(Government and Internet)
P 114
States and government increases with use of the Internet. Only way to keep the old patterns in the face of new technology is to use government regulation of small companies and the average person. They have done this historically to protect class divisions.

Internet distributes power seeming to decentralize it, but power has long been diffused by the Authoritarian Technic by creating vast and spread out control structures.

(National Borders)
P 119
National borders are breached by the use of corporations' networks. Markets are setting rules and governments can resist them only as much as the seek to lose corporate controlled capital, technology, jobs and the ability to balance trade budgets.

(Bill Gates)
P 120
Gates: governments can help determine the rules of the road, the guidelines within which companies compete but they shouldn't try to design or dictated the nature of the network because governments aren't very good at out guessing the
competitive market place", in other words the market place should dictate how we live.

(Role of Government)
If government cannot protect us from control from the few corporations left to compete, or if they totally lose control allowing single corporation domination, as they have with Microsoft proving unable to protect the citizens
economically, why should their citizens protect them politically. Both corporations and governments can soften in their means of operation. Traditionally only the most driven individuals will develop necessary innovations to keep markets competitive and those controlling the markets may choose to ignore and therefore marginalize them. Unless government can be persuaded to keep these technologies from self actualizing in their own shops then there is a strong possibility they may ultimately replace the existing ICTs and their supporting corporations. If ICTs become cheap simple and cheap enough not to require capital investment to sponsor manufacturing then centralized capital becomes meaningless with respect to information. Industries completely dependent on information, such as medicine, would become threatened by independent development and the more physical markets may suffer from innovations in material production and enhanced morality based on democratic communication.

(Corporations dependant on government)
Without the regulative control of government and the automated behavior of soldiers, tradition market corporations may collapse under their own weight; the only way they can save themselves would be to increase the pressure on
government representatives away from democratic representation and towards lobbyist control, the selection process would have to go away from democratic elections and towards behavioral control through the media and corrupted
electoral decisions in the courts. It is known that the majority of the people did not elect the present president and it is said that he was not even elected in the state of Florida where he ultimately was granted the powers of state. Today the president's party struggles to redistrict localities to attempt to lock in long-term power in a process known as gerrymandering.

(Libertarians)
P 121
Libertarians see the role of the state as the protection of property rights.

(WTO position on government in emerging nations)
P 130
Government should only protect property and contract law
Richard Posner: Legal reform is an important part of the modernization of poor countries, but the focus should be on creating rules of contract and property rather judiciary or civil liberties. -- Protect those who have and allow them
full control by minimalizing justice and eliminating the needs of the greater population. What possible motive for this form of "liberalization" and the enhancement of "free" markets except possibly global suicide through the uncontrolled spread of disease caused by poverty and the neglect of the mass of the population.

(Finland)
P 138
Finnish first true Information Society, creator of Linux -- not substantial in of itself, obsolete before it was created, but its Finnish origin was all that it needed to become the biggest threat the world's most powerful corporation has.

(Old computers)
P 152
One million PCs go to landfills every year; no computer is obsolete except for power usage.
example: old laptops 1/10th of cost of 1/100th power - reverse of Moore's law.

(Tech One and Tech Two)
P 153
Tech one uses technology to enhance existing process, Tech two creates process that were unimaginable before the new global matrix. Problem is when corporations label tech one as tech two preventing tech two from receiving the necessary
investment.

Increased communication called tech two but isn't, its just an increase over the phone, a better tech two is the creation of vastly new technology, biotech or even better, revolutionary economic matrixes where all technology is accelerated through e-mutualism.


(Information bubble linked to oil prices)
P 160
The Information Society is perceived as something new to which older analyses are invalid.. Bit if the Information Society is capitalistic then it makes sense to apply older criticisms to understand it, after looking at the recent tech crash, we have to admit that older rules still apply. The rising oil prices of the turn of the millennium indicates that the deployment of ICTs may have less to do with the new economy than the sudden change in the price of oil after the historically low prices during the nineties.
**This follows the concept that surplus energy creates Renaissance, as the canals and windmills of Holland allowed the planting of tulips rather than food (Mumford)

Emotional Intelligence by Daniel Goleman

1995
Bantam Books, New York

Goleman explores a part of the brain which enhances the human experience more than any other. Human intelligence as measured by IQ tests rests on a part of the brain evolved to help us love our families, to protect our young. Intelligence springs from the emotional center. Besides making us good people, it makes us stronger too by allowing emotions to enhance our intelligence.

He also explores family or group relationships, trauma, specific physiology, animal empathy, the work environment, the topic of crime and even Robin Hood's purported quotes.

He is brilliant, is adept at the crossover relationships between topics so relevant to my study and breaks many new trails through the studies of psychotherapy and sociology.

References and Notes:
(Emotions)
P 6
Anger: Blood flows, heart rate increases, and a rush of hormones allows us to be more vigorous

Fear: Face is blanched and runs cold as it is shunted to the legs making it easier to flee. The body becomes edgy, going on general alert making quick decisions easier

Happiness: The brain inhibits negative feelings and releases available energy. Quiescence allows the body to recover from upsetting emotions. Rest, readiness and enthusiasm

Love: Tenderness and sensual pleasure create empathic feelings and parasympathetic arousal. Feelings of calm and contentment allow interpersonal commitment

Surprise: Eyes open to take in a larger visual sweep. Openness to the situation allows for more information to be able to figure out what is going on and create a plan of action
Disgust: Globally universal, disgust has the same expression everywhere. Something is offensive to the nose, or metaphorically so. As Darwin suggested, a primordial attempt is made by curling the lips to spit out the offensive substance.

Sadness: Helps us adjust to significant loss such as death or disappointment. It brings a drop in energy and enthusiasm and approaches depression where the metabolism slows. Withdrawal allows for introspection, mourning and a chance to grasp life's consequences. The loss of energy may keep saddened organisms close to home.

(Amygdala)
P 14-17
Large in humans, near the brainstem, the amygdala and hippocampus gave rise to the cortex and the neocortex. The amygdala is the specialist for emotional matters. Without it one is unable to gauge the emotional significance of events, affective blindness; one loses affection. It’s a storehouse for emotional memory and thus significance itself. Life without it is stripped of personal meanings.

All passion depends on it. Tears are an emotional response unique to humans. Triggered by the amygdala and the cingulate gyrus, sobbing stops when these regions are soothed by being held.
Joseph LeDoux, Center for Neural Science at NYU

Amygdala scans every experience; it has a powerful emotional responsibility. If there is fear of some significant concern it reacts instantaneously, telegraphing messages to all parts of the brain.

(Regions / Emotions)
P 22-23
Hippocampus: Narrative memories
Neocortex: Rational thought
Thalamus:

Hippocampus and amygdala work together, each receives and stores information and the amygdala determines if it has any emotional valence. The amygdala is formed much closer to birth and is formed by life's earlier experiences especially the relationships between newly born infants and parents. The experiences are stored in their pure and raw form having been stored before the skills of description have been formed. Reactions caused by the amygdala can be so baffling because they date back to a time when almost all experience was bewildering and had no links to rational analysis.

The amygdala and other lymbic areas prime the emotional reaction and the prefrontal cortex dampens the feeling in order to act more effectively. Sensory information from the thalamus goes to the neocortex where a response is coordinated by the prefrontal lobes, the planning area for goals including emotional ones. If an emotional response is called for, the prefrontal lobes dictate it.

This is the cascading process for everything except emergency reactions. Within moments the prefrontal lobes determine a "risk/benefit" ratio to the possible emotional reactions to find the one that is best; when to run or attack and also to placate, seek sympathy, etc.

The neocortal response is slower but more reflective than the amygdalan response. In hijacking the amygdala reacts but there is a failure of the neocortex to dampen the response. The rational mind is flooded by an emotional emergency. The left prefrontal lobe regulates negative emotions where the right one holds negative feelings such as fear and aggression. The left moderates the right.

(Intelligence at Harvard University)
P 35
In the 1940s, before students were chosen or culled by intelligence quotients by the University system, a study was initiated which followed the students into middle age. Those with high intelligence test scores where not as successful as those with lower scores in terms of such free market measurements as salary, productivity and professional status. Nor did they get as much satisfaction from life such as in relationships.

Other studies prove that IQ ratings can predict socioeconomic status but measurements emotional abilities are much greater predictors. This compared against societal free market measurements, not internal more nebulous personal achievements.


(Emotional Intelligence)
P 43
** since therapy is personal yet a "tango", empathy is everything below
Knowing one's emotions: recognizing feelings as they happen

Managing emotions: Handling feelings builds on self awareness, ability to shake off anxiety, gloom, irritability and being able to bounce back from life's upsets.

Motivating one's self: Getting emotions into the flowing state towards goals while stifling impulsiveness or delaying gratification.

Recognizing emotions in others: Empathy and altruism allows us to understand what other people want or need, creating professional skills.
** Evil empathy as in human resource exploitation (management / Mumford)

Handling relationships: As empathy is proactive sympathy, relationships are proactive empathies.

(Pure IQ Types w/o emotional intelligence)
P 45
High IQ type: a caricature of intellect

High IQ male: ambitious, productive, predictable, dogged -- critical, condescending, fastidious, inhibited, sexually/sensually impaired, unexpressive, detached and bland

High IQ female: intellectually confident, can express thoughts, have intellectual and aesthetic interests -- introspective, prone to anxiety, rumination, guilt, express anger indirectly rather than openly
** Passive aggressive -- back stabbing??
** isn’t aesthetic an emotional skill?? -- are they faking it??
** Possibly these studies separated male/female traits as a consequence of testing

(Anger)
P 59-62
Calculated: From neocortex, outrage at unfairness or injustice

Spark of Rage: From amygdala

Franklin, Ben: "Anger is never without a reason, but seldom a good one"

Dampening Anger: Rage is the mood most unable to control or escape; most intransigent. It is seductive, propelled by the self-righteous inner justification for venting rage. Energizes and even exhilarates

Defusing: Brooding gives more "good" reasons to be angry, but analyzing the train of thoughts and reframing the situation helps put the anger to rest (Tice)

Self-perpetuating: Every event in a sequence of provoking situations becomes a "mini-trigger" to escalate the intensity of anger. Amygdala excretes catecholamines and the effect subsides only gradually. If the secretions are too frequent, the brain heats up and violence erupts. People become unforgiving and exist beyond reason, oblivious to the consequences of reactions fostered by the illusion of power and invulnerability. Failing cognitive guidance (experiential intelligence) becomes primitive. Limbic urge is ascendant; brutality becomes the guide to action (Zillmann)
** Animus of the hunter (Mumford)

Solution: Timing, challenge the thoughts that created the anger as soon as possible, preferably even before the anger erupts (Zillmann)

Nature: I left and vowed I would never return, but it was a beautiful summer day and the stillness and the beauty of the country lanes soothed me and melted my anger.

Cooling down: Can help reduce the anger especially with exercise, but can also be used to rationalize the anger developing cooler reappraisals which can deepen the anger

Catharsis, venting rage: may feel satisfying but does nothing to reduce anger and the target of this "appropriate response" of anger may actually retaliate

Handling anger: Don’t suppress it, but don’t act on it (Tibetan teacher)

(Enthusiasm)
P 80
Pleasure in what we do and an optimal amount of anxiety at the consequences of failure can propel us to achieve life long goals. Guiding emotions allows us to facilitate ourselves and achieve goals rather than allowing emotions to selfishly and impulsively interfere with them

P 87
(Optimism)
Strong expectation that things will turn out alright, buffers against apathy, hopelessness, depression when faced with adversity.

Unrealistic optimism can be disastrous

P 96
(Empathy)
Emotional attunement, capacity for sympathy (in another's shoes)
Builds on self-awareness (congruence), more open to others if we are in touch with ourselves. Our internal knowledge gives us the ability to understand all the subtleness of others' communications; the weaving of sounds and motions in other's language and motions, telling silences or trembles. Possibly navigating by "dead reckoning", guessing how others would be feeling, where they are on the emotional map by regarding our own navigation system.

Absence of empathy seen in rapists, molesters, psychopaths (and some therapists?)

Tone of voice, gesture, facial expressions.

(Attunement)
P 100
Part of the rhythm of relationship, mothers let their infants know that they have a sense of what the infant is feeling. When the baby squeals with delight, the mother affirms it by cooing or giving a gentle shake. If the baby shakes a rattle, the mother gives a shimmy in response. The mother matches the baby's level of excitement. The attunements give the baby the feeling of being emotionally connected; mothers give these messages once a minute
** Like servers calling to each other to assure "state" (infosoc)

Love makers sense each others emotional states, shared desire, intentions, increasing arousal, mutual empathy (congruence).

Absence of attunement in the child damages the emotional health of the child. Without emotions, joys, tears, cuddles, the child avoids expression and possibly loses emotions that are necessary for interactions in life.

Unfortunate emotions can be attuned to by the child; depressed mothers can bring about more anger and sadness in their child's play.
** What about self actualization, can the child grow anyway??

An imbalance in early life can be corrected later, life is an ongoing experience and others can fulfill the gaps left by a less fortunate childhood.

Foster home to foster home is the condition the cruelest of criminals share, emotional neglect and no opportunity for attunement
** Definition of criminal ... changers may need to break laws to change this process
** Why "emotional person" bad in free market environment, un-attunement component of the economic system

Hyper attunement: Children of continual abuse are hyper alert to emotions around them, post traumatic vigilance. Those gifted at empathy very often developed their empathic skills surviving abusive childhood environments.
** The best humans, found in Africa??
** Pain will never go away, no shortage of hurt yet attuned humans to look for
** What comes around goes around??

P 103
(Animal Empathy)
Researchers have developed data proving animal empathy, by using excruciating electrical shock to prove their points. Monkeys were allowed to prevent other monkeys from being shocked by researchers by recognizing fear in their cage-mates faces.
** Would these researchers be Maslow's "well adjusted Nazis", they must be empathic as they are studying empathy, yet they themselves would probably benefit from electro shock to enhance their own empathic experience as "to feel with another is to care" (therapeutic contradiction)

P 104
"Never send to know for whom the bell tolls, it tolls for thee"

(Hoffman)
P 105
In the progression of empathy from babyhood onward, a one year old feels distress when another infant cries as if they were hurt, by one year they will actively soothe another crying child.

Putting oneself in another's shoes (empathy), allows the formation of moral principles.

(Political Empathy)
P 106
Empathic people support the economic distribution of resources based on need.
** We no longer need morality, a derived human lesson, when empathy is both political and given at birth

P 110
Consequences do not trigger anxiety in psychopaths; they lack concern for what they do. As they cannot feel fear nor fear pain, they have no empathy, or concern, for fear and pain in others.
** Suppressing fear is bravery, ignoring the consequences of the potentially painful or lethal results of dangerous selfless acts is psychopathy. The consequences will include post trauma where society consistently, and appropriately, punishes self sacrifice as no good deed goes unpunished.
** is the psychopath, the punished, the backbone, the survival of humanity??

(Interpersonal Intelligence)
Organizing groups: skill of the leader, networking peoples skills and efforts
** No longer a network, a matrix
Negotiating Solutions: mediator, preventing conflicts
Personal Connection: Empathy, team players, dependable family members and friends
Social Analysis: insights about others feelings, motives, and concerns. Competent therapist or novelist
** As opposed to empathy (or sympathy)
Interpersonal polish
(Hatch and Gardner)

P 125
Emotional brilliance, Aikido, the art of reconciliation

(Stonewalling)
P136
Ultimate defense, the face goes blank, withdrawing from communication, sending a powerful, unnerving message, distance, superiority and distaste. Devastation to relationships cuts off all possibility of reconciliation.

(Cooling down)
P 144
Time out when emotional flooding begins


(Moving towards reconciliation)
P 155
Listen during the emotional hijackings, listen past the anger, hear peace offerings

P 148
(Fear-boss)
McBroom is a pilot who had his air-crew so scared that failed to tell him about the depleted fuel during an emergency and the plane crashed. Arrogance, intimidation and other deficiencies can cause an organization (or a planet) to crash and burn.

Feeling empathy or compassion puts people in conflict with organizational goals. Feeling for others would prevent "hard" decisions and though empathy they may allow a more humane implementation.
**Or would they fake empathy, publicize superficial platitudes and affect a cruel and satisfying implementation of a business decision.



(Empathy and healing)
P 168-169
Chemical impact on the immune cells, fear causes problems in surgery and prevents healing. Blood pressure can cause excess bleeding.

Chronic anxiety, sadness, pessimism, tension, hostility, cynicism, suspiciousness doubles the risk of diseases, asthma, arthritis, headaches, ulcers, heart disease. Emotions are as big a risk indicator as smoking or cholesterol for heart disease.

P 173
Stress doubles likelihood of virus infection

P 178
Isolation doubles risk in illness for men. Being cut-off is emotional risk.

P 179
Health is dependant on relationships

P 180
Robin Hood: "Tell us they troubles and speak freely. A flow of words doth ever ease the hear of sorrows. It is like opening the waste where the mill dam is overfull."

Openness has a beneficial medical effect (Pennebaker, Southern Methodist University)

(Aggression passed generation to generation)
P 197
Study of 870 in Upstate NY: Followed from age 8 to 30, the quickest to habitually use force were most likely to drop out and have a criminal history by age 30. Their children were also the most likely to have similar problems in school.

The troubled kids, as parents, made family life a school for aggression. As children they were punished arbitrarily and with relentless severity. As parents they continued the process. Other than punishment, there was little interest in the children's lives and the children were ignored. The acts of punishment were transported to the playground and carried throughout life. The parents wished for the best for their children but they were repeating the style of parenting that had been modeled for them historically.
** Historic patterns developed during the anti-empathic paleotechnic by moralists working to help the factory owners exploit the human resource

The Farther Reaches of Human Nature by Abraham Maslow

1971
Viking Press, New York

From this book I only sought to learn about the relationship between Maslow and Rogers. Instead I found a fascinating chapter in which he recounts a lecture by his colleague, Ruth Benedict, where she discusses a way of quantifying success in a society or community. This is synergy, which defines cooperation between people, specifically support, which makes communities strong and resilient and able to live happily and spiritually.

Much of the book works around the topic of self-actualization which is the core of much of Rogers’s work where there is a direction of life and a point of living in every organism, which gives us all reason to be optimistic about each new day.

A successful person is viewed has having self-actualized, meaning reached out in all directions to have met their potentials, and possibly more. One would expect self-actualization, synergy and the all-important empathy, to be components of successful persons and viable communities. There is probably much to be learned from people with these qualities which can be applied to the Information Society and the underlying technology community.

Synergy has been linked to technology by the life works of the engineer Buckminster Fuller. Self-actualization, however, has been only recently attached to it as an extension of the Techniques concept (May).

(Self actualizing people)
P 43-46
The people I selected for my study were older people, people who had lived much of their lives out and were visibly successful. When you pick out fine and healthy people, creative people, saintly people, sagacious people, then you get a different view of mankind. You are asking "what can a human become?"

Being-values: Self-actualizing people are, without exception, involved in a cause outside their own skin, in something outside their selves. The are devoted, working at something, something which is very precious to them -- some calling or vocation in the old sense, the priestly sense
**Maslow, who may have "actualized" the rebellion of the 60s, here evokes old-school values
They are working at something which fate has called them to somehow and which they work at and which they love...
**Here he gives fate, or even guidance from above, a contributing role to self-actualization
They devote their lives to the search for what I have called the being values, the ultimate values which are intrinsic...
Being values: these include truth, goodness, wholeness, acceptance, spontaneity, uniqueness, completion, justice, rightness, simplicity, totality, beauty in form, beauty in function, playfulness, and identity.
Humanistic therapists help "counselees" move and grow toward self-actualization. Children, who seem little more than snotty, would love to have something to devote themselves to, to be patriotic about.
Self-actualizing means experiencing fully, vividly, selflessly, with full concentration and total absorption. At this moment of experiencing, there is wholly and fully human, this is the self-actualizing moment.

Youngsters suffer from too little selflessness and too much self-consciousness; they should be come totally absorbed so they can forget their poses, defenses and shyness. It is an ongoing process, it means making each of many little choices, and it means to make each of these choices a growth choice.

There is a self and the self has to emerge. Most of us, most of the time, listen not to ourselves, but to interjected voices of authority, parents or tradition. The process of the emergence is "listening to the impulsive voices."

(Function of behavior)
P 201-208
Ruth Benedict struggled to reconcile the various behaviors of Native American tribes she studied with her own gut-feeling of what was good in a society and what was bad. In the beginning she could only define cultures as having lots of affection, or the opposite, lots of hatred. Initially she described cultures as being secure and insecure.

Eventually, in comparing cultures, she determined that the external behaviors of cultures did not determine whether they were secure or insecure. It was the motivations behind the behaviors that determined this rather than the over behavior itself. There was then a much more subtle power at work defining a society than could be determined by observing superficial characteristics.

Eventually, after tallying all the characteristics of the cultures, she determined that there were cultures that worked well together and those that were internally combative. A single term became the measurement of cultural effectiveness that was synergy; a society had either high or low synergy, or something in between or, as in our own complex society, a mixture of the two on different planes.

High synergy "provides for acts that are mutually reinforcing" whereas low synergy "provides for acts that are mutually opposed and counteractive." In "high societies with high social synergy where their [customs] insure mutual advantage from their undertakings, and society with low social synergy where the advantage from their undertakings becomes a victory of one individual over another." "The majority who are not victorious" must do as they can to survive. (Benedict)

In specific terms, she defines the siphoning of wealth as being the economic system of a high synergy society, and the funneling of wealth associated with a low synergy society. Siphoning refers to the ability of society members to place a spoon in the community pot of wealth where the better standing members of that society contribute to that pot. The funnel system found in low synergy societies produces the opposite effect; all the wealth tends toward individual members who benefit from a phenomenon where wealth attracts more wealth. Increased concentrated wealth guarantees that the increased leverage will further increase that concentrated wealth until the majority of the society members become so poor that they can no longer support the system and the economic equilibrium of the system slows, or possibly crumbles, as a result of the imbalance.

In both types of societies, hard work and the accumulation of wealth is the primary step to developing standing in the society.

In a high synergy society, the wealthy gain respect by supporting the society by helping those less fortunate, poverty stricken by bad luck, for instance, or sickness or old age. In the highest synergy societies, the ultimate measure of wealth and source of pride was to give away all possessions to the needy. Such a society would then guarantee that even this wealthy generous person would in the end be supported by this system if they should ever falter, or when, they themselves, become old.

In a low synergy system, greed is the key characteristic of the successful and the result is a far poorer culture where there is much less life and happiness in the population and the cultural symbols are more representative of harshness and control rather than generosity and happiness. Key vital statistics, such as interest rates, crime, substance abuse and health are much lower in low synergy system than one that is high in synergy.

Our own society is one that is mixed in synergy. We encourage success in individuals but then use the benefits of success in a variety of ways, some low and some high in synergy. The central re-distribution system of our society, or as Benedict would say, "the siphon", is taxation. Some taxes are collected in ways that are generally beneficial for the bulk of society both rich and poor. We support health and educational systems and defend the nation as a unified front in event of attack. These taxes are proportional to income so that the resources of the wealthy can be "siphoned" for the greater good. Other tax systems, such as local property taxes virtually guarantee that only the wealthy will benefit from the resources of the wealthy. This is clearly evidenced by the disproportionate (and embarrassing) difference between schools of different taxation districts. A neighborhood replete with mansions will have palatial educational edifices and one that is racked with poverty will have schools which more resemble corrupt prisons where children are daily debased by both the administration and resident criminal forces. As further evidence of low synergy in education, these same schools will exist within the same tax districts, meaning that the wealth siphoned for the greater good, as in high synergy, is then "funneled" giving those who have even more as defined by low synergy. The process of controlling district lines to reinforce this low synergy practice is called gerrymandering and the only legal description for it is "corruption." Hence we live in a society of mixed synergy where low synergy is actually a crime but is, for some reason, tolerated even encouraged systematically. Of great concern in our society would be the spread of disease; drastic differences in health care, presumably also affected by low synergy funneling could mean the sudden spread of a disease, which, like the plague of centuries ago, may not stop at the gates of the mansion owners.

** This low and high synergy equation helps define confusion in government. It breaks down very simply, the most important role of the government is to protect the people, but in a legal perversion sometimes referred to as "corporate personhood", the government instead attacks the people as the bequest of corporations and other institutions of wealth and control. The maximalized copyright and patenting laws of the last decade are an important example but not a new one. Watts, the inventor of the steam engine, and the inventor of the flying shuttle were unable to collect much if not all the royalties due them for the courts were more greatly influenced by "clubs" of industrial owners. As an expedience to bypass the need to corrupt the courts, the copyright and patent laws have been perverted so much that they would not be recognizable to original lawmakers who sought to protect inventors and writers.

**low and high synergy have been applied to science and information in a more direct way by Buckminster Full who engineered the futuristic foundations of a purely high energy society, controlled by a high synergy political system which, through electronics, allowed direct access to the decision making process. Nowhere in Fuller's synergy is found the now necessary computers of communication, yet his society would entirely rely on ICTs to function.

As part of the introduction of Benedict’s synergy concepts to society in general and in particular sociological applications, management concepts have been created to try to encourage generosity within the corporate structure where giving responsibility when appropriate would then foster greater productivity creating a much better bottom line. More generally referred to as "delegating power", it is a form of paradox where "the more power you give away the more you have." Needless to say, this is not a new concept, it has been discussed since antiquity in the East and these practices are often preceded with the word "Zen" revealing the influence of the Buddha. Bible belt societies would refer to this as behavior “mighty Christian" proving that generosity is a key tenant of Christ's teaching. Both these spiritualities could only be defined as having exceptionally high synergy, at least as meant by their namesake founders.

**To quote our most popular popular singer, John Lennon, "the love you give is equal to the love you get."

**Having mentioned Christianity and Buddhism, I feel compelled to relate an experience with an old-school Jew of NY background who I feel was the most synergistic man I ever met. His name was Sydney and he owned a small public park near Santa Barbara, California, called, El Cid Park, an appropriate play on words. I was working as an oil-rig diver and on my days off I could not feel but happy when ever he came around. Anybody could hangout at El Cid Park despite the low synergy attempts of the other local landowners to close it to the public. On site was a trampoline system, which, for a price could catapult you very high in the air as were benches and a used bicycle business. Police infiltrated constantly, practiced racist repression but they could not impact the synergy of Sidney’s spirit. Further infuriating the low synergy controllers, was the fact that he owed two self-storage complexes adjoining the park, where the "parkies" could establish themselves as residents in Spartan cells for a few dollars in an otherwise high rent district. The police skirted the laws of the land constantly, yet fortunately refrained from the violent practices which we have associated with the city to the south of Santa Barbara which is Los Angeles. Sid to me struck a cord with me that brought back a lot of the culture that made New York City special during its brief renaissance during the 60s and early 70s. I now wonder if Sid was a student of synergy, his generosity was complete, yet, despite common experience, it actually strengthened him rather than weakened him against the low synergy practices found in American suburban sprawl. Or maybe he was naturally on the level of Christ and the Buddha guided by the fate mentioned by Maslow in his definition of a self-actualizing person.

(All good and no fun)
P 315
Maslow is credited with popularizing humanistic thinking so much so that he is given credit for "kicking off the 60s." While he carried out studies on LSD, it appears he was no fan of partying and may have been moralistic to a detrimental and isolating degree. In this way, he may have departed Roger's concepts of self-actualization, to the point of wanting to punish "good old fun." His "B" values of successful self-actualizing included such examples of wholesomeness that would imply that projects unfinished are a total waste where the means would be more important than the journey, totally contradicting Rogers, and that perfection is a goal in of itself, a trait practiced by the suburban home-ist Martha Stewart and deplored by most of today's therapists. Mumford too would question these thoughts as he attributed the concept of work for works sake as one of the primary evils in our society and the phony moral justification used to promote "wage slavery."

Here he cites Nelson Algren's statement "politicians and intellectuals bore me" as they don't seem real. The ones that seem real are "whores, thieves and junkies, etc." He labels Algren's statement as hatred and "counter valuing" or the Nietzschean ressentiment, presumably a very bad thing. Well, no doubt the lives of whores, thieves and substance abusers are very real, they feel reality's harshness with every moment as the low synergy forces of today’s tactical enforcers track them down and concentrate them into maximal prisons designed to destroy the minds with the unusual practices of isolation and humiliation. Whores and thieves live in their squalor largely as a result of the funneling of resources away from their needy families. There are heroes and heroines who remain strong in our culture centuries after their deaths as heroes who had just those occupations. The two most familiar names are Robin Hood, quoted for his therapeutic openness, and Billy the Kid, the "regulator" who sought to re-establish fairness in the west through his method of siphoning which was bank robbery. Less known would be Christ's "girlfriend", Mary Magdalene who was reputed to be a prostitute. Highly self-actualized successful people know right from wrong, whereas unsuccessful people suffer from "value-confusion." My assumption of Algren from this statement is that he enjoyed observing the harshness of the reality of those lives. Maslow himself founded studies based on the use of LSD which contradicts his moral bend. Malsow clearly contributed to the openness of our society in significant ways, and may have kicked of the revolution that was the 60s, but from this book it seems that was Ruth Benedict, his mentor, who actually got out and experienced "the journey" while Maslow allowed his brilliant thinking to be skewed by the isolation of the psychotherapist’s environment.

Prisoners of Hate by Aaron Beck

1999
HarpersCollins, New York

(Biased thinking)
P 8
I noted the same type of hostile framing and biased thinking in encounters between siblings, parents and children, employers and employees. Each believed that he or she had been wronged and the other persons were contemptible, controlling, and manipulative.

People in conflict perceive and react to the threat emanating from the image rather than to a realistic appraisal of the adversary. They mistake the image for the person. The most negative frame contains an image of the adversary as dangerous, malicious, and evil. Whether applied to members of a family or an unfriendly foreign power, the fixed negative representation is backed up by selective memories of past wrongs, real or imaginary, and malevolent attributions. Their minds are encased in “then prison of hate.”

(Aggressive beliefs, Kenneth Dodge)
P 9

• The offender wronged them in some way and is responsible for feelings of hurt or distress
• The injury was deliberate and unjustified
• The offender should be punished

(Imposed rules of conduct)

• People must show respect for me at all times
• My spouse should be sensitive to my needs
• People should do what I ask of them

(Revenge)
P 12
The urge to extract revenge ... is so powerful and so primitive that it may be suspected of having evolved from an ancient ancestral setting, where inflicting the supreme punishment for betrayal and treachery had survival value.

The formula “kill or be killed” defines the [ feelings of a solider at war ] in simple unambiguous terms.

Soldiers on a rampage of killing innocent villagers are oblivious to the fact that they are destroying human beings like themselves. They do not realize that the impetus for their violent actions from their highly charged, primitive thinking. The malevolent images of the victim spread across the group like wildfire and they driven by thoughts of vengeance, evil doers must be exterminated.

(Master plan)
P 16
The moguls troops that laid waste cities that opposed their sweep through Europe had no specific hostility toward the inhabitants of the cities. The master plan rationally conceived by Genghis Khan called for the destruction of recalcitrant cities in order to intimidate other cities into submitting to them with out a fight. Undoubtedly reinforcing the troops was the pleasure of pillaging, like violence from any cause.

(Procedural violence)
P 18
Along with instrumental violence (the end justifies the means) and reflexive, emotionally charged, violence, procedural thinking can be attached to the carrying out of destructive assignments. Attention is fixed on the low level of the details of the destructive process in a kind of tunnel vision blotting out the inhumanity of it.

Accountability for the cold violence lies in the author of the grand design, ideology, or political dictum that claims that the desired goals justify the violent means of achieving them. Crusaders during the Middle Ages implemented a well articulated ideology when they massacred “infidels” on their way to doing “Gods work.” Framers of these master plans fail to reflect on the consequences of their goals and impose higher moral standards but choose not to.

The international community needs to make it clear that those who carry out destructive instructions are as guilty as those who frame them.

(Guilty Feelings)
P 19
Guilty feelings are the main deterrents to harmful behavior (Roy Baumeister) but those feelings are not experienced during a hostile sequence. People feel guilty after committing an act they consider wrong. The memory of an incident may influence their behavior the next time an incident happens, it acts as a deterrent since it prods the individual to avoid something which creates feelings of guilt.

Empathy for the object of the hostility is often sufficient to inhibit an angry person from inflicting an injury in the first place. In cognitive therapy, techniques of empathy training are used to help an angry person identify with their target victim.

(The twist of logic)
P 21
The Bible and Koran divide the universe in to absolute categories of good and evil. Through a reverse twist of logic, religious faithful who engage in murder view their victims as evil.

(Good in people)
P 24
There seems to be an innate program that reinforces sociable behavior. Because people feel pleasure when they are altruistic educators can utilize this force to counter hostility.

(Bias and feelings)
P 25
We select and and process information and attach meanings to conditions. If we do it properly we extract what is appropriate and attach relevant meanings to the conditions. If “I am in danger”, I feel nervous; if “I am wronged”, I feel angry or hurt; if “I am alone”, I feel sad; if “I feel loved”, I feel joy.

If meanings are falsely attached to conditions, anxiety might appear instead of calm, and joyfulness may felt instead of sadness. When information is affected by bias, we act inappropriately. Bias affect thinking at a very early stage. A hypersensitive woman interprets a hearty compliment as a slur and she may snap angrily. Because she expects rejection, she misinterprets innocent remarks as demeaning.

(Chain of hostility)
P 31
Event -> Distress -> Wronged -> Angry -> Mobilized to Attack

(Evolution of a group to hatred)
P 144-145
Camaraderie, commitment to a cause or leadership allows a person to transfer his own perspective to a group's frame of reference. Events are interpreted in terms of the group's interests and beliefs. Selfishness becomes groupishness as individuals subordinate their personal interests to those of the group and they oppose the interests of those outside the group unless they are compatible with the interests of the group.

Confrontations accentuate a positive bias for toward the group and a negative bias outside the group. Ingroup members are viewed and evaluated with a reciprocal relationship to outgroup members. As opposition is perceived from the outside, ingroup persons elevate their evaluation of themselves. Ingroupers become more worthy and moral and others become worthless and immoral.

Group members are tuned to special meanings assigned to events affecting the group through the subtle communication of beliefs and images. They readily accept the opinions and policies of the leaders. They can be extreme, yet they are plastic; followers of mass opinion can be swayed in any direction. People have a tendency to adjust their perceptions of the evaluations of other group members. Such collective thinking, which may be distorted, binds the group.

The gratification of sharing goals and opinions accentuates commitment, sacrifices and and risks further increases group cohesion. There may be a willingness, even eagerness, to abandon normal ethical values which results in intense destruction such as torture and killing.

(Communication of the group)
P 148
There is no limit to the capacity for a group's collective imagination to conjure up images of unspeakable acts by those outside the group. Rumors surrounding inflammatory issues can result in communicated images that enhance the credibility of a group's possibly outlandish beliefs to point of reality even though they may be pure fantasy.

(Prejudgment)
P 150-151
The human mind must think with the aid of categories, (Gorden Alpert), once based, categories are the bias for prejudgment. We cannot avoid the process, orderly living depends on it, it makes life speedy, smooth and consistent.

The tendency to think in categories, the prototype for prejudice, readily leads to over simplifying and consequently to distortion.

(Outsiders do not belong)
P 153
People who are not even members of an oppositional group may get a negative appraisal simply because they do not belong. All outsiders may be devalued and excluded because they do not belong because they have unacceptable values or beliefs, lack virtue or purity, or possess repugnant traits.

(The closed mind)
P 154
Prejudiced people are not only affected by what they think but how they think. Intolerance belongs to people with closed minds, they are rigid in their problem solving behavior, show concrete thinking, and are narrow in their understanding of what is vital to them. They make snap judgments, dislike ambiguous situations, and show a distortion in their recall of certain events.

Acceptance for those who agree is as intolerant as is rejection for those who don't agree (Rokeach)

Tolerance is the acceptance of others despite disagreements. The closed mind rejects information that contradicts highly charged beliefs within it its frame. Certain conditions contribute to the mind's closure, feeling helpless and miserable, living in a lonesome place, fearing the future, looking for others to solve problems.

Need for approval by a group or authority figures freezes the beliefs of closed minded people and leads them to reject those with different beliefs. A relationship exists between rigid thinking, ideology and prejudice. A person with an extreme commitment to a religious belief tends to “sacrilize” the difference between believers and non believers. Religious fanatics are prejudiced.

The thoughts of the group – groupthink-- can result in dehumanizing actions directed against an opposition based on the assumptions that “we are good” and they are bad.” (Janis) Any deceitful actions that we perpetrate are justified, and anyone who is unwilling to go along with our version of the truth and our actions is disloyal. Groupthink creates the illusion of invulnerability, rationalizations for destructive acts, and prejudice. Groups have self-appointed “miniguards” whose role is to exclude outside information that might contradict the group's beliefs and decisions. Miniguards suggest that some in the group may not have wholly transformed their beliefs and, consequently, require pressure to conform.

Decision making becomes defective, since much information is rejected, and risks may not be fully appreciated nor will reappraisals be tolerated after setbacks.

But if there is an ample flow of information and circumstances are clearly understood, groups can function successfully.

Closemindedness and groupthink not only promote enmity against others but can impair the judgment of the aggressor so much that they become their own victims.

(Black Panthers)
P 161
The Panthers were influenced by Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Tse-tung. They initially emphasized cultural nationalism but converted to terror when after a member was killed by the police. They had gun battles with the police and used explosives.

(Milita Paranoia)
P 161-162
The government is believed by the militas to have formed a conspiracy to subordinate the US to a world government.

Markings on federal highways are secret codes for UN invasion, Russian tanks in Michigan are proof of Russian presence in America. Helicopters hovering over militiamen is proof of their being monitored.

Video tapes have been altered to give the appearance that the blaze in the Waco attack was set by the government.
** My recollection was that I saw on a news programs a tank spewing flames from what appeared to be a gun barrel. In Newsweek I read that witnesses to the event, from the inside, alledged that the government flooded a buried school bus with gas killing the inhabitants. This was a bunker outside the compound that held children. It was reported that the Texas courts involved in the case refused to hear some testimony and sealed testimony that had been given.

They believe that there is an international conspiracy to take over the world and change the weather.
**Could this be Mumford's “machine” causing global warming protected the “new world order” concepts of corporate trade control tribunals promoted by the WTO? It sounds as if the militas understand something is very wrong, but then from reading the papers and talking to average Americans, one can only conclude that certainly are serious global threats to the nation and that infiltration is more the case than the exception. The militas, however, suffer from the same lack of access to global trade control resources (as everybody else does), and being isolated, have limited guessing powers. They know something is wrong, are not sure what it is, and having lived in rural isolation, could not know what a successful plan for change looks like.

(Mythology)
P 163
Paranoid groups and delusion persons both have closed minds. Their beliefs are impermeable to contradictory evidence their mythology (groups) or delusions (patients). Deception is the primary tool of the enemy and therefore proof of deception. Deception is therefore an acceptable defense in counter attacks of deception.

(Milita members)
Militants confine their beliefs to the narrow domain of their politics. Otherwise they are outwardly normal, socializing, working and raising families. They are rational when testifying in court.

(Herdsmen)
P 165
Herdsmen are universally associated with a readiness to retaliate violently for affronts to their reputations. They have been historically vulnerable to rustling which results in economic disaster and have developed a social image of toughness and violent retaliation. Because of their sense of vulnerability, they have a low threshold for provocation.

** I have never heard of shepherds as being described as thugs; they are usually a symbol of self-reliance and reflective loneliness, they become one with their herds and probably represent a key growth passage for human society.

But let us say hypothetically there is a shepherd community that is under the stress of brigand and lacking a peaceful solution, they are forced to protect themselves. Giving an outward impression of weakness might encourage someone with less than normal values to come steal animals knowing that nothing of consequence will happen to them whereas a tough reputation would certainly encourage thieves to look elsewhere. Meeting Beck's standard for social acceptance would certainly result in a fight in a remotely located area, reducing the herdsmen to helpless victims, very likely leading to their deaths. Beck, of course, would run for safety, while innocents died. Here social correct behavior yields the worst results, and Beck's concept that self-protection is unacceptable would lead to the deaths of these hypothetical herdsmen.

(Black Culture)
Since there does not seem much likelihood for adequate alleviation of the socioeconomic conditions in the predictable future, it is necessary to look elsewhere for other remedies.

(Hunter Dilemma)
P 199
A 1960s and 70s theory regards aggression as an expression of man as a predator, in fighting wars humans are carrying out a program that facilitated hunting earlier environments. A more recent theory has us fear larger animals as predators where supposedly our ancestors were at the mercy of wildlife.

War itself causes hostilities rather than hostile aggression causing war. A process takes place once leaders have initiated war where the populations lust for a fight is encouraged. The intoxication of anger spreads while the leaders remain rational and calmly calculate the next steps. They may even be paralyzed with fear at the consequences.

With the exception of the UN there is no over riding structure to deflect military intentions.

(French and Russian Revolutions)
P 236
Mass executions during the French and Russian revolutions were justified by the succeeding governments on the basis that the upper classes were depraved and deserved to be punished, even though the victims had no sense of guilt.

**Revolutions, for the most part, have been simply an exchange of power where one depleting power replaces another where the replaced power suffers the consequences of their damage. This cycle can exist within a government as each succeeding Soviet leader killed his predecessor, ending, of course, with Perestroika (which means openness.)

(Dualistic belief systems)
P 245
** Does this mean that if I adhere to Beck's Altruistic-Humanistic code I am a better person, better deserving of resources.

Narcissistic-Expansive

• we are superior
• outsiders are potential enemies
• our rights supersede others
• other's lives are expendable
• if I help in-groupers, I am better

Altruistic-Humanistic

• all are equal
• outsiders are potential friends
• no groups have prior claims
• all life is sacred
• if I help outsiders I am better

If well self-actualized shouldn't one feel like they have succeed where most fail ??
Outsiders-- who does he mean? Many countries are dangerous and the people who represent them have only been reinforced by corrupt practices where those resources not stolen by the elite and exported to forgiven banks can be obtained only taking those of peaceful and well adapted “others.” All are not equal, all have equal rights, but not all are equal. Many are highly beneficial and generous, others function purely to accumulate wealth amorally unconcerned with longterm results. Those who help are far better than those who hurt. Outsiders can be potential friends, yes, or they may fly airplanes into cities specifically to kill as many as possible. Or they may be group leaders, or they may simply seek to take what is not theirs from those who have successfully shepherdded the land.

Fishermen's families who have developed and yielded sustainable harvests and raised exemplary families, many of whom I have personally met, have inherited rights to their fisheries. Beck would take these and give them to, simply, anyone, no matter how many felonies they have committed in their journalese seeking better resources.

Once attacked a human has not just a right, but a responsibility to preserve his life. Life, otherwise, has no biological meaning. Attackers relinquish the “sacredness” of their lives during the duration of the attack. Afterwards, the law takes over and rehabilitation is a preferable way to solve the problem. Victims have a right to life and its protection, this right exists in virtually everywhere, yet Beck finds it an abhorrent relic of history where humans had to protect themselves against animal predators (which never existed) or marauders, (P 33). While animals have never been a threat to humans with the exception of insects, I have long lived in the woods have never had a single aggressive encounter, marauders definitely exist in our society and wander the streets seeking violent encounters. Beck describes violent and genocidal behaviors, he attributes them to leaders with rational and calculated plans. Unfortunately, when time comes for self-protection, especially during attack, Beck describes the same people he has analyzed with precision as being members of a “phantoms world composed of individuals who are poised to to dominate, deceive and exploit” which has been constructed by the victim.

Beck clearly seems to live in a split reality of highly biased beliefs. When this book had been written, there had already been in New York the exposure of the “Street Crimes Unit”, a group of plains clothes police who worked under direct supervision of the Police commissioner autonomously of the presents they patrolled. Beck discusses problems in the Black communities of the Northern US so he must have been familiar with a particular case where the street crimes unit shot at a man forty times “because he wouldn't go down.”

Of the forty shots fired only twenty-one bullets struck the man, but the force had been such that he was pinned to the wall and therefore could not fall. The police had killed the man, as he supposedly had a gun which, if you know the case, was a wallet. The case was moved from the Bronx, where it occurred, to the somewhat racist rural city of Albany where the policemen involved where quited as having “followed their training.”

Assuming that they had in fact followed their training, and that the act was not that of rogue police, life for young blacks must have been truly terrifying during the reign of the street crimes unit. I had seen, many times, treatment of blacks by police, and every time, the youths and homeless seemed to narrowly avoid violence or death by immediately becoming physically submissive, stretching their arms in the air. From what I could tell, these youths did nothing to deserve to lose their dignity as the police had never seen them before. The mayor at the time, Giuliani, still enjoys a reputation of having saved the city through a tough approach to crime.

Giuliani is also given credit for his work during the World Trade Center rescue. I was there the day of the attack, and he definitely wasn't. I also know that the government, as well as all other organizations, were excluded from the effort for three months. Autonomous control by the rescuers ended only after an attack by the police which put the Red Cross in control; they then immediately replaced all the existing support groups. The Red Cross was revealed to have collected funds for the disaster by misleading contributors into believing that they were contributing to the disaster which were really collected for other projects as well as higher salaries for the Red Cross leadership. Unfortunately, the true story of the organization of the rescue is still obscured, probably by the unwillingness of rescuer organizers to re-visit the traumatic illness they undoubtedly experienced. The WTC was as remarkable as an altruistic event as it was as a gadgetry. Beck could not have written about it in this book as it was published in 1999, but events and reactions to them happen around the world frequently. There is, in fact, good and evil, and good people must protect themselves while being attacked.

Beck documents a world full of horrors continuously perpetrated by leaders, yet when push comes to shove he suddenly proclaims that we live in a perfect world, where authority is to be blindly trusted as danger appears. Those who would “self-protect”, operate outside his narrow set of beliefs and must be “re-taught” (with cognitive therapy) to think as Beck believes they should.

If the resources of enforcement were available to Beck, would Beck enforce his narrow protocols with imprisonment and the violence and death it causes? Having created a major branch of psychology he has many followers, it would seem more likely than not that some of them may be attempting this compliance using ingenuine practices to gain authority and therefore legal control of people. In many respects Beck is similar to Skinner. In the social arena he is weak and often, unlike Skinner, admits it. Like Skinner one gets the impression that Beck would take the cowardly route of running into his gated mansion if his policies of cognitive control backfired while being social implementations.

I have concern about his flippancy over rights to resources. He implies that groups of people who have been victimized by their own deliberate uncontrolled population explosions, who, for religious reasons, will very likely continue the process in compliance with the their cultural interests, should be given the resources of those who have interacted prudently with their environments in ways including population control. Cultures that practice mass population growth are nationalistically and religiously motivated and tend to react violently when their goals are interrupted.

Beck consistently seeks to have better people allow themselves to be victimized by the abusive ones. This will always be resisted because it is wrong, and behaviors such as Beck's simplistic proposals constantly lead to aggression. Since Beck, like the French and Russian aristocrats would not be “aware” of his guilt, and would not, therefore, be responsible for deaths caused by any contributions he makes to global policy.


(Jarvis on diplomacy, from notes)
P 314

• Leader's belief system greater impact when there is less factual data
• Confidence in those beliefs will increase impact
• Information has different meanings depending on sides' perspectives.
• Messages are interpreted to conform to expectations. Messages are accepted more readily if they are closer to the belief system. Messages are commonly distorted to produce
• Decision makers over-use historical analogies and past experiences to analyze the meanings of present events.

Carl Rogers: Dialogues with BF Skinner

1989
Houghton Mifflin Company, New York

The debate transcribed in this book between Rogers and Skinner is famous, it creates a map for the debate between the client centered and operant behavioral schools of therapeutic thought. In practice the reality is somewhere in between, more towards the client approach where clients have a solid internal sense of strength, but when patients are truly rudderless ships, then some changes have to be made for often for the safety of the patient, the non directive approach has to diluted without lessening the therapists respect for the client. The more modern techniques of cognitive therapy answer that call, and they, when combined in varying degrees Roger's empathy and Skinners behavioralism should fit almost any purpose. Cognitive techniques are limiting in one way. Since they concentrate entirely on the thought processes of the individual, they have no application to society as a whole, and therefore will never have a place in this debate.

Rogers sought to scale the person centered approach to allow the non-directive facilitation of the global peace process, and Skinner would have clearly liked to steer humanity away from the likelihood of self destruction through the controls of positive reinforcement. In the case of this lengthy and friendly debate, I believe the audience subtly brought these social and political questions to a head. In my opinion, Rogers had Skinner on the ropes the majority of the time and squeezed many concessions from him, bringing him more into the humanistic fold by forcing him to see that operant behavioral control techniques could easily be used to hurt rather than benefit humanity. It is hard to imagine concepts such as empathy, congruence and genuineness being used to promoting pure evil.

P 84
Rogers:
(Third Force, Declaration of freedom)
Behavioral science moves closer to the equation of life, but life will always be subjective. Over intellectualizing is a bad thing.

P 88
(Control)
Skinner:
Control of human behavior is any contribution toward determining a man's action and the man may be fully aware of what is being done to him. I mean by control the various police and military forces that governments use to keep people working within certain legal frameworks... and the various techniques that are used to bring about the acquisition of knowledge.
**Military?? Is he confusing the weapons of mass destruction with positive reinforcement?

Control is not 100%, occasionally an employee doesn’t go to work, or a man becomes a hobo and stops working altogether, or a student plays hooky, or someone breaks the law or escapes from jail. Exceptions are to be expected because in none of the cases are the variables manipulated (in control) the only variables (the others are in life).

I hope we don't limit the discussion to concealed control.

P 90
Why do we in controlling man, control him in one direction and not in another? How do we decide in advance how we want to control? This comes up in the case of education,

P 91-92
(Control and Freud)
Freud hopes to find within the individual the source of a pattern of life that is not imposed from the outside (a self).

In terms of control, the change in control is not from external control of the individual to internal control. It is a change from coercive, punitive control to positive reinforcement. There are ways to control people that influence what they want to do... and ways to force them to do what they do not want to do.

When democracy shifts control from a coercive punitive system to the self-policing of individual freedom, where good behavior is no longer the responsibility of the police but that of the individual, that inner control which is discovered is the product of another kind of external control which has been getting individuals to want to behave rather than have to behave for fear of punishment.

I see culture evolving away from immediate punitive ways of controlling people to more remote techniques based upon knowledge of human behavior. This kind of control is more likely to build a stronger group because it releases resources within the individual that are lost under aversive control (he agrees with Rogers here).

** Experience here, controlling our activity??

P 92
Skinner:
(Individual)
If you deny the individual freedom, or deny an interpretation of the individual based upon freedom and personal responsibility, that some who or other the individual vanishes. This is not the conclusion one should arrive at.

P 93-98
(Freedom rider and alcoholic)
Rogers:
To tell a freedom rider that he is the locus of a number of unique forces which have predetermined him to move southward and to sit in certain illegal places, that he has been operantly conditioned to behave in ways which bring him in to conflict with the law and that he finds it rewarding to emit certain sounds when he is beaten by the police [would seem absurd to the freedom rider]

Skinner:
** He does not deny this
Suppose I could convince this freedom rider that I was right, would he then stop being a freedom rider? He sees himself as a person that can do something to bring about an important change and who can get credit for his effort; people will admire him for it. He does this because of a heritage which has come to him from his own culture, undertaking a certain kind of martyrdom and undergoing a punitive treatment in order to bring bout change, if he has been through a culture that goes in for this. There are many cultures that would never produce freedom riders at all.

The converse of this is the alcoholic who will say, "I'm sorry and know I am an old drunk, but I am really ill, I need treatment." Society has controlled drunkenness by shaming the drunk, by teaching children to laugh at these people as an effort to control through punishment. In a modern world it is more beneficial for the drunk to get treatment but as you shift from one technique of control, punishment, to another, medical or positive educational measures, there is a transition period where people seem at loose ends, the old system doesn’t work and the new system hasn't taken control.

I am not saying people should be kept from buying alcoholic beverages, that didn't work, but I think advertisers should not be allowed to show alcohol as being attractive or glamorous.
**Here freedom, allowance for alcohol, is retained only because control of it produced the American crime syndicate.

Rogers:
You are saying influences and controls are from the outside but man's subjective into the inside has no importance whatsoever, and that is not an issue, a kind of Calvinism where the clock is would up at birth and runs to its conclusion and there is nothing more to be said.

Skinner:
This is a point we keep disagreeing on. When I give up trying to account for something internally and try to deal with external entities, which might be responsible, in the long run it comes out. I went a long time using the concept of drive in talking about behavior. It was the last of the fictions that I dispossessed myself of. Now instead of saying, "this rat is 80% of its body weight, or he has been deprived of food for forty-eight hours, it is less awkward to say, "this rat has a high hunger drive." This is positivism, of course, but it is a highly valuable practice.
**Skinner clearly uses an artificial condition to exaggerate the animal instinct to survive, hardly a positive reinforcement. And what does he mean by positivism?
Take such things as the enjoyment of literature or a dedication to an industry or courage, doing something in the face of aversive consequences. These things are very easily assigned to personality traits, which seem to come with the baby. People who have them can do these things and people who don’t, cant. The dedicated scientist who is in his laboratory 15 hours a day seems to have something, zeal, a dedication which many people don’t have
**Or maybe they are just social misfits chasing rewards they will never receive suffering from social isolation and doing so with the sanction of a society intent on preserving a culture of cruelty intent on mass and finalistic exploitation and knows a scientist like Skinner is precisely what they need.

P 99
Rogers:
I too think of the possibilities and potentialities of human control that all of us will face and the consequences of which we all will face.

When you spoke about your feelings, I wondered, why? Perhaps you haven’t found the cause for them, but it seems to me that there are other reasons for speaking of our feelings. Man's subjective life has a significant perspective on life, which stands quite separately, and paradoxically in relationship to our view of him as one molecule in the vast chain of cause and effect. When the subjective life does seem to have significance we adopt different course of action form those we adopt if we regard it having no significance at all.

P 102
(Control)
Skinner:
Conscious and subconscious behaviors are all the same, the only distinction being that in the case of conscious behavior you know what you are doing or why you are doing it. In the case of the unconscious you don’t.

P 129
(Inner freedom)
Skinner:
I quite agree with Dr Rogers what we need to release the inner freedom of the individual, the freedom from explicit and aversive external controls. I want to teach the person to talk to himself, go over plans, and review himself as an individual. Techniques of self-management can and should be taught a t a tender age.

Rogers:
Skinner and I agree on the view of a vast untapped potential in the human organism though we might have different pathways to it. I am not sure how much influence, he would call it control, I might have had on Skinner. I was intrigued by his statement that if you are going to design a culture you have to start with certain values, but it was my whole understanding that it was on this point that he felt it was unfeasible. We do have to choose those values and those choices preempt our efforts to make changes.


P 130
(Skinner confesses to having feelings)
Skinner:
I do not exclude anything from my considerations. I have confessed to my having feelings ... I confessed to their importance in my life. As a scientist I raise the question of whether they are something which precede and determine my action, or where the are an observation of my own behavior after the fact, or possibly before, if what I am actually observing are the conditions which are to be responsible for my behavior in the future.

P 135
(Concern with spontaneity)
Skinner:
I am concerned with arriving at the conception of the individual, which is one we accept, find useful and find dignified and worthwhile, yet which is compatible with the approach of a nature or social science of human behavior. The time has come when this issue must be taken out of the realm of philosophical discussion and deliberately faced. I we are still likely to be dealing with a conception of man which allows a great deal of leeway for caprice, for individual spontaneous changes, and so on, we are going to get into trouble.

P 141
(Genius and neurosis)
Skinner:
Having shown that great works of genius were essentially neurotic, he also cured neurosis that seems to indicate that eh had something against genius. But his answer is that people are geniuses against whatever background they maybe living in. In a world in which there are many neuroses some of these will be really fine neuroses and will call them works of art or works of genius. Bu tin a world in which people life a more orderly or more successful life, the will also be works of genius because of mans capacity to do great things. They will be somewhat different, it wont be art based upon neurotic tendencies and it can’t be literature that deals with personal conflicts....
** It will be so boring as to initiate suicide

P 150
(Differences between Humanists and Behavioralists)
Rogers:
There are some profound differences between us, though less than when these discussions began. I suspect that the deeper differences will not be reconciled by us, the will be reconciled by you and by other people (future generations)

Skinner sees himself and the world as automated [organisms] moving in preordained paths. I hold this perspective as a fruitful one in my work as a scientist, but not a s total world view and find it inadequate as a view point toward all of man.

Another point on which we differ is genuineness, I have come to feel, especially in the work of therapy, one of the most important values in human relationships is the quality of genuineness, of one person being in real and genuine contact with another, an individual being as completely as he is able.

There is no doubt about he personal genuineness of Dr Skinner, I get puzzled, though when he talks about designing cultures where nothing is real, where behaviors induced for other reasons, not fort themselves. I believe he feels that since all human relationships are simply manipulations whether we know it or not, the quality of genuineness doesn’t have significance... it doesn’t square with my experience.

** Comparing Rogers and Skinner makes me wonder if there are two distinct personalities, which can coexist, yet never meet. Unlike railroad tracks they not on parallel but separate paths, but on completely different planes.

So what if culture consists of these two social approaches, and since they cannot coexist, it would only be fair to allow them to exist on two separate planes. These would be Skinner's world of benign control; Walden II was unnecessary for reaching this societal thought...He has succeeded in reality to a strong degree, and Rogers’s free world of attraction, happiness and the good life. Then, just for the sake of the betting pool... how long would it take for Skinners social engineers to muster the troops and begin the invasion, using Munford’s ultimate labor saving tool, the weapon to increase their social reward??
And how surprised and unaware would Rogers enlightened citizens be at the sudden ingenuineness of their neighbors?? Soldiers, conditioned by such extreme positive rewards as land, women and other booty, take to exterminate the peace loving Rogerians. Skinner would be off in his lab, of course, measuring the leaps of mice when he pulls their tails. When asked why he did it, created such an effective machine, he would, if this debate were any indication, change the subject.

On Becoming a Person

1961
Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, New York

(Experience)
P 11
It is the client who knows what hurts, what directions to go what problems are
crucial what experience have been deeply buried.

P 23
.. to learn that I am, in the eyes of some others, a fraud .. superficial ..
damaging .. only one person can know that what I am doing is honest ..
experience is, for me, the highest authority

P 24
Neither the Bible nor the prophets -- neither Freud nor research -- neither the revelations of God nor man -- can take the precedence over my own direct experience

(Positive Direction)
P 26
It has been my experience that persons have a basically positive direction... even for those whose trouble is most disturbing...

(Warmth / Intelligence)
P 41
... the acceptant-democratic [parental attitude] seemed most growth
facilitating ... showed accelerated intellectual development (an increasing IQ).

(Regard / Confirming Other / Process of Becoming)
P 55
... accepting the whole potentiality of the other (Buber) ... a process of becoming ...

(Process of Becoming / Directions of Client)
P 167-175
... not ... satisfying or helpful to intervene ... with diagnostic explanations ... nor with ... guidance

(Direction Away From)
... [client moves] away from what is not ... even though there may be no recognition of what he is moving toward... instead of being a facade ... being himself

...moving away from "oughts" ... moving away from expectations [of parents or society] ... [away ] from trying to please others ...

(Direction Towards)
... self direction ... being process ... becoming all of the
complexity of one's changing self

(Experience)
... openness to experience ... to be the self that one truly is ... living in an
open close relationship to his own experience ... discern the exact flavor of the feelings occurring

(Acceptance of Others)
Openness to inner and outer experience ... is an openness to ... other individuals... values his own experiences [as well as] the experience of others

(Fear / Anger)
P 177
...he can be his fear [, anger or other feelings ] ... but it does not dissolve him ...

(Social Implications)
P 180
we would by our openness ... work out the solutions of world problems on the basis of the real issues rather than in terms of facades... Freedom from threat ... freedom of choice ... exemplify ... a commonality of direction and goal

(Accountability in Therapy / Q-sort cards)
P 232-235
In order to obtain [an] objective indication [we used] the Q-technique ... [where the] client perceives herself as having become very similar to the person she wanted to be ... (rIB*SF2 = .70)

(Education: Teaching / Learning / Experience)
P 277-278

• do away with teaching ... people would get together to if they wished to learn ...
• do away with examinations ... they measure only the inconsequential type of learning
• do away with grades for the same reason
• do away with degrees [which] mark the conclusion of something [where] a learner is interested only in the continuing process of learning
• do away with the exposition of conclusions [since] no one learns significantly from conclusions
• I think I better stop there ... I do not want to become too fantastic

(Learning)
P 280-281
Significant learning is facilitated in psychotherapy ... learning which is more that the accumulation of facts ... learning which makes a difference in the individual's behavior ... in the future ... his attitudes ... his personality

(Knowledge)
don't be the ammunition wagon, be the rifle ... knowledge exists primarily for use

(Conditions and Process of Learning in Therapy)
P 285
When these five conditions are met, a process of learning inevitably occurs ... the client's rigid perception of himself and others loosen and become open to reality...

He discovers feelings of which he has been unaware ... and experiences them in the therapeutic relationship

He learns to be more of his experience to be the feelings of which he has been frightened as well as those which are more acceptable

1) When the client perceives himself as faced by a serious and meaningful problem
2) When the therapist is a congruent person in the relationship, able to be the person he is
3) When the therapist feels unconditional positive regard for the client
4) When the therapist feels an empathic understanding of the client's inner world and communicates this
5) When the client experiences to some degree experiences the Therapist's congruence, acceptance and empathy

(Process of Change)
... it is not necessary for the therapist to motivate the client ... the motivation for learning and change springs from the self-actualizing tendency of life itself ... tendency for the organism to flow into all the differentiated channels of potential development ... insofar as these are enhancing to the organism …

Other References
Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary (empathy)
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary

Cognitive Therapy by Aaron Beck

1976
International Universities Press, New York

Cognitive therapy works with the learning process of the client (or patient) to help replace distortions in the perception of the world that are harmful. Such distortions could be delusions of grandeur, fear of common social situations, anger for the perceived offenses of others, a sense of danger that lingers after a real danger has passed. These are just a few examples. Like humanistic client centered therapy, the client and his learning experiences are key to the healing, the cognitive therapist is a greater player though in the process and the process is goal oriented where specific problems are targeted and a procedure is developed along a schedule to provide, even guarantee results. Cognitive therapy strongly relies on the genuineness of the therapist along the lines of client centered therapy, but the therapist does not seek to become the client's life-long friend.


While relying on warmth and genuineness, the cognitive approach is almost as surgical as behavioral therapy. The warmth however, is an emotional tool to restore a patient's trust in authority and it is not an emotionally sacred component of the soul as humanists view it. Learning (or cognitive) techniques are used to give the patient a closer relationship with reality or personal self confidence in a step by step procedure, replacing faulty thought processes, with new ones. The cognitive therapist is not necessarily genuine with the patient, especially in the beginning, where there is a pretense at acceptance of, say, delusions, for instance, just to keep the patient from running away. As the patient becomes more focused on reality, the pair agrees more on basic perceptions until the therapist and the patient are congruent-- reading from the same page of reality. Cognitive therapy is not open-ended, it does not borrow from the humanist concept that life is the journey; they are simply solving problems as any healer would do. Cognitive therapy helps with symptomatic problems, but probably cannot help in the greater soul wrenching pain that can be cause by the grief of death or some other great suffering. Very likely pharmacopoeia, to relieve mental pain, combined with an emotional support system would be the only effective therapy, where family or social support, if it exists, would pick up after the therapeutic period ends.

While cognitive therapy does not augment the reason to live, the beauty of life, self actualization, it does seem very useful in combating the worst problems of life such as strong hatred. Hatred on a cultural, racial or religious basis flies in the face of all moral philosophies, there is no reasonable support for it and it can easily be discredited as ignorance. Since cognitive therapy is specifically designed to change perceptions based on false learnings, it seems very useful as tool to replace the extreme form of ignorance which hatred is with the clearings associated with peace and prosperity. In the short run cognitive therapy can be used to forestall some grievous event, which may bring about permanent schism. In the long haul, however, the natural self-actualizing process can bring us together into a joined learning where we can share our experiences, probably best through the technologies of the Information Society.

Note: Aaron Beck does have a book on hatred, which I believe extends on his observations of anger produced by the intolerance of inflexible and completely absolute moral values.

As does Skinner, Beck provides insight into the roots of problems. Skinner sees animalistic reactions to events based almost on digital programming where as Beck sees humans responding to life, either successful or self defeating, extending learning experiences of the past, either good or bad. Rogers sees it all as good, that it is a very good force that pushes us every day to succeed no matter how hopeless the circumstances. That force only needs to be empowered to align valued experiences and learnings into an internal renaissance, which of course can be shared with society to enrich us all at the deepest levels. Neither cognitive nor behavioral therapies even consider this benefit (and probably should) yet the humanist therapist no doubt occasionally wants to quicken the process of the realignment of the client's experiences with the behavioral "quick fixes" provided for by cognitive (or possibly behavioral) therapy. It may even be unethical not to try these techniques, or even resort to pharmacopoeia, if the patient is in a dangerous mental place.


P 2
The emotionally disturbed person is victimized by concealed forces over which he has no control.

The three leading schools (neuropsychiatry, psychoanalysis, behavior) maintain that source of a patient's disturbance lies beyond his awareness, conscious conceptions, specific thoughts and fantasies.

P 3
Man has consciousness contains elements that are responsible for the emotional upsets and blurred thinking that lead him to seek help.

Man has the key to understanding and solving his psychological disturbance with in the scope of his own awareness.

He can correct the misconceptions producing his emotional disturbance wit the same problem solving apparatus the he has been accustomed to using at various stages in his development.

P 8
Behavior therapists have downgraded the importance of thinking in their zeal to emulate the precision of the physical sciences (control??). They have rejected data and concepts derived from man's reflections on his conscious experiences. Only behavior that could be directly observed has any relevance. Since thoughts feelings and ideas which are only accessible to the person experiencing them are not valid data.

P 9
The behavior therapist with his faith in the determative form of environmental (observable) uses external stimuli to help the patient; administering rewards and punishments, exposing the patient to situations or objects that frighten him.

The troubled person is led to believe that he can’t help himself.

P 51
The specific content of the interpretation of an event leads to a specific emotional response. We can generalize that, depending on the kind of interpretation a person makes, he will feel glad sad scared or angry or he may have no particular emotional reaction alt all.

P 55
Cognitive model:
Stimulus -> conscious meaning -> emotional response

P 67
Anger can be caused if the individual interprets commands or restrictions as encroaching on his rights. Restrictive authority may anger an individual even though he had no desire to break a rule. His rights include expectations of respect courtesy, consideration and loyalty from others as well as autonomy, freedom of action and expression.
Social or professional status may prompt the expectation of special privileges and may cause offense of they are not accorded or anger is a person of lower status tries to claim privileges to which he is not "entitled."

P 70
A breach of code produces the same reaction as an attack.

"They have no right to act that way", or "he should not have done that", or "those hippies should be locked up, they have no business with their hair that long or being so dirty."

Acceptable forms of behavior constitute a moral code that is embedded in the domain. Codes vary widely between groups and may be idiosyncratic. Anger produced by a violation may seem appropriate to the angry individual but may be unhealthy to others. A violation of his personal standards is an attack on his domain.

P 71
Situations that lead to anger:

• Direct and intentional attack
• Direct, unintentional attack
• Violation of laws or social mores, hypothetical threats, substandard behavior, breach of idiosyncratic moral code

The arousal of anger is the individual's appraisal of an assault on his domain, including his values, moral code and protective values. The individual must take the infringement seriously and label it negatively. If a person is concerned with his own safety, he will be anxious not angry; it cannot be a present danger. The individual focuses on the wrongness of the offense and the offender rather than on any injury he may have sustained.

P 78
The devastating aspect of acute emotions disturbance is the slippage of controls previously taken for granted. The patient has to grapple to retrain voluntary control over concentration, attention, and focusing. He has trouble framing thoughts or following along a consistent line of thinking. His awareness of himself and his surroundings is not only lathered, but diminished, so that he has difficult in perceiving many details in his environment.

P 79
Feelings such as "I am losing my grip", or "I am falling apart", or "I am going crazy", are signs of acute neurotic reactions rather than psychosis.

P 84
Ideational Content of Neurotic Disorders

Depression Devaluation of domain
Hypomania Inflated evaluation of domain
Anxiety Neurosis Danger to domain
Phobia Dangers connect with specific, avoidable situations
Paranoid State Unjustified intrusion on domain
Hysteria Concept of sensory abnormality
Obsession Warning or doubting
Compulsion Self command to perform specific act to ward off danger

P 89
Thinking disorder: sometimes a feature of schizophrenia but when less gross and more circumscribed it is an important component of common psychiatric syndromes.

Patients systematically misconstructed specific kinds of experiences ranging from subtle inaccuracies in mild neurotics to grotesque misinterpretations and delusions in psychotics.

Departures from reality and logic occurred in ideation that was relevant to the patient's specific problems. Depressive concerned about self worth, anxious patient was concerned with danger.

Distortions have characteristics of automatic thoughts, appear to rise as if by reflex without antecedent reflection or reasoning. They seem plausible to the patient even though the implausible to other people. They are less amenable to change by reason or contradictory evidence.

P 214-215
Cognitive therapy seeks to alleviate psychological stresses by correcting faulty conceptions and self-signals. By correcting erroneous beliefs we can lower excessive reactions.

The intellectual approach consists of identifying the misconceptions, testing their validity and subsisting more appropriate concepts. Often the need for broad attitudinal changes emerges when the patient realizes that the old rules served to deceive and defeat him (or others.)

The experiential approach exposes the patient to experiences that can change misconceptions. Encounter groups may help a person to perceive other more realistically and consequently to modify his inappropriate maladaptive responses. A patient in response to a psychotherapist’s warmth and acceptance modifies his stereotypes of others, a "corrective emotional experience."

The behavioral approach encourages the development of specific forms of behavior that lead to more general changes in the way the patient views himself with the real world. Practicing techniques for dealing with people who frighten him, as in assertive training enables his regard of others as well as increasing self-confidence.

P 216
Folk wisdom is at the core of much psychotherapy, yet it is often blended with myths, superstitions, and misconceptions that aggravate an unrealistic orientation.

Many people are not motivated to engage in self-improvement without professional guidance.
** What if the patient just needs support and advice in self-improvement... self-improvement alone is not going to ease the pain, he hardly mentions pain.

Psychotherapy can have its greatest impact because of the authority attributed to the therapist, his ability to provide an appropriate systematic set of procedures.

P 222

Paranoid and depressed patients often automatically react to the therapist with suspicion. The therapist must establish common ground; find a point of agreement and the attempt to extend the area of consensus. If the therapist attempts to assume an over optimistic attitude, the patient may think the therapist is being unrealistic. In trying to reason with a paranoid patient the therapist may just play into a role within the patient's paranoia.

By taking a neutral stance the therapist may encourage the expression of distorted ideas and listen to them attentively. When the patient is ready, the two can examine the evidence surrounding the ideas. Paranoids and depressives have been regarded as impermeable to therapy because there has been an attempt to correct their thinking to early. Even fixed delusions may become amenable if the therapist is sensitive and patient.

P 233
Aldous Huxley: The problem of freedom in the psychological rather than political sense is a technical problem. It is not enough to wish to be free, it is not enough to work at achieving freedom, correct knowledge in knowing how to get there is also essential.

• The perception of reality is not the same as reality itself; at best it is a rough approximation
• Interpretations of sensory input are dependant on inherently fallible cognitive processes such as integrating and differentiating the stimuli; physiological and psychological processes can alter perception and comprehension

Fatigue or a high state of arousal may distort reality. Reliable knowledge depends ultimately on having sufficient information so that a choice can be made among alternative hypotheses.

P 239
(Automatic thoughts)
A basic procedure for helping a patient identify his automatic thoughts is to train him to observe the sequence of external events and his reactions to them.

P 246
(Too many rules)
We have seen that people apply rules in regulating their own lives and in trying to modify the behavior of other people. When these rules are framed in absolute terms, are unrealistic or are used inappropriately or excessively, they frequently produce maladjustment. The results can be anxiety, depression phobia, mania, paranoid state, obsession.

The ideas are generally not irrational but are too absolute, broad and extreme, too personalized and are used too arbitrarily to help handing the exigencies of life. When rules are discovered to be false, self-defeating, or unworkable, they have to be dropped.

P 309-309
Standards for evaluating therapy

• The system should be well defined and clearly described
• The general principles of treatment should be sufficiently articulated so that everyone is reading from the same page
• There should be empirical evidence to support the validity of the principles underlying the therapy
• The efficacy of the treatment should have empirical support such as analog studies, single cases which are investigated, well designed trials with control groups, etc

P 310-311
Cognitive therapy, central model
The content of a person's thinking affects his mood. Self-enhancing or self-deflating content produces feeling so elation or sadness respectively.

Frustration is responsible for the arousal of anger. If the same situation is either perceived as threatening or innocuous will lead respectively to anxiety or a neutral response. Self-signals or automatic thoughts contribute to arousal of anxiety. Negative thinking produces anxiety and there is compulsive intrusion of automatic thoughts following stress.

Politics and Innocence: A Humanistic Debate by Carl Rogers

1986
Saybrook Publishers, Dallas

While intriguing at first this book did not provide much applicable to either humanistic studies or the Information Society. Instead it provided insight into concerns that Rogers had about human communities that I believe were unfounded. Global evidence of historical hatreds, Rogers believed, would become magnified in large American cities. Even the nature of beings themselves, he felt, would cause strife when brought together in large numbers. His evidence was a maze type rat study. Despite his paranoia his resulting suggested remedies were precisely those I would recommend -- hiring humanistic planners such as Buckminster Fuller to consult with the population in making democratic decisions on urban planning. In fact, I bet Bucky could have made a neat little rodent community if he wasn’t so busy designing components of our future.

P 26
Our great cities concern me deeply, but the facts are well known and I will not bore you with them. Our large urban centers are seemingly ungovernable, choking on their own traffic, becoming insufferable garbage littered ghettos, and are rapidly becoming financially as well as psychologically bankrupt... In this incredible influx into the cities, it might be well to consider some lessons learned from a study of rats. (Imagine me evoking a rat study!) A cleverly design experiment with a large number of rats had a variety of areas. The outskirts had narrow entrances, where a dominant rat could keep others from entering and the central area was available to all and could not be dominated. All the rats had ample food and water and were free to breed as they wished. A few findings give me pause.

The rats multiplied, of course, but in the areas controlled by dominant males overcrowding was not excessive and life was reasonably normal. In the central, uncontrolled area, there was serious over crowding accompanied by poor mothering, poor nest building, high infant mortality, bizarre sexual behavior, cannibalism, often complete alienation, some rats behaving like zombies, paying not attentions to others and coming out of their solitary burrows only for food.

More ominous, the central area for all its bad conditions had a certain magnetic pull. [The scientist] called it behavioral sink, the rats crowded together in it ... the more rats feeding there, the more would crowd in ... females in heat would leave the protected areas and head for the central area, sometimes not retiring at all.

Perhaps we city dwellers are inhabitants of behavioral sink, cannibalism and all, what we need to do is unleash creative innovators like Buckminster Fuller, designing [communities] fro human beings and human and life, not simply for profit.

**The scientist did not build a city, cities have apartment buildings. My own gerbils lived in a big cage with wine boxes in it which they fashioned into homes, they were as happy as I was growing up in my apartment building. What the scientist did was build a Nazi concentration camp or a Mexican prison. The rats self-actualized as I would have expected, they wanted to fuse into a group, but did the scientist provide recreation, birth control, a variety in diet or any of the natural amenities provided by nature to rats. Rats are adapted to living in human society, not a product of it. Maybe a more appropriate study animal would have been musca domistica, the house mouse, a creature that has matured with humanity over the millennia, stable, calm and excessively adept at avoiding cats.
Many wild animals have adapted well to our societies and have learned all the skills we have, such as crossing through traffic, disputing the validity of the incestuous environment this scientist created. Raccoons are the stuff of legend, many living quite happily in NY's Central Park, but also foxes live in our midst and of course there is the homing pigeon, a gentle, social and highly intelligent creature, it boasts a natural navigation system that our aviators still envy.
Animals amaze me when they group. If there is no danger of a species eating another, they congregate without distinction, enjoying each other's company without discrimination; they are magnetized to the group as this study showed in its flawed way. Rogers should have gone with his initial instinct and ignored this rat study.


P 28
(Ethnic frictions)
To be sure there would be frictions between races, ethnic groups, between persons with very different value systems, in these human cities. The behavioral scientist could help with workshops on communication with emphasis on the contributions each group could make.
** It almost seems like Rogers is making work for his therapists, which actually would probably be a lot of fun. But the concern is hardly necessary, in my entire life in New York City; disputes based on old hatreds have been so rare that they made the news when they occurred. The city is a violent mixing bowl, highly mobile and unrelenting; time and space are so disrupted that it is almost impossible not to self-actualize and be your own unique universe. The Broadway IRT line seems to have defined rock and roll fifty years ahead of the Rolling Stones. In fact the Independent line "A" train may have inspired the concept of "jazzy madness." One of the liveliest and most perennial jazz standards is named after it.

The best examples of cross culture fusion that Rogers would liked to have facilitated (wouldn't we all) are in art and music. With music it is fairly easy to combine stanzas especially considering that music was no doubt our first, and still our favorite, Information Communication Technology. One rhythm would broadcast to another drummer, that drummer would answer with his and the rhythms would fuse and then seek other drummers to communicate with. Art is a little more complicated, but the mass exodus out of Europe as a result of the WW II into America and the American response to it was highly organized communication, comparison and, most important, exhibition. As Mumford states, photography is the most elusive yet telling of all visual arts. It was a photographer, famous from his work during WWII who created the global central exhibition hall, the Museum of Modern Art. It had modest beginnings, no doubt, but it would be hard to imagine a more influential art institution today.

The Carl Rogers Reader

1998
Houghton Mifflin Co., New York, New York

(Leaderless Groups)
P. 40-41
We [were meeting] audiences of six to eight hundred people ... we felt strongly
that to talk about the person centered approach without giving participants
a chance to talk and without sharing the control and direction of the sessions
was inconsistent with our principles

We took some far out gambles ... we tried leaderless groups, special interest
groups, a demonstration encounter group [and] dialog between staff and audience

... most daring was [forming] a large circle of eight hundred people and permit feelings and attitudes to be expressed ... there was no one person exercising
leadership ...

It became a mammoth encounter group ... [after] much initial chaos, people began
to listen to one another ... there were persons who felt they never learned so
much in such a short time

(Emerging Person)
P. 42
... Stanford Research Institute study estimates that forty-five million
Americans are committed ... to having things on a human scale ... it is better
to live frugally ... conserve, recycle, not waste ... and that inner life, not
externals is central ( Mitchell, 1977)

(Physical Healing)
P. 46
... terminal cancer patients given meditation and fantasy training focused on
overcoming the malignancy experience a surprising number of remissions.

(Conditions for Therapy / Definitions)
P. 135-136
... genuineness, realness and congruence ...
more the therapist is in the relationship ... [without] a professional front ...
the greater the likelihood that the client will change and grow ...

Genuineness means that the therapist is openly being the feelings and attitudes
that are flowing within at the moment

(Congruence)
There is a close matching or congruence between what is being experienced and what is present in awareness and what is expressed to the client

(Unconditional Positive Regard)
...acceptance, or caring, or prizing -- unconditional positive regard -- accepting a positive, non-judgmental, accepting attitude toward whatever the client IS a the moment...

Acceptance [is the] therapists willingness [to be] for the client to be whatever immediate feeling is going on -- confusion, resentment, fear, anger, courage, love, or pride ... non-possessive caring ... therapist prizes the client in a total rather than conditional way

(Trust)
... the person centered approach is built on basic trust in the person. This
is the sharpest difference from most institutions ... [much] of education,
government business, religion, family life, and psychotherapy is based on distrust ... [where] goals must be set because the person is seen as incapable of choosing aims ... and the [person] must be guided ... since otherwise he may go astray...

(Self-actualizing)
The person centered approach depends on the actualizing tendency present in
every living organism -- to grow, to develop, to reach its full potential.

(Therapist or Facilitator)
P. 137
When I am at my best as a facilitator or therapist ... I find that I am closest to my inner, intuitive self ... in touch with the unknown in me ... perhaps a
slightly altered state of consciousness ... then whatever I do seems to be full
of healing.

(Basic Conditions for Therapy)
P. 230
... I advance [with] some fear and trembling ... the concept that the essential conditions for therapy exist in a single configuration even thought he client may use them differently.

... effective psychotherapy of any sort produces similar changes ... and that a single set of conditions is necessary

(The Individual / Rogers Experience)
P. 266
Of all the incredible forms of life ... the individual human being [has] the most exciting potential, the greatest possibilities [and] the richest capacities for self-aware living ... my experience leads me to place a primary value on the [individual]

(Personal Freedom)
P. 267
I think of the confused psychotic man [whose healing began] when he muttered, "I don't know what I am going to do, but I'M going to do it." ... personal freedom, choice, purpose, or goal, have a profound and significant meaning ... behavioral sciences have made not only such terms meaningless, but the concept of meaning itself, meaningless.

(Knowledge)
P. 267
How do we know? ... we are apt to think of [the] machinery of science ... [but ] in the last analysis knowledge rests on the subjective .. I experience ... I exist ... I, in some sense, know, and I have felt assurance. All knowledge, including scientific, is a vast inverted pyramid resting on this tiny, personal, subjective base ... the discoverer of knowledge feels a trust in all his avenues of knowing, unconscious, intuitive, and conscious.

(Scientific Intuition)
P. 270
The great scientists, like Kepler, Einstein and others, have learned to trust this intuitive sensing

P. 272-276
(Conditions for a Scientist)
... sensing a pattern of relationships is a the heart of true science ...
** Beauty in nature
Keen and alert intelligence
Dedicated immersion over time with a broad range of phenomena
Commitment to finding out
Fresh non-defensive approach, laying aside previous knowledge
Openness to all avenues of knowledge
Trust in the total organismic sensing
Recognition of beauty or elegance of the perceptions of the pattern
Recognition that unity in the pattern is likely to provide fruitful discovery

... hypothesis must be put to the test ... I have deep respect for the methodologies that scientists have developed ... [but] behavioral sciences are marked by a shallowness that which bodes ill.

(Technology)
** Fuzzy logic appeals to Rogers
As computers are used more and more in all research, [fuzzy logic] may be found useful in fields in which we are interested.

(Education)
P. 301-303
** Teaching to teach is futile, anything that can be taught has no significant
influence on behavior
** Only self discovered learning influences behavior
** People can get together to learn
** Tests only measure inconsequential learning
** Grades credits and degrees are limiting
** Do away with conclusions as everything is always changing

(Education)
P. 315
** Proof of success with genuineness in teaching
Some teachers see their urgent problems as "helping children think for themselves and be independent", or, "getting students to participate"; etc. Students perceived the first group as exhibiting far more empathy, prizing and realness. [They] showed a high degree of facilitative attitudes.


(Person Centered Approach in Teaching)
P. 329
Threatening to teacher:
Who knows whether students can be trusted [with shared power and control]
Threatening to student:
It is much easier to conform and complain than take responsibility and live with the mistakes
Threat to the administrator:
... responsible freedom and shared power ... is a revolutionary force to be suppressed ...
** Life becomes dangerous and may cost your job

P. 338
** A technically unqualified administrator is given control of a dysfunctional
school. By enlisting parents, teachers and students and trusting them to create guidelines and policies for the school, he made it into a splendid school. When the district became economically sound it fired the director and hired a more technically qualified one.

(Good Life)
P. 411-412
** commonality for many
... the good life is a process not a state of being ... direction not destination
the direction ... is chosen by the whole organism ... where there is psychological freedom to move in any direction ...
... direction seems to have certain discernable general qualities, which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals

(Process Toward the Good Life)
P. 413
... movement away from defensiveness towards openness ...
... more able to listen to himself and what is going on within ...

... live fully in each moment ... the fluidity of such existential living is to say that the self and personality emerge from experience rather than being created by some preconceived self-structure ...

... one becomes a participant in and observer of ... experience rather than being in control of it ...

... increasing trust in his organism ... arriving at best behavior based on experience ...

(The Good Life)
P. 419
not necessarily happy, contented, blissful, enjoyable ... a range variety and richness ... significant movement in therapy may bring greater awareness of pain but also of ecstasy, anger is more clearly felt but so is love, fear is known more deeply but so is courage... they have underlying confidence in themselves and trustworthy instruments for encountering life

B. F. Skinner by Daniel W. Bjork

1978
HarperCollins, New York

Carl Rogers and BF Skinner are often introduced as close yet antithetical friends. Both were behavioral scientists and each allowed for truths in each other's therapeutic theories. Rogers believed strongly that successful therapy derived from reaching the client in an empathic way and helping them align their life's experiences with present day life itself; each person has within them the self-actualizing energy to heal and the therapist has only to help them use that. Energies emanate from within and they simply have to be tapped.

Skinner is a pure behavorialist and is credited with bringing that field of social science to critical mass so that it could be applied to psychotherapy. He used mechanical devices, Skinner boxes, to show cause and effect correlations in his process of conditioning animals to consistently influence their behavior. He separated the animals that he studied from the realities that had brought them to his lab, and sought, with his devices, to prove that thinking organisms are entirely controlled by the environment, in the moment, with their genetic makeup providing for their history.

The "carrot" is positive reinforcement, simply described; it has been the common knowledge of parents and bosses that rewarding goodness in a person will encourage further goodness. Conditioning the human, positively, where the reward ultimate would be a more stable, comfortable life, could only be a good thing; if humans can be conditioned to behave better social problems could be solved instantly. This technique, a technology really, evolved from the devices bearing his name, is now combined with cognitive therapy and is helping people in therapy just as much as Roger did.

Skinner's concept that positive conditioning can bring us from the realities of the Earth to a paradise of perfection is naive; he wrote a book, Walden II, where positive reinforcement replaces personal decision making in a small utopia was designed to explore this premise. Criticisms from all parts of America would be predictable, in fact, individualists howled and I don't believe anyone would actually support a system that would replace the balance of fairness we call the law, with logical positive conditioning technology. On the other hand, while his animal experiments are largely discredited for their over simplification and their artificial environments, therapists can bring relief to suffering patients in an expedient way through behavioral conditioning, which, in many cases may be a life and death necessity, as in the cases of suicidal depression or uncontrolled drug abuse.

While Skinner sought to control the patient into proper behavior and Rogers wanted to empower his clients to find their true selves, they had surprising commonalities and they liked each other enough to enter into a lively and lengthy debate, which helps define these contradictory perspectives. Skinner had to admit that respect and empathy and therapeutic congruence are key to creating a healthy mind and Rogers conceded that there are limits to the self-actualizing process and that influences of the realities of our environment as well as our genetic make up are unavoidable givens in our existence.


(Skinners behavioral science roots)
P 82
Walter Hunter was a professor at Clark University who taught classes at Harvard where Skinner attended in the late 1920s. He was a careful clever examiner who challenged the then held belief that animals learned from imitation. He built multiple-choice boxes and delayed response boxes that proved that behavior in animals was more sophisticated that previously thought. Skinner considered himself Hunter's grandchild in terms of the lineage of ideas.

A German gestalt psychologist, Wolfgang Kohler, had done work with apes in the wild and had maintained that apes did not solve problems through trial and error but through perceptual restructuring. Kohler felt he proved, through experiments, that animals did more that behave, they could think as well.

Skinner wanted to repeat Kohler's experiments but was not convinced; in fact he made fun of his work.

(Rats in Mazes)
P 85
By the end of the first decade of the twentieth century the maze was routinely used to test sense discrimination and motivation and, by the 1920s, used to test learning ability. The use of multiple animals became standard practice with twenty or more rats making repeated maze runs. American behaviorists Edward Tolman and Karl Lasheley were among the notable rat researchers when the maze reached its zenith about 1930.

(Rats on aluminum plates)
Skinner was more interested in the rat's changing postures. He attempted to measure the reflexes in young rats whose body temperatures didn't maintain normal levels when moved between hot and cold. Next he made slings on which he placed young rats to measure their muscle reflexes. It also proved unrewarding so he created a device from an aluminum plate and piano wire to measure reflexes. A measuring device, a kymograph, was attached to the device. When he pulled the rat's tail, a kymograph recorded the rat's leap forward. Skinner was "over-joyed" at the accuracy with which he could measure rat's leaps.

(Skinner's life)
P 104
The timing of major life's events was one variable Skinner could not control. "It is amazing the number of trivial accidents which have made a difference. I don’t believe my life was planned at any point."


(Transference of the science of rats to humans)
P 109-110
The most radical implication of this new behavioral science was in its potential social application. Skinner never doubted the transferability of operant condition of white rats to human beings. "The importance of a science of behavior derives largely from the possibility of an eventual extension to human affairs." The only difference would be verbal behavior. "The Behavior of Organisms" would eventually influence the development of teaching machines, programmed instruction and the community treatment programs for juvenile delinquents.

Skinner could not apply his science to society until the 1940s; he was having trouble convincing his associates. In one letter to Fred Keller, "You can control your drive (the rat's state of deprivation) well enough to rest easy about it, and there is a hell of a lot more fun (in this psychological camp) and a better chance you will become famous."

Edward Tholman wrote in his book, Purposive Behavior in Animals and Men that he worried that "the rat emerged with psychological dignity which no behaviorist has previously granted to the ape."


(Behavior on its own right)
P 112
Skinner had found it, what scientists are always looking for, a purely descriptive experimental behavioral science that was freed from physiology as well as mentalism.

Others said that Skinner was wrong in setting off behavior as something that can e studied with reference to physiological processes (Carmichael)

(Sadomasochism or other mental illness in Skinner)
P 114
Among Skinner's girlfriends was Ruth Cook, with whom he was wildly in love. He called her Nedda in his book, Particulars of My Life. It did not matter to him that they were basically dissimilar and when she left him to return to a lover who was chronically ill, Skinner was stunned. "I was almost in physical pain, and one day I bent a wire in the shape of an N (for Nedda), heated it in a Bunsen burner (presumably in his lab) and branded his left arm."


(Pigeons as guided missiles)
P 123
The idea was simply that pigeons could guide planes loaded with dynamite into targets. In Minneapolis he bought a few pigeons from a supplier of Chinese restaurants. He found that, when bound, they could be taught to peck at targets. He also experimented with cows "which proved remarkable subjects, but for their difficult temperaments.

(Skinner bonds with his pigeons)
Skinner was surprised at the variety of behavior that pigeons could perform if held by hand and reinforced after pecking. By successive approximation, a gradual increase in reinforcement for more sophisticated tasks in a step-by-step basis, Skinner actually got the birds to play simple musical tunes. Pigeons, he discovered, were no "dumb" animals and when hand held they could achieve the first important Information Communication Technology, which is music. He felt this was a "great illumination" and reinforced his belief that operant conditioning would be applied to human endeavors.
**Unbeknownst to Skinner, the discovery he made did not bolster behaviorists’ theories; he had reached his pigeons in a truly empathic way. Had Skinner been a true scientist, had he followed every possible lead, he could have then and there credited himself as being an early and scientific discoverer of the natural existence of empathies in higher organisms.
When he found that handholding the pigeon produced such amazing results, he had discovered the relationship between emotion bonding and intelligence. Intelligence, as Goleman points out, rests on top of bonding, and that bonding is so important in history because it gives us the ability to care for our young. Furthermore, his caring for the pigeons could have become the operant of behavioral behavior in that he always maintained that there is no place for negative reinforcement, what we would think of as the criminal act of "shocking the monkey." He completely ignored any possibility that this emotional bonding represented the key to higher life and that possibly there were loyalty issues associated with it. Instead he continued to try to convert pigeons into cruise missiles and, needless to say, the premise for the project was too mystifying to be grasped by the generals of the time, and far too complicated to be deployed in the field. This was one of many failed projects Skinner had initiated and saw fail, largely because of his lack of empathy for the real needs of either society, business or, in this case, the military.
** Skinner could have leaped past what Mumford described as the paleotechnic phase of technical growth right here. Today we are still burdened by the use of negative reinforcement in animal testing, when clearly observance in nature is the best behavioral gather technique. As later pointed out, he loved nature, and nature lovers run the interference against Munford’s worst enemy, the hunters who converted the weapon into the ruthless labor saving device it is today and put the nation state on its track to perpetual war.

(Skinner has kids)
P 129
Yvonne, Skinner's wife, was "scared to death" of their first child, Julie, and Yvonne gave Skinner job of mother. Yvonne came from a background where domestic chores were for others and she failed to adapt when her children arrived.

Skinner's true aim)
P 129-135
When his second child arrived, Julie, Skinner wanted to "simplify the care of the baby" and all the baby needed was a "clean, comfortable and safe place." Hence the "baby tender" or what would later be marketed as the Air Crib. Yes, Skinner had placed his daughter in a human sized Skinner box. He claimed that it was not intended to "bring behavior under the control of reinforcers or to record the cumulative rates of response." Nonetheless, he had created a box with a glass side where the effects of it on the child could be observed.

He had been bothered by the plight of the restrained pigeons while trying to convert them into cruise missiles, and now the clothes that restrained his daughter as an infant as she was zipped into a flannel blanket, her arms in flippers, bothered him. The baby tender, he hoped, would restrain and protect the infant while allowing freedom of movement. It was a crib-sized living space where his daughter wore only a diaper.

The tender’s cleaning was automated, a crank pulled a new sheet onto its soft floor, the air was filtered and it was sound proofed. She was comfortable dry and clean and she enjoyed her freedom of movement. A curtain could block out the light for naps.

The tender became the "Air Crib" and was marketed. There were probably technological problems with it and these were pointed out early in his marketing attempts. He claimed that all the technical problems were solved and added the following statement, "Since the baby tender relieved parents from constantly ministering to the infant's needs, playtime was likely to be more enjoyable for them." That illustrates the second concern with this crib, it separated the child from the parent physically, limiting the single most important experience a growing human has, the bond with the caregiver.

**The "trouble" of the constant care required by growing children has been, in my experience, them most enjoyable part of my life. Skinner obviously minimalized the importance of this, possibly casting a long shadow on all the intentions he had for his life's work.

It also made him vulnerable to malicious rumors that the crib had made his daughter insane and that she had committed suicide.

Deborah defended her father later on in life, saying he was a warm and loving man. He was not experimenting on her and the crib had not harmed her in any way. Just as she had gone through life with people expecting her to be a little crazy as a result of the growing up in the tender, it was impossible to stop the rumors that harmed his product.

He later basically laid it to rest by a complete lack of ability to adapt to the realities of business. He was blessed with the luck in finding venture capitalist he maligned his relationships with a lack of social empathy and unrealistic demands and basically shut down his own products. This aberrant behavior, or lack of empathy, which ever you choose, mirrored other attempts to bring his concepts to reality and he would suffer as a result of it each time.

(Walden II)
P 146
A friend of Skinner had encouraged him to write a book about a better future. He replied that "he had found his niche," and she countered that "they had not found theirs."

Skinner had knowledge of the utopian experiments in America and was aware of details of the creation of the Latter Day Saints because the Book of Mormon had sprung into existence near his birthplace of Susquehanna, Pennsylvania.

He also loved the book Walden very much and in 1945 he began creating a fictional utopian community in a book that would later be called Walden II. His writing took on a "white heat", he said, and it flowed as stream onto paper. The book had written in the spirit of his predecessor, Thoreau, in that he sought to work out a way of independent life without the burden of politics. "In Walden II, there are very few automobiles, food is not purchased in small packages, tins and bottles to be thrown away, consumption does not require much heavy industry, a few copies of papers suffice for many readers ... the citizens are not taking much out of nature nor are they putting waste back in it."
** So far so good...
There is a standard utopian plot to the book, where visitors debate the qualities of the community with the leaders of it. Beyond that the book is filled with the details of daily life in the community; the required work day is four hours regardless of profession, labor is rewarded with localized money, where the least popular tasks are rewarded with the highest labor rate. Cleaning toilets is more profitable than cooking. Property is owned in common, work is not determined by gender and competition is discouraged. There is plenty of time to engage in hobbies or the arts.
** So far so good...
Walden II had arrived at this social equilibrium through behavioral science utilizing positive reinforcement. There is little decision making process and spirituality is absent, and babies are separated from their natural parents to be raised by the group in (you guessed it) Skinner's baby boxes.
**Ugh, Skinner had no empathy for his audience, instantly ruining an otherwise good idea.
In the debate between the society's engineer and visitors who were critical of his society, Skinner, through the engineer, points out that you are "controlling the contingencies of reinforcement of which individual behavior was a function; techniques of operant conditioning could be used to control individual behavior to enhance life generally. To the question of control, he shows that normal (usually undemocratic) controls are absent; the government, the economy, religious institutions and the corporate community. Without utilizing operant conditioning you are vulnerable to control form others and those hands are often tyrannical and usually ineffective. Unlike most radicals who promote freedom as a solution to irresponsible control, Skinners radicalism says that control is held by the wrong persons and used for the wrong reasons with all its cruel effects.

A nation of individualists, no matter who well controlled by the substitution of the illusion of freedom for the real thing, would not accept a fully controlled society under any conditions, no matter how beneficial the intentions and results may be.

Operant Behavioralists would be automatically suspected by a cynical culture as being tyrants disguised as healers, Skinner would once again, naively, make himself vulnerable to the abuse of misrepresentation and outright lie by a sometimes cruel public.

** But what if Walden II were simply an educational summer camp or maybe a beneficial information corporation, people would eventually leave so the control would not be permanent but only focused to the single purpose of the community, presumably a good one. This would soften the debate over separating children from their parents and raising them in boxes. This is such a radical concept that most would see as a clear mistake, but a day-care center, on the other hand, might function efficiently in this way. Positive reinforcement for successful efforts, say, work that would benefit humanity in some profound way, would not be so offensive. It would be, in the minds of the few socially conscious capitalists -- a very good thing.

Ironically, despite the obvious feminist theme where the division of labor is eliminated, many women, including his wife, hated the book. He showed he ever really got the picture when expressed, crudely, that he concluded, "that freeing women of the slavery of domesticity made them feel that they should not be loved."

** This hardly ends the story of Skinner; he is highly complex and interesting. He seems to be a loveable man, entertaining in his conceit, surprising in his innovation, and while he was wildly successful as a human, he had clearly self-actualized like few others; he missed an important mark, the undeniable need for empathy in healing. He had unusual opportunities to explore it, as with his musical pigeons, but instead pursued their purpose as guided missile components. He completely disregarded the humanist concepts of being and self, yet defined himself as "the ultimate humanist." Fortunately this left him open to praise from Rogers who used his scientific techniques to help define his conditions for scientific exploration, even though Skinner openly contradicted Rogers' conclusions. He must have been fun to have as a dinner guest.

While Skinner excelled as a valuable technician bringing many viable concepts to the table while adding more scientific value to the social science process, I wonder why he is held in a higher level, more as a guru that and technician. In my opinion, his instance on only positive reinforcement is his greatest contribution and gives him moral standing as a humanist. Yet it seems that people hold him at guru level whose use for his science is an expedience in therapy. His followers may have more sinister uses where control is socially engineered for domineering purposes, to wrest power to destroy things for obsessive and horrifying reasons.

(Rights, the right to own slaves)
P 206-207
Most Americans living in the north extolled the virtues of individualism while white Southerners were incenses over northern interference with liberties won in the American Revolution such as the right to control their property especially black slaves.

(Rogers on Skinner and power)
P 209
Rogers: I believe that skinner has seriously underestimated the problem of power.

The Control Revolution by Andrew L. Shapiro

1999
The Century Foundation, New York

Shapiro's title well explains his book, but control isn't one sided. Control, he says, is passing from the institution to the individual. From being controlled, the individual is gaining self-control, as different from more
nebulous concepts of political freedom.

While the present leap in the Information Society continues to empower individuals, the underlying system of information communication technology (ICT) is also very useful for denying freedom and placing individuals under automated control, homogenizing the social order using the mathematical principle of "the least common denominator."

P 20-21
(Birth of the Internet)
In the 1960s and 1970s the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency created a network to allow defense researchers to share computer resources between universities.

Soon it served the more social purpose of email communication spawning the creation of a distributed bulletin board system based on topics of interest called the UseNet. Arpanet continued to grow under the National Science
Foundation until it was privatized in the mid 1990s. The government sold off the network backbone to a consortium of technology corporations and gave a single company control over the directory service that gives names to all the computers and links them to their computer language addresses.

(Privatization)
Privatization of this kind removes all decision making power from the government (with its presumably democratic interaction with the population) and puts all decision making power in the hands of corporate officers.
Education, health and social welfare, even prisons, have been transferred to private control relying entirely on free market forces to provide well-being and justice. Certain small units, such as in machinery maintenance or
transportation, function well serving the public as corporations as long as accountability and competition are present as part of the process.

(Failures of Privatization)
But taking such vast policy responsibilities out of the scope of the democratic process and granting them only the values of the profit motive is a concept untested in history and does give the intuitive feeling that social responsibilities would be met.

Personal experiences in the health field suggest that doctors will consistently bypass common ethics and provide unnecessary and possibly dangerous surgery to increase hospital profits. Educational corporations have consistently failed to provide improvement when asked to take over troubled public institutions.

There is no real reason to assume that a privatized Internet will enhance the social responsibilities normally given to government and the granting of monopolies historically guarantees price gouging, hence anti-trust laws.

(Technology Crash of 2000)
Total privatization accelerated the technological growth of the Internet from 1995 onward where it graduated from the simplistic text based applications like the UseNet to the highly graphical and interactive World Wide Web. The acceleration was, in fact, phenomenal, and using traditional economic analysis it was very likely to create a financial bubble. Growth in the last year of the technical rise was beyond any previous experience and resulted in a crash that very likely pushed America into a three year market depression causing employment problems that are expected to last much longer.

(Global Stocks)
Global stocks, if an indicator of the global economy, suffered just as the technology stocks did, as if to say that the world was depending on American, and European, technology to bootstrap itself out of historical poverty. Their
investments all went sour and their market indexes followed very closely those of technology stocks, where as more common wealthy nation stocks only suffered marginally.

(Culture of Individualism)
The US has a strong culture of individualism; today self-reliance is expected in health, diet, exercise spiritual awareness, exercise, self help and even recovery from severe mental and health problems. Historical roots point to
spirit of the frontier, the very language of the national documents and the laws of the land, and the residence of a large percentage of individualists and free thinkers in the world, either born into the tradition or brought here
often to escape repression elsewhere. Names like Emerson and Thoreau, Franklin and Einstein, Emma Goldman and Susan B. Anthony. Even Daniel Boone and Billy the Kid remain as important folk heroes.

It has increased over the years; trust in institutions has eroded dramatically, both with government and corporations. From a seventy-five percent in the early sixties, the government's trust rating has fallen to twenty-five percent.
The private sector has done even worse, falling from 55 percent to 21. Even doctors are as entrusted now, as are educators and journalists.

**There is a tendency to create black and white separations between issues, oversimplifications that are exploited by those who may be under scrutiny. Economists, financiers and government leaders and the private sector offer us
two choices in governance and sustenance, communism or capitalism. If the government cannot be trusted, they say, then they present us with a more individual solution, the corporation. The law supports the concept that a corporation is an individual creating the horrid skew, which has been righted by collective bargaining, and class action law suits. Corporations are often bigger than government yet enjoy the status and protections of an individual person, the system we live in offers no choice except to accept the rules presented by a few institutions based on a millennia of developed control practices.

P 23
(Growth)
The need for personal control is known to every person, they pass from infancy and childhood to many years of expressing individuality as teenagers to the full responsibilities of adulthood.

(Stakeholders)
Control is the key factor in our political and economic lives as we struggle to become stakeholders in society

P 39
(On-line feedback loop)
Journalists are often the arbiters of the facts, so keeping them on guard is a tremendous asset for the community. The Internet provides an "on-line feedback loop" allowing interactive questioning of the facts to hold the media
accountable.

(Buckminster Fuller, Direct Democracy)
P 58-59
Democracy was in a shambles and needed to be modernized "to give it a one-individual-to-another speed and spontaneity of reaction commensurate with the speed of broadcast news." "electrified voting" "Devise a mechanical means for nation-wide voting dial and secretly bye each adult citizen of Uncle Sam's family."

(Government obsolete)
Citizens can use the Internet to express their views instantly, not just on policy issues, but for instance, the location of dump sights. Representatives would no longer be decision makers but tabulators to keep track of what the voting public wants. Referendums are common in Switzerland, which has also pioneered the use of the Internet in political outreach.

P 80
(Click Wrap Agreements)
These documents go beyond the copyright laws in controlling the way information can be used. They contain hundreds of lines of fine print and are followed by an OK button that somehow is taken to signal consent. Being impossible to
understand by the average person even if they did take the time to read the documents, they also deny the legally required opportunity to negotiate the terms of the agreement. Nonetheless the courts will very likely support these agreements.

(Trusted Systems)
This technology controls how information is used. Browsers have been modified to prevent users printing, cut and pasting, or otherwise copying information even if they have paid for it. Unlike the concepts of fair use and trivial
sharing, which allows music listeners to make copies of music or magazine readers to photocopy articles.

Trusted systems make no allowance for fair use, the aspect of copyright that is essential to freedom of expression. They also help the monopolization of computer technologies and dangerously shrink the public domain. The political
trend is to do away with the freedoms of expression rights to an even playing field at an exponentially increasing pace.

Trusted systems also record the use of data with accuracy that a user's mental profile can be established based on what information is accessed. Furthermore, assumptions can be misleading since the intent of the viewer will never be known, yet the trend has been for the use of this type of profile to be protected by the courts and even in some cases used as evidence in criminal cases.

(Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
In 1998, copyright maximalist persuaded congress to enact laws preventing users from circumventing tools designed to control a user's access to information. The law requires the use of one kind of program rather than another when specified by the provider of the content.

P 86
(Freedom and control)
"there is no more perfect form of subjection than the one that preserves the appearance of freedom" (Rousseau)

(Microsoft Quote)
"Where do you want to go today" means that they really "want a cut of every transaction on the Internet" -or "vig" (Myrhvold).. to become the supreme commercial middleman.
**Corporate independence from government to increase control over the individual, in an environment that promotes individual choices

(De-isolation of ideas)
P 119
"You can create your own world in the Net and do whatever you want on it." You may make all your own rules for others to interact with you eliminating the needs of give and take that are the basis of commonly shared community. There has been decline in social organizations over the years and the wide spread use of the Internet may continue that in some users. However the tools of the Internet are invaluable to social organizations and in the future more