Presentation: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/click-crash-course-modern-hardware

Presenter: Cliff Click

14:30 - cache hit take 2/3 clocks - miss to memory take 200/300 clocks - 100X cost

15:20 - in multicore you hit l3 because of bandwidth & 1 ft of wire is 1 ghz clock

18 minutes - shadow processing; kind of how the cray does ii

25:30 - out of order execution & cache miss

30 - results - 7 ops out of 300 due to cache miss

33 - miss rates are low; but a tiny (5%) missrate dominates performance

52:20 - cahce misses are hard to detect; they just look like busy cpu top doesn't help...

SRII 2011 - Keynote Talk by Alan Kay - President, Viewpoints Research Institute from SRii GLOBAL CONFERENCE 2011 on Vimeo.

SRII 2011 - Keynote Talk by Alan Kay - Q&A Session from SRii GLOBAL CONFERENCE 2011 on Vimeo.

Killing Time: The Autobiography of Paul Feyerabend

I was surprised by the amount of detail spent on reviewing films, theatres, musicians, and restaurants in contrast to the brevity given seemingly more important matters. A great book overall.

I especially liked the story on pages 18/19/20.

Notes below:

Page 4

We [Paul & his father] were friends, sort of, but not very close; I was much too self-centered and much too involved in my own affairs. I had already moved to California when I heard of his final illness; I did not return and I did not attend his funeral.

Page 5/6

Aunt Pepi was married to Konrad Hampapa, a railwayman and a heavy drinker himself. They had two children - Konrad junior, who was retarded, and Josephine. The family visited us on Sundays, and Junior played he accordion. He was an excellent musician and could improvise on any melody he heard. When is father remarried, he tried to make love to his stepmother, Maria. This, he thought, was was the normal function of a mother, for Aunt Pepi, apparently, had made love to him. Maria was a kind but determined woman. She stopped her husband's drinking; but she failed with Konrad junior. He left home, roamed the streets, hid in garbage containers (which at the time were large enough to hold ten people), played his instrument, and raped the women who came to listen. He died in an insane asylum at the age of thirty-six -- at least this is what I heard later, after my return from London. For me (at age ten), Cousin Konrad was just another relative with a great gift for music. I noticed that he was a little peculiar - but so were many people. My attitude changed when the peculiarity received a name, "retardation," and when casual and unintended hints informed me of its social implications. Fear and revulsion were the result.

Page 12/13

Between the ages of three and six I spent most of my time in the kitchen and in the bedroom. Mama moved a bench up to the window and tied me to the window frame. The I hung like a spider and watched the world: major street repairs, colorful steamrollers, the green electric buses that transported the mail, the street performers, and now and then a private car. Once a week a bunch of pigs was delivered to the butcher's shop in the house opposite. On Friday the workers received their paychecks, went to the local pub, and got drunk. Between two and three in the morning - I was in bed at the time, but the noise woke us all up -- their wives went looking for them and brought them home. It was an impressive sight: huge women lifting tiny men up by their collars and shouting with thunderous voices: "You heap of shit! You bum! You asshole! Where's the money? ... " Even the mailman ended up in the gutter with letters, checks, bills scattered all around him.

Inside, wives beat their husbands (and vice versa), parents beat their children (and vice versa), neighbors beat each other. Every morning the ladies of the house assembled at the bassena, the only water outlet on each floor. They exchanged gossip, commiserated, complained about their men, pets, relatives. Most of the time that was that. Once in a while the gossip increased in volume, changed character, and turned into a row. Endearments such as "You whore! You bitch!" filled the corridors. Weapons (brooms and so forth) might be added, but dragging the opponent around by her hair seemed to suffice. Turds on the stairway meant that the janitor had managed to make an enemy or two. It would be wrong to infer that our house was an extreme case, however. The nuns at a well-known Catholic hospital where I had my appendix removed used the same language and treated each other in almost the same way.

Page 16/17

I started school when I was six. It was a strange experience. Having been kept off the streets, I had no idea how other people lived or what to do with them. Papa gave me his military knapsack instead of the customary briefcase. "People will envy you," he explained. I was laughed at. "Defend yourself!" said mama. Next day I did just that. School was over and I started for home. I saw mama at the window, remembered her advice, turned to the main offender, and broke his arm. Gradually things settled down and instruction began. Now I could not understand why I should sit still while the teacher was wandering around; so I wandered around with him. He ordered me back to my place. There I remained, but I began to throw up as soon as the first letters appeared on the blackboard. ...

Page 18/19/20

Once a year, on December 10, my father dressed up (at a neighbor's) in a bishop's outfit, put on a mask, and entered our place as Saint Nicholas. Mama and I waited in the kitchen. There was a knock. "It must be Saint Nicholas," said mama. I trembled with fear and excitement. Mama opened the door and Saint Nicholas came in. I knelt down. Papa asked in a deep voice: "Have you been a good boy? Have you done your homework? Did you obey your parents?" And I had to admit, alas, that I had sinned here and been negligent there and that my behavior had been far from exemplary. Saint Nick came closer, looked at me with a penetrating glance, hit me (gently, of course), and said: "Next time you won't get away that easily"; and then he departed. Outside the door he left a basket with fruit, chocolate, and various sweets. When my father returned, he looked exhausted; he had a leather strap in his hand and explained how he had caught, tied, and gagged the devil while Saint Nick was giving me the third degree. "You know," he said, "you were lucky; this time the devil almost got away and he surely would have beaten you up. He might even have taken you with him!" I believed the story, especially as the neighbors were moving around in the corridor in demonic costumes. "Poor papa," I said. I gave him some of my presents and was proud of the strength that had enabled him to restrain the Evil One himself.

...

The door opened. Here was the old familiar figure: the long white dress, the golden embroider, the staff, the pointed hat, the deep voice. But I also saw my father's shoes, which I had not noticed before, I saw the eyes behind the mask, which I had never separated from the mask, and I heard him, not Saint Nicholas. It was my father; clearly it was my father, yet equally clearly it was not my father but the Saint.

...

I was sad, not for myself but for my father, who, having been a mighty Saint, was now a vulnerable human being.

Page 37

He [Hitler] would begin slowly, hesitantly, in a low but resonant voice: "Volksgenossen und Voksgenossinnen!" -- "Fellow nationals, men and women!" Many people, young and old, male and female, my mother among them, were hypnotized by his voice. Listening to the mere sound they became transfixed. "I loved Hitler, " Ingmar Bergman writes in his autobiography, reporting his impressions as an adolescent exchange student. "The only face among faceless men," was Heidegger's reaction. "He is a phenomenon - too bad I am a Jew and he is an anti-Semite," said Joseph von Sternberg, inventor of Marlene Dietrich, director of The Blue Angel and many Hollywood movies afterward. Hitler mentioned local problems and achievements; he made jokes, some of them rather good. Gradually his delivery changed; in approaching obstacles and setbacks, Hitler increased both his speed and his volume. The outbursts, which are the only parts of his speeches known the world over, were carefully prepared, well staged, and exploited in a calmer vein once they had passed. They were the result of control, not of anger, hatred, or despair, at least while Hitler was still in good physical shape and in command of events. "Here is a man who knows how to speak," said papa, who had been looking forward to the takeover, "not like Schuschnigg" (the Austrian chancellor, an intellectual without temperament or popular appeal.)

Page 42

Later on I met soldiers who wore the Gefrierfleischorden, the frozen meat medal, which they received for having survived without winter clothes.

Page 51/52

Our destination was Poland, the area near Czestochowa. There I was put in command of a bicycle company. I was hardly thrilled - I had never ridden a bicycle, and I fell of when I tried. The soldiers stood around looking puzzled: this is supposed to be our leader? The problem was solved the Russians; in one day the bicycles were already in their hands. And then came two weeks of absolute chaos. Run, rest, build a bridge, cross the bridge, blow up the bridge, remove mines, lay mines, rest, run again. I remember sitting in a house, reading a book, with anxious peasants around me; soaking my feet in warm water when the Russians entered by the back door - I still don't know how I escaped; sleeping in a barn and seeing the Russians through a small crack when I opened my eyes in the morning; running across a field to escape gunfire, with people dropping like flies around me.

...

Then, one evening, in the midst of shooting from right, left, front, back, the horizon aflame with burning houses, my carelessness finally caught up with me. Playing the operatic hero once again, I placed myself at a crossroad and started directing traffic. Suddenly my face was burning. I touched my cheek. Blood. Next, an impact on my right hand. I looked at it. There was a large hole in my glove. I didn't like that at all. The gloves were made of excellent leather and lined with fur; I would have liked them to remain intact. I turned slightly to the left - things were getting dangerous. I slipped and fell. I tried to get up but I couldn't. I felt no pain, but I was convinced that my legs had been shattered. For a moment I saw myself in a wheelchair, moving along endless shelves of books - I was almost happy. Soldiers eager to get out of trouble gathered around me, lifted me onto a sledge, and dragged me away. The war was over as far as I was concerned.

Page 54

I soon recovered but remained paralyzed form the waste down. I was not unduly concerned. I even got alarmed when one of my toes started moving; "Not now, please," I said; "can't you wait until the war's over?" I didn't mind being a cripple - I was content; talked to my neighbors; read novels, poems, crime stories, essays of all kinds.

Page 63

I had not joined the party and I had not been involved in any criminal activities. I can't take credit for that - the occasion simply didn't arise. I don't know what I would have done had I been asked to become a Parteigenosse or ordered to kill civilians.

Page 68

All of us, men and women, were "scientists" and thus superior by far to students of history, sociology, literature, and similar trash.

Page 89/90

Falsificationism now seemed a real option, and I fell for it.

...

Today I regard this episode as an excellent illustration of the dangers of abstract reasoning. There are lots of dangerous philosophies around. Why are they dangerous? Because they contain elements that paralyze our judgement. Rationalism, whether dogmatic or critical, is no exception. Even worse - the inner coherence of its products, the apparent reasonableness of its principles, the promise of a method that enables individuals to free themselves from prejudice, and the success of the sciences, which seem to be rationalism's main achievements, provide it with an almost superhuman authority. Popper not only used these elements, he added paralyzing ingredient of his own - simplicity.

Page 117/118

Paul Meehl was interested in the mind-body problem and in the relation between theory and experiment. The positivists favored an "upward seepage" of meaning, as Meehl called it: observation statements (which we put at the bottom of our diagrams) are meaningful; theoretical statements, taken by themselves, are not but receive meaning via the logical links that tie them to observation statements. Continuing the drift of my 1958 paper I argued then that meaning travels in the opposite direction. Sense-data in and for themselves have no meaning; they just are. A person who is given sense-data and nothing else is completely disoriented. Meaning comes from ideas. Meaning, therefore, "trickles down" from the theoretical level toward the level of observation. Today I would say that both positions are rather naive. Meaning is not located anywhere. It does not guide our actions (thoughts, observations) but aries in their course. Meaning may stabilize to such an extent that the assumption of a location starts making sense. This, however, is a disease and not a foundation.

Page 119

Later, at a monster debate epistemology, I compared Aristotle's philosophy with that of the Vienna Circle. Aristotle's philosophy, I said, was fruitful - it had helped him to found some sciences and to enrich others. Ernst Mach was still making contributions to the sciences themselves, not only to the rhetoric about them. TheVienna Circle, however, merely commented on work already done. It was barren, from a scientific point of view. Or, as Ernst Bloch had colorfully put it, "Die Philosophie ist aus einer Fackeltragerin der Wissenschaft zu ihrer Schleppentragerin geworden" ("Having been the torchbearer of science, philosophy is now carrying its train"). Carnap did not object, but he emphasized the advantages of clarity. ...

Page 124/125

My friend Joan McKenna, a bigmouth with a heart of gold and a certified witch, tied an experiment. Having been introduced as a guest lecturer she talked for about twenty minutes; then she stopped and invited questions. Her answers were unfair, sarcastic, authoritarian. Nobody intervened. On the contrary, people next to her victims moved away a little - we don't want to have anything to do with a loser like you, they seemed to say. Now Joan explained the setup and its purpose. "Loo at what you are doing!" she exclaimed. "I give ridiculous, authoritarian answers. You not only swallow them but treat the only students brave enough to resist like outcasts. No wonder a professor can et away with anything!" After that we discussed how to deal with the bastards of the profession. Assume one such superior being says thins that sound silly or incomprehensible. What do you do? You get up and ask for clarification. Assume you are silenced by an authoritarian gesture. Well, somebody else gets up and repeats the question: "I didn't understand either." More anger, more sarcasm. A third student gets up: "You are supposed to teach, not to make fun of us; so please explain." "Don't be insolent!" "He wasn't being insolent," a fourth student says. "He was asking for information, and you wouldn't give it." -- and so on. Sooner or later, I said, there will be a more accommodating response. "We can't do that," some students replied; "we'll get bad grades." "We won't do it " was the reaction of others. "It's not worth the effort."

Page 126

I didn't always accept the advice of the student leaders. For example, I didn't participate in the strike they declared. On the contrary, I cut fewer lectures during the strike than either before or after. "Didn't you feel any solidarity?" Grazia asked when I told her. "With the students, yes; with the organizers of the strike, no. They presumed to speak for all students just as Johnson presumed to act for all Americans - the old authoritarianism again." Besides, I thought a student strike was rather silly. Industrial strikes cause a shortage of goods. Student strikes are a nuisance, nothing more. (I have changed my mind since then. Professors without students are as useless as screwdrivers without screws - and they feel it.) I would have stopped lecturing if my students had demanded it, but when I asked them, some said yes, some said no - and we spent the rest of the time debating the issue. Eventually I moved off campus, first into students' quarters, then into a church. Now the administration got on m back: teachers were supposed to remain in assigned lecture halls. Consulting the regulations I found no such rule, and continued as before. For some of my colleagues,John Searle especially, this was the last straw; they wanted to have me fired. When they realized how much paperwork was involved, they gave up. Red tape does have its advantages.

Page 128

"Science has many holes," I said in passing. "A Popperian triviality," shouted Imre Lakatos, who came to every lecture. That shut me up; but I soon smiled at the incident. Lakatos had used a familiar trick: assuming that your audience does not know too much history, you can increase the stature of a modern midget by burdening him with age-old discoveries. In the present case the ancestors were clear - they were the ancient skeptics. Unfortunately this only occurred to me hours after the lecture.

Page 134

"It's your own fault," said my friends. "First you denigrate reason, then you expect people to say something interesting." I saw things differently. I never "denigrated reason," whatever that is, only some petrified and tyrannical versions of it. Nor did I assume that my critique was the end of the matter. It was the beginning, a very difficult beginning - of what? Of a better understanding of the sciences, better societal arrangements, better relations between individuals, a better theater, better movies, and so on.

Page 142/2143

Today I am convinced that there is more to this "anarchism" than rhetoric. The world, including the world of science, is complex and scattered entity that cannot be captured by theories and simple rules. Even as a student I had mocked the intellectual tumors grown by philosophers. I had lost patience when a debate about scientific achievements was interrupted by an attempt to "clarify," where clarification meant translation into some form of pidgin logic. "You are like medieval scholars," I had objected; "they didn't understand anything unless it was translated into Latin." My doubts increased when a reference to logic was used not just to clarify but to evade scientific problems. "We are making a logical point," the philosophers would say when the distance between their principles and the real world became rather obvious. Compared with such doubletalk, Quine's "Two Dogma's of Empiricism" was like a breadth of fresh air. J.L. Austin, whom I heard invited Berkeley, dissolved "philosophy" in a different way. His lectures (later published as Sense and Sensibilia) were simple, but quite effective. Using Ayer's Foundations of Empirical Knowledge, Austin invited us to read the test literally, to really pay attention t o the printed words. This we did. And statements that had seemed obvious and even profound suddenly ceased to make sense. We also realized that ordinary ways of talking were more flexible and more subtle than their philosophical replacements. So there were now two types of tumors to be removed - philosophy of science and general philosophy (ethics, epistemology, etc.) - and two areas of human activity that could survive without them - science and common sense.

...

Nor is there one way of knowing, science; there are many such ways, and before they were ruined by Western civilization they were effective in the sense that they kept people alive and make their existence comprehensible. Science itself has conflicting parts with different strategies, results, metaphysical embroideries. It is a collage, not a system. Moreover, both historical experience and democratic principles suggest that science be kept under public control. Scientific institutions are not "objective"; neither they nor their products confront people like a rock, or a star. They often merge with other traditions, are affected by them, affect them in turn. Decisive scientific movements were inspired by philosophical and religious (or theological) sentiments. The material benefits of science are not at all obvious. There are great benefits, true. But there are also great disadvantages. And the role of the abstract entity "science" in the production of the benefits is anything but clear.

Page 145

Most critics accused me of inconsistency: I am an anarchist, they said, but I still argue. I was astonished by this objection. A person addressing rationalists certainly can argue with them. It doesn't mean he believes that arguments settle a matter, they do. So if the arguments are valid (in their terms), they must accept the result. It was almost as if rationalists regarded argument as a sacred ritual that loses its power when used by a nonbeliever. "He says A," the critics exclaimed when I formulated a premise they accepted to produce a result they did not, "but he obviously opposes A; therefore he is inconsistent." Were philosophers really that unaware of the function of reductio ad absurdum? ...

Page 151/152

What do I think of AM today? Well, scientists have always acted in a loose and rather opportunist way when doing research, though they have often spoken differently when pontificating about it. By now this has become a commonplace among historians of science. In analyzing Galileo's telescopic observations, I indicated how Galileo, without much theorizing, achieved authoritative reports. More recently, historians have suggested that observational levels form entire cultures, whose criteria and rules differ considerably from those of the theoreticians. And in analyzing Galileo's theoretical achievements (in connection with defense of Copernicus - the Two New Sciences are a different matter), I suggested that they involved a deceptive restructuring of the fundamental ideas and relations. Today such processes are being examined in considerable detail. I am far from claiming that the historians engaged in these new types of research have necessarily read AM and were educated by it - nothing would be further from the truth. But it is pleasant to see that some armchair view of mine are being held by scholars working in close contact with scientific practice.

Other armchair views did not fare so well. I am referring to my "relativism," to the idea that cultures are more or less closed entities with their own criteria and procedures, that they are intrinsically valuable and should not be interfered with. To a certain extent this view coincided with the views of anthropologists who, trying to understand the confusing complexity of human existence, divided it into (mostly) non-overlapping, self-contained and self-maintaining domains. But cultures interact, they change, they have resources that go beyond their stable and objective ingredients or, rather, beyond those ingredients which at least some anthropologists have condensed into inexorable cultural rules and laws. Considering how much cultures have learned from each other and how ingeniously they have transformed the material thus assembled, I have come to the conclusion that every culture is potentially all cultures and that special cultural features are changeable manifestations of a single human nature.

Page 164

People, intellectuals especially, seem unable to be content with a little more freedom, a little more happiness, a little more light. Perceiving a small advantage, they seize it, circumscribe it, nail it down, and in this way prepare a New Age of ignorance, darkness, and slavery. It is rather surprising that there are still people who want to help others for personal reasons, because they are kindhearted and not because they have been intimidated by principles. It is even more surprising that some of these people can work in institutions despite the greed, the incompetence, the power struggles that seem to surround the noblest cause. But there are such people, and my wife, Grazia, is one of them.

Page 172/173

I felt that writing papers and giving lectures was on thing, and living was another, and I advised students to seek their center of gravity outside whatever proession they might choose. It was in this connection that I ridiculed the notion of intellectual poperty and the standards that force a writer to refer the most insignificant intellectual fart to its proper source. I knew that refusing to define my life in terms of a profession or a specific actions did not yet give it content, but at least I was aware that there was such a content apart form this or that particular activity. I was aware, but I was not particularly concerned. At any rate, I felt no urge to pursue the matter.

Today it seems to me that love and friendship play a central role and that without them even the noblest of achievements and the most fundamental principles remain pale, empty, and dangerous. And when speaking of love, I don't mean an abstract commitment such as a "love of truth" or a "love of humanity," which taken by themselves, have often encouraged narrow-mindedness and cruelty. Nor do I mean emotional fireworks that soon exhaust themselves. I can't really say what I mean, for that would delimit a phenomenon that is a constantly changing mixture of concern and illumination. Loe lures people out of their limited "individuality," it expands horizons, and it changes every object in their way. Yet there is no merit in this kind of love. It is subjected neither to the intellect no to the will; it is the result of a fortunate constellation of circumstances. It is a gift, not an achievement.

Page 174/175

Looking back at this episode, I conclude that a moral character cannot be created by argument, "education," or an act of will. It cannot be created by any kind of planned action, whether scientific, political, moral, or religious. Like a true love, it is a gift, not an achievement. It depends on accidents such as parental affection, some kind of stability, friendship , and - following therefrom - on a delicate balance between self-confidence and a concern for others. We can create conditions that favor the balance; we cannot create the balance itself. Guilt, responsibility, obligation - these ideas make sense when the balance is given. They are empty words, even obstacles, when it is lacking.

But what can we do in an age like ours that has not yet achieved that balance? What can we do while our criminals, their judges, and henchmen, while the philosophers, poets, prophets who try to force us into their patterns, and while we, who are collaborators or victims or simply bystanders, are still in a barbaric state? The answer is obvious: with a few exceptions we shall act in a barbaric way. We shall punish, kill, meet violence with violence, pit teachers against students, set "intellectual leaders" against the public and against each other; we shall speak about transgressions in resounding moral terms and demand that violations of the law be prevented by force. But while continuing our own lives in this manner, we should at least try to give our children a chance. We should offer them love and security, not principles, and under no circumstances should we burden them with the crimes of the past. They may have to deal for generations with the physical, juridical, and financial consequences of our actions and with the chaos we leave behind; but they are free of any moral, historical, national guilt. As for myself - I certainly cannot undo my wavering and unconcern during the Nazi period. Nor do I think that I can be blamed or held responsible for my behavior. Responsibility assumes that we know the alternatives, that we know how to choose from among them, and that we use this knowledge to push them aside through cowardice, opportunism, or ideological fervor. But I can report what I thought and did, what I think about these and did, what I think about these thoughts and actions today, and why I changed.

Page 180

I urge all writers to who want to inform their fellow citizens to stay away from philosophy, or at least to stop being intimidated and influenced by obfuscators such as Derrida and, instead, to read Schopenhauer or Kant's popular essays.

My favorite quotation:

An Anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice, and so on). Against Method, 23

Some quick references:
PAGE 124 American Medical Association!
PAGE 156 Good Diagram
PAGE 205, 211 -> Incommensurable
Page 218 -> Quite Excellent

On page 25, I drew a connection between consistency theory and the network science concept of preferential attachment.

"Consistency theory is path dependent; exhibits scale free behavior we economize by choosing it."

Here are the passages I found most interesting, challenging, or enlightening:

Page 7

The results obtained so far suggest abolishing the distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification, norms and facts, observational terms and theoretical terms. None of these distinctions plays a role in scientific practice. Attempts to enforce them would have disastrous consequences. Popper's critical rationalism fails for the same reason.

Page 9

Science is an essentially anarchic enterprise: theoretical anarchism is more humanitarian and more likely to encourage progress than its law-and-order alternatives.

Page 10

'The external conditions', writes Einstein, 'which are set for [the scientist] by the facts of experience do not permit him to let himself be too much restricted, in the constriction of his conceptual world, by the adherence to an epistemological system. He, therefore, must appear to the systematic epistemologist as a type of unscrupulous opportunist...'

Page 12

The attempt to increase liberty, to lead a full and rewarding life, and the corresponding attempt to discover the secrets of nature and of man, entails, therefore, the rejection of all universal standards and of all rigid traditions.

Page 15, Footnote 1

One of the few thinkers to understand this feature of the development of knowledge was Niels Bohr: '... he would never try to outline any finished picture, but would patiently go through all the phases of the development of a problem, starting from some apparent paradox, and gradually leading to its elucidation. In fact, he regarded achieved results in any other light than as starting points for further exploration. In speculating about the prospects of some line of investigation, he would dismiss the usual consideration of simplicity, elegance, or even consistency with the remark that such qualities can only be properly judged after the event...' Now science is never a completed process, therefor it is always 'before' the event. Hence simplicity, elegance or consistency are never necessary conditions of (scientific) practice.

Page 22/23 *

Now - how can we possibly examine something we are using all the time? How can we analyse the terms in which we habitually express our most simple and straightforward observations, and reveal their presuppositions? How can we discover the kind of world we presuppose when proceeding as we do?

The answer is clear: we cannot discover it from the inside. We need an external standard of criticism, we need an external standard of criticism, we need a set of alternative assumptions or, as these assumptions will be quite general, constituting, as it were, an entire alternative world, we need to a dreamworld in order to discover the features of the real world we think we inhabit (and which may actually be just another dream-world). The first step in our criticism of familiar concepts and procedures, the first step in our of 'facts', must therefore be an attempt to break the circle. We must invent a new conceptual system that suspends, or clashes with, the most carefully established observational results, confounds the most plausible theoretical principles, and introduces perceptions that cannot form part of the existing perceptual world. This step is again counterinductive. Counterinduction is, therefore, always reasonable and it has always a chance of success.

...

One might therefore get the impression that I recommend a new methodology which replaces induction by counterinduction instead of the customary pair theory/observation. This impression would certainly be mistaken. My intention is , rather, to convince the reader that all methodologies, even the most obvious ones, have their limits.

...

An Anarchist is like an undercover agent who plays the game of Reason in order to undercut the authority of Reason (Truth, Honesty, Justice, and so on).

Footnote 3:

'Dada', says Hans Richter in Dada: Art and Anti-Art, 'not only had no programme, it was against all programmes.' This doe s not execlude the skilful defence of programmes to show the chimerical character of any defence, however 'rational'. (In the same way an actor or a playwright could produce all the outer manifestations of 'deep love' in order to debunk the idea of 'deep love' itself. Example: Pirandello.)

Page 24

They will start with a criticism of the demand that new hypotheses must be consistent with such theories. This demand will be called the consistency condition.

...

To speak more abstractly:consider a theory T' that successfully describes the situation inside domain D'. T' agrees with a finite number of observations (let their class be F) and it agrees with these observations inside a margin M of error. Any alternative that contradicts T' outside F and inside M is supported by exactly the same observations and is therefore acceptable if T' was acceptable (I shall assume that F are the only observations made). The consistency condition is much less tolerant. It eliminates a theory or a hypothesis not because it disagrees with the facts; it eliminates it because it disagrees with another theory, with a theory, moreover, whose confirming instances it shares. It thereby makes the as yet untested part of that theory a measure of validity. The only difference between such a measure and a more recent theory is age and familiarity. Had the younger theory been there first, then consistency condition would have worked in its favour. 'The first adequate theory has the right of priority over equally adequate aftercomers.' (emphasis added - danny) In this respect the effect of the consistency condition is rather similar to the effect of the more traditional methods of transcendental deduction, analysis of essences, phenomenological analysis, linguistic analysis. It contributes to the preservation of the old and familiar not because of any inherent advantage in it but because it is old and familiar. (emphasis added - danny) This is not the only instance where on closer inspection a rather surprising similarity emerges between modern empiricism and some of the school philosophies it attacks.

Page 25/29 *

... Hence the invention of alternatives to the view at the centre of discussion constitutes an essential part of the empirical method. Conversely the fact that the consistency condition eliminates alternatives now shows it to be in disagreement not only with scientific practice but with empiricism as well. By excluding valuable tests it decreases the empirical content of the theories that are permitted to remain (and these, as I have indicated above, will usually be the theories which were there first) ...

Page 29/30

John Stuart Mill has given a fascinating account of the gradual transformation of revolutionary ideas into obstacles to thought. When a new view proposed it faces a hostile audience and excellent reasons are needed to gain for it an even moderately fair hearing. The reasons are produced, but they are often disregarded or laughed out of court, and unhappiness is the fate of the bold inventors. But new generations, being interested in new things, become curious; they consider the reasons, pursue them further and groups of researchers initiate detailed studies. The studies may lead to surprising successes (they also raise lots of difficulties). Now nothing succeeds like success, even if it is success surrounded by difficulties. The theory becomes acceptable as a topic for discussion; it is presented at meetings and large conferences. The diehards of the status quo feel an obligation to study one paper or another, to make a few grumbling comments, and perhaps to join in its exploration. There comes then a moment when the theory is no longer an esoteric discussion topic for advanced seminars and conferences, but enters the public domain. There are introductory texts, popularizations; examination questions start dealing with problems to be solved in its terms. Scientists from distant fields and philosophers, trying to show off, drop a hint here and there, and this often quite uninformed desire to be on the right side is taken as a further sign of the importance of the theory.

Unfortunately, this increase in importance is not accompanied by better understanding; the very opposite is the case. Problematic aspects which were originally introduced with the help of carefully constructed arguments now become basic principles; doubtful points turn into slogans; debates with opponents become standardized and also quite unrealistic, for the opponents, having to express themselves in terms which presuppose what they contest, seem to raise quibbles, or to misuse words. Alternatives are still employed but they no longer contain realistic counter-proposals; they only serve as a background for the splendour of the new theory. Thus we do have success - but it is the success of a manoeuvre carried out in a void, overcoming difficulties that were set up in advance for easy solution. An empirical theory such as quantum mechanics or a pseudo-empirical practice such as modern scientific medicine with its materialistic background can of course point to numerous achievements but any view and any practice that has been around for some time has achievements. The question is whose achievements are better or more important and this question cannot be answered for there are no realistic alternatives to provide a point of comparison. A wonderful invention has turned into a fossil.

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Unanimity of opinion may be fitting for a rigid church, for the frightened or greedy victims of some (ancient, or modern) myth, or for the weak and willing followers of some tyrant. Variety of opinion is necessary for objective knowledge. And a mehtod that encourages variety is also the only method that is compatible with a humanitarian outlook.

Page 49

Ad hoc approximations abound in modern mathematical physics. They play a very important part in the quantum theory of fields and they are an essential ingredient of the correspondence principle. At the moment we are not concerned with the reasons for this fact, we are only concerned with its consequences: ad hoc approximations conceal, and even eliminate, qualitative difficulties. They create a false impression of the excellence of our science. It follows that a philosopher who wants to study the adequacy of science as a picture of the world, or who wants to build up a realistic scientific methodology, must look at modern science with special care. In most cases modern science is more opaque, and more deceptive, than its 16th- and 17th-century ancestors have ever been.

...
To sum up this brief and very incomplete list: wherever we look, whenever we have a little patience and select our evidence in an unprejudiced manner, we find that theories fail adequately to reproduce certain quantitative results, and that they are qualitatively incompetent to a surprising degree. Science gives us theories of great beauty and sophistication. Modern science has developed mathematical structures which exceed anything that has existed so far in coherence generality and empirical success. But in order to achieve this miracle all the existing troubles had to be pushed into the relation between theory and fact, and had to be concealed, by ad hoc hypotheses, ad hoc approximations and other procedures.

Page 51/52

... Not only are facts and theories in constant disharmony, they are never as neatly separated as everyone makes them out to be. Methodological rules speak of 'theories', 'observations' and experimental results' as if these were well--defined objects who's properties are easy to evaluate and which are understood in the same way by all scientists.

However, the material which a scientist actually has at his disposal, his laws, his experimental results, his mathematical techniques, his epistemological prejudices, his attitude towards the absurd consequences of the theories which he accepts, is indeterminate in many ways, ambiguous, and never fully separated from the historical background. It is contaminated by principles which he does not know and which, if known, would be extremely hard to test. Questionable views on cognition, such as the view that our senses, used in normal circumstances, give reliable information about the world, may invade the observation language itself, constituting the observational terms as well as the distinction between veridical and illusory appearance. As a result, observation language itself, constituting the observational terms as well as the distinction between veridical and illusory appearance. As a result, observation language itself, constituting the observational terms as well as the distinction between veridical and illusory appearance. As a result, observation languages may become tied to older layers of speculation which affect, in this roundabout fashion, even the most progressive methodology. (Example: the absolute space-time frame of classical physics which was codified and consecrated by Kant.) The sensory impression, however simple, contains a component that expresses the physiological reaction of the perceiving organism and has no objective correlate. This 'subjective' component often merges with the rest, and forms an unstructured whole which must be subdivided from the outside with the help of counterinductive procedures. (An example is the appearance of a fixed star to the naked eye, which contains the effects of irradiation diffraction, diffusion, restricted by the lateral inhibition of adjacent elements of the retina and is further modified in the brain.)

...

Consideration of all these circumstances, of observation terms, sensory core, auxiliary science, background speculation, suggest that a theory may be inconsistent with the evidence, not because it is incorrect, but because the evidence is contaminated. The theory is threatened because the evidence either contains unanalysed sensations which only partly correspond to external processes, or because it is presented in terms of antiquated views, or because it is evaluated with the help of backward auxiliary subjects. The Copernican theory was in trouble for all these reasons.

...

(Note that the experimental results are supposed to have been obtained with the greatest possible care. Hence 'taking observations, etc. for granted' means 'taking them for granted after the most careful examination of their reliability': for even the most careful examination of an observation statement does not interfere with the concepts in which it is expressed, or with the structure of the sensory image.)

Page 58

In the history of thought, natural interpretations have been regarded either as a priori presuppositions of science, or else as prejudices which must be removed before any serious examination can begin. The first view is that of Kant, and, in a very different manner and on the basis of very different talents, that of some contemporary linguistic philosophers. The second view is due to Bacon (who had predecessors, however, such as the Greek sceptics).

Galileo is one of those rare thinkers who wants neither forever to retain natural interpretations nor altogether to eliminate them.

...

The senses alone, without the help of reason, cannot give us a true account of nature. What is needed for arrive at such a true account are 'the ... senses, accompanied by reasoning.'

Page 61/62/63

Perceptions must be identified, and the identifying mechanism will contain some of the very same elements which govern the use of the concept to be investigated. We never penetrate this concept completely, for we always use part of it in the attempt to find its constituents. There is only one way to get out of this circle, and it consists in using an external measure of comparison, including new ways of relating concepts and percepts.

...

Theories are tested, and possibly refuted, by facts. Facts contain ideological components, older views which have vanished from sight or were perhaps never formulated in an explicit manner. Such components are highly suspicious. First, because of their age and obscure origin: we do not know why and how they were introduced; secondly, because their very nature protects them, and always has protected them, from critical examination. In the event of a contradiction between a new and interesting theory and a collection of firmly established facts, the best procedure, therefore, is not abandon the theory but to use it to discover the hidden principles responsible for the contradiction. Counterinduction is an essential part of such a process of discovery. (Excellent historical example: the arguments against motion and atomicity of Parmenides and Zeno. Diogenes of Sinope, the Cynic, took the simple course that would be taken by many contemporary scientists and all contemporary philosophers: he refuted the arguments by rising and walking up and down. The opposite course, recommended here, has led to much more interesting results, as is witnessed by the history of the case. One should not be too hard on Diogenes, however, for it is also reported that he beat up a pupil who was content with his refutation, exclaiming that he had given reasons which the pupil should not accept without additional reasons of his own.)

Having discovered a particular natural interpretation, how can we examine it and test it? Obviously, we cannot proceed in the usual way, i.e. derive predictions and compare them with 'results of observation'. These results are no longer available. The idea that the senses, employed under normal circumstances, produce correct reports of real events, for example reports of the real motion of physical bodies, has been removed from all observational statements. (Remember that this notion was found to be an essential part of the anti-Copernican argument.) But without it our sensory reactions cease to be relevant for tests. This conclusion was generalized by some older rationalists, who decided to build their science on reason only and ascribed to observation a quite insignificant auxiliary function. Galileo does not adopt this procedure.

If one natural interpretation causes trouble for an attractive view, and if its elimination removes the view from the domain of observation, then the only acceptable procedure is to use other interpretations and to see what happens. The interpretation which Galileo uses restores the senses to their position as instruments of exploration, but only with respect to the reality of relative motion. Motion 'among things which share it in common' is 'non-operative', that is, 'it remains insensible, imperceptible, and without any effect whatever'. Galileo's first step, in his joint examination of the Copernican doctrine and of a familiar but hidden natural interpretation, consists therefore in replacing the latter by a different interpretation. In other words, he introduces a new observation language.

...

Extraordinary cases which might create difficulties are defused with the help of 'adjustor words', such as 'like' or 'analogous', which diver them so that the basic ontology remains unchallenged.

Page 88/89

... I tested the instrument of Galileo's in a thousand ways, both on things here below and on those above. Below it works wonderfully; in the heavens it deceives one, as some fixed stars [Spica Virginis, for example, is mentioned, as well as a terrestrial flame] are seen double. I have as witnesses most excellent men and noble doctors ... and all have admitted the instrument to deceive ... This silenced Galileo and on the 26th he sadly left quite early in the morning .. not even thanking Magini for his splendid meal ... ' Magini wrote to Kepler on 26 May: 'He has achieved nothing, for more than twenty learned men were present; yet nobody has seen the new planets distinctly (new perfecte vidit); he will hardly be able to keep them.' A few months later (in a letter signed by Ruffini) he repeats: 'Only some with sharp vision were convinced to some extent.' After these and other negative reports had reached Kepler from all sides, like a paper avalanche, he asked Galileo for witnesses: 'I do not want to hide it from you that quite a few Italians have sent letters to Prague asserting that they could not see those stars [the moons of Jupiter] with your own telescope. I ask myself how it can e that so many deny the phenomenon, including those who use a telescope. Now, if I consider what occasionally happens to me then I do not at all regard it as impossible that a single person may see what thousands are unable to see ...Yet I regret that the confirmation by others should take so long in turning up ... Therefore, I beseech you, Galileo, give me witnesses as soon as possible ... ' Galileo, in his reply of 19 August, refers to himself, to the Duke of Toscana, and Giuliano de Medici 'as well as many others in Pisa, Florence, Bologna, Venice and Padua, who, however, remain silent and hesitate. Most of them are entirely unable to distinguish Jupiter, or Mars, or even the Moon as a planet ...' - not a very reassuring state of affairs, to say the least.

Page 99/101

Galileo was only slightly acquainted with contemporary optical theory. His telescope gave surprising results on the earth, and these results were duly praised. Trouble was to be expected in the sky, as we know now. Trouble promptly arose: the telescope produced spurious and contradictory phenomena and some its results could be refuted by a simple look with the unaided eye. Only a new theory of telescopic vision could bring order into the chaos (which may have been sill larger, due to the different phenomena seen at the time even with the naked eye) and could separate appearance from reality. Such a theory was developed by Kepler, first in 1604 and then again in 1611.

...

This, then, was the actual situation in 1610 when Galileo published his telescoping findings. How did Galileo react to it? The answer has already been given: he raised the telescope to the state of a 'superior and better sense'.

Page 106

... almost everyone takes it for granted that precise observations, clear principles and well-confirmed theories are already decisive, that they can and must be used here and now to either eliminate the suggested hypothesis, or to make it acceptable, or perhaps even to prove it.

Such a procedure makes sense only if we an assume that the elements of our knowledge - the theories , the observations, the principles of our arguments - are timeless entities which share the same degree of perfection, are al equally accessible, and are related to each other in a way that is independent of the events that produced them. This is, of course, an extremely common assumption. It is taken for granted by most logicians; it underlies the familiar distinction between a context of discovery and a context of justification; and it is often expressed by saying that science deals with propositions and not with statements or sentences.

Page 110/112/113/114/116/117

In the case of Copernicus we need a new meteorology (in the good old sense of the word, as dealing with things below the moon), a new science of physiological optics that deals with the subjective (mind) and the objective (light, medium, lenses, structure of the eye) aspects of vision as well as a new dynamics stating the manner in which the motion of the earth might influence the physical processes at its surface. Obesrvations become relevant only after the processes described by these new subjects have been inserted between the world and the eye. The language in which we express our observations may have to be revised as well so that the new cosmpology receives a fair chance and is not endangered by an unnoticed collaboration of sensations and olde rideas. In sum : what is needed for a test of Copernicus is an entirely new world-view containing a new view of man and of his capacities of knowing.

...

This need to wait, and to ignore large masses of critical observations and measurements, is hardly ever discussed in our methodologies. Disregarding the possibility that a new physics or a new astronomy might have to be judged by a new theory of knowledge and might require entirely new tests, empirically inclined scientists at once confront it with the status quo and announce triumphantly that 'it is not in agreement with facts and received principles'. They are of course right, and even trivially so, but not in the sense intended by them. For at an early stage of development the contradiction only indicates that the old and the new are different and out of phase. It does not show which view is the better one. A judgement of this kind presupposes that the competitors confront each other on equal terms.

....

Thus the new view is arbitrarily separated from data that supported its predecessor and is made more 'metaphysical': a new period in the history of science commences with a backward movement that returns us to an earlier stage where theories were more vague and had smaller empirical content. This backward movement is not just an accident; it has a definite function; it is essential if we want to overtake the status quo, for it gives us the time and the freedom that are needed for developing the main view in detail, and for finding the necessary auxiliary sciences.

...

How can we convince them that the success of the status quo is only apparent and is bound to be shown as such in 500 years or more, when there is not a single argument on our side (and remember that the illustrations I used to paragraphs earlier derive their force from the successes of classical physics and were not available to Copernicans). It is clear that the allegiance to the new ideas will have to be brought about by means other than arguments. It will have to brought about by irrational means such as propaganda, emotion, ad hoc hypotheses, and appeal to prejudices of all kinds. We need these 'irrational means' such as propaganda, emotion, ad hoc hypotheses, and appeal to prejudices of all kinds. We need these 'irrational means' in order to uphold what is nothing but a blind faith until we have found the auxiliary sciences, the facts, the arguments that turn the faith into sound 'knowledge'.

...

The ideas survived and they now are said to be in agreement with reason. They survived because prejudice, passion, conceit, errors, sheer pigheadedness, in short because all the elements that characterize the context of discovery, opposed the dictates of reason and because these irrational elements were permitted to have their way. To express it differently: Copernicanism and other 'rational' views exist today only because reason was overruled at some time in their past. (The opposite is also true: witchcraft and other 'irrational' views have ceased to be influential only because reason was overruled at some time in their past.)

...

The first step on the way to a new cosmology, I have said, is a step back: apparently relevant evidence is pushed aside, new data are brought in by ad hoc connections, the empirical content of science is drastically reduced.

Page 119

'There is no independent interpretation, ' says Carnap and yet an idea such as the idea of the motion of the earth, which was inconsistent with the contemporary evidence to be irrelevant and which was therefore cut from the most important facts of contemporary astronomy managed to become a nucleus, a crystallization point for the aggregation of other inadequate views which gradually increased in articulation and finally fused into a new cosmology including new kinds of evidence. There is no better account of this process than the description which John Stuart Mill has left us of the vicissitudes of his education. Referring to the explanations which his father gave him on logical maters he writes: 'The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time; but they were not therefore useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallize upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my notice afterwards. In exactly the same manner the Copernican view, though devoid of cognitive content from the point of view of a strict empiricism or else refuted, was needed in the construction of the supplementary sciences even before it became testable with their help and even before it, in turn, provided them with supporting evidence of the most forceful kind.

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When the 'Pythagorean idea' of the motion of the earth was revived by Copernicus it met with difficulties which exceeded the difficulties encountered by contemporary Ptolemaic astronomy. Strictly speaking, one had to regard it as refuted. Galileo, who was convinced of the truth of the Copernican view and who did not share the quite common, though by no means universal, belief in a stable experience, looked for new kinds of fact which might support Copernicus and still be acceptable to all. Such facts he obtained in two different ways. First, by the invention of his telescope, which changed the sensory core of everyday experience and replaced it by puzzling and unexplained phenomena; and by his principle of relativity and his dynamics, which changed its conceptual components. Neither the telescopic phenomena nor the new ideas of motion were acceptable to common sense (or to the Aristotelians). Besides, the associated theories could be easily shown to be false. Yet these false theories, these unacceptable phenomena, were transformed by Galileo and converted into strong support of Copernicus. The whole rich reservoir of the everyday experience and of the intuition of his readers is utilized in the argument, but the facts which they are invited to recall are arranged in a new way, approximations are made, known effects are omitted, different conceptual lines are drawn, so that a new kind of experience arises, manufactured almost out of thin air. This new experience is then solidified by insinuating that the reader has been familiar with it all the time. It is solidified and soon accepted as gospel truth, despite the fact that its conceptual components are vastly more speculative than are the conceptual components of common sense. Following positivistic usage we may therefore say that Galileo's science rests on an illustrated metaphysics. The distortion permits Galileo to advance but it prevents almost everyone else from making his effort the basis of a critical philosophy (for a long time emphasis was put either on his mathematics, or on his alleged experiments, or on his frequent appeal to the 'truth', and his propagandistic moves were altogether neglected). I suggest that what Galileo did was to let refuted theories support each other, that he built in this way a new world-view which was only loosely (if at all!) connected with the preceding cosmology (everyday experience included), that he established fake connections with the perceptual elements of this cosmology which are only now being replaced by genuine theories (physiological optics, theory of continua), and that whenever possible he replaced old facts by a new type of experience which he simply invented for the purpose of supporting Copernicus. Remember, incidentally, that Galileo's procedure drastically reduces the content of dynamics: Aristotelian dynamics was a general theory of change comprising locomotion, qualitative change, generation and corruption. Galileo's dynamics and its successors deal with locomotion only, other kinds of motion being pushed aside with the promissory note (due to Democritos) that locomotion will eventually be capable of comprehending all motion. Thus, a comprehensive empirical theory of motion is replaced by a much narrower theory plus a metaphysics of motion, just as an 'empirical' experience is replaced by an experience that contains speculative elements. This, I suggest, was the actual procedure followed by Galileo. Proceeding in this way he exhibited a style, a sense of humour, an elasticity and elegance, and an awareness of the valuable weaknesses of human thinking, which has never been equalled in the history of science. Here is an almost inexhaustible source of material for methodological speculation and, much more importantly, for the recovery of those features of knowledge which not only inform, but which also delight us.

Page 124

So far the argument was purely intellectual. I tried to show that neither logic nor experience can limit speculation and that outstanding researchers often transgressed widely accepted limits. But concepts have not only a logical content; they also have associations, they give rise to emotions, they are connected with images. These associations, emotions and images are essential for the way in which we relate to our fellow human beings. Removing them or changing them in a fundamental way may perhaps make our concepts more 'objective', but it often violates important social constraints.

Page 130

The attitude of the American Medical Association towards lay practitioners is as rigid as the attitude of the Church was toward lay interpreters - and it has the blessing of the law. Experts, or ignoramuses having acquired the formal insignia of expertise, always tried and often succeeded in securing for themselves exclusive rights in special domains. Any criticism of the rigidity of the Roman Church applies also to its modern scientific and science-connected successors.

Page 148/149

The activities which according to Feigl belong to the context of discovery are, therefore, not just different from what philosophers say about justification, they are in conflict with it. Scientific practice does not contain two contexts moving side by side, it is complicated mixture of procedures and we are faced by the question if this mixture should be left as it is, or if it should be replaced by a more 'orderly' arrangement. This is part one of the argument. Now we have seen that science as we know it today could not exist without a frequent overruling of the context of justification. This is part two of the argument. The conclusion is clear. Part one shows that we do not have a difference, but a mixture. Part two shows that replacing the mixture by an order that contains discovery on one side and justification on the other would have ruined science ...

Page 149/150

Finally, we have discovered that learning does not go from observation to theory but always involves both elements. Experience arises together with theoretical assumptions not before them, and an experience without theory is just as incomprehensible as is (allegedly) a theory without experience: eliminate part of the theoretical knowledge of a sensing subject and you have a person who is completely disoriented and incapable of carrying out the simplest action. Eliminate further knowledge and his sensory world (his 'observation language') will start disintegrating, colours and other simple sensations will disappear until he is in a stage even more primitive than a small child. ...

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To sum up: wherever we look, whatever examples we consider, we see that the principles of critical rationalism (take falsifications seriously, increase content; avoid ad hoc hypotheses; 'be honest' - whatever that means; and so on) and, a fortiori, the principles of logical empiricism (be precise; base your theories on measurements; avoid vague and untestable ideas; and so on), though practiced in special areas, give an inadequate account of the past development of science as a whole and are liable to hinder it in the future. They give an inadequate account of science because science is much more 'sloppy' and 'irrational' than its methodological image. And they are liable to hinder it because the attempt to make science more 'rational' and more precise is bound to wipe it out, as we have seen. The difference between science and methodology which is such an obvious fact of history, therefore, indicates a weakness of the latter, and perhaps of the 'laws of reason' as well. For what appears as 'sloppiness', 'chaos', or 'opportunism' when compared with such laws has a most important function in the development of those very theories which we today regard as essential parts of our knowledge of nature. These 'deviations', these 'errors', are preconditions of progress. They permit knowledge to survive in the complex and difficult world which we inhabit, they permit us to remain free and happy agents. Without 'chaos', no knowledge. Without a frequent dismissal of reason, no progress. Ideas which today form the very basis of science exist only because there were such things as prejudice, conceit, passion; because these things opposed reason; and because they were permitted to have their way. We have to conclude, then, that even within science reason cannot and should not be allowed to be comprehensive and that it must often be overruled, or eliminated, in favour of other agencies. There is not a single rule that remains valid under all circumstances and not a single agency to which appeal can always be made.

Page 159

Science needs people who are adaptable and inventive, not rigid imitators of 'established' behavioral patterns.

Page 160/161/162

In this case one class of standards is set against another such class - and this is quite legitimate: each organization, each party, each religious group has a right to defend its particular form of life and all the standards it contains. But scientists go much further. Like the defenders of The One True Religion before them they insinuate that their standards are essential for arriving at the Truth, or for getting Results and they deny such authority to the demands of the politician. They oppose all political interference, and they fall over each other trying to remind the listener, or the reader, of the disastrous outcome of the Lysenko affair.

...

Science is only one of the many instruments people invented to cope with their surroundings. It is not the only one, it is not infallible and it has become too powerful, to practical aim rationalists want to realize with the help of their methodology.

...

Rationalists are concerned about intellectual pollution. I share this concern. Illiterate and incompetent books flood the market, empty verbiage full of strange and esoteric terms claims to express profound insights, 'experts' without brains, character, and without even a modicum of intellectual, stylistic, emotional temperament tell us about our 'condition' and the means for improving it, and they do not only preach to us who might be able to look through them, they are let loose on our children and permitted to drag them down into their own intellectual squalor. 'Teachers' using grades and the fear of failure mould the brains of the young until they have lost every ounce of imagination they might once have possessed. This is a disastrous situation, and one not easily mended. But I do not see how a rationalistic methodology can help. As far as I am concerned the first and the most pressing problem is to get education out of the hands of the 'professional educators'. The constraints of grades, competition, regular examination must be removed and we must also separate the process of learning from the preparation for a particular trade. (Emphasis Added - Danny) I grant that business, religions, special professions such as science or prostitution, have a right to demand that their participants and/or practitioners conform to standards they regard as important, and that they should be able to ascertain their competence. I also admit that this implies the need for special types of education that prepare a man or a woman for the corresponding 'examinations'. The standards taught need to be 'rational' or 'reasonable' in any sense, though they will be usually presented as such; it suffices that they are accepted by the groups one wants to join, be it now Science, or Big Business, or The One True Religion. After all, in a democracy 'reason' has just as much right to be heard and to be expressed as 'unreason' especially in view of the fact that one man's 'reason' is the other man's insanity. But one thing must be avoided at all costs: the special standards which define special subjects and special professions must not be allowed to permeate general education and they must not be made the defining property of a 'well-educated person'. General education should prepare citizens to choose between the standards, or to find their way in a society that contains groups committed to various standards, but it must under no condition bend their minds so that they conform to the standards of one particular group. The standards will be considered, they will be discussed, children will be encouraged to get proficiency in the more important subjects, but only as one gets proficiency in a game, that is, without serious commitment and without robbing the mind of its ability to play other games as well. Having been prepared in this way a young person may decide to devote the rest of his life to a particular profession and he may start taking it seriously forthwith. This 'commitment' should be the result of a conscious decision, on the basis of a fairly complete knowledge of alternatives, and not a foregone conclusion.

...

It seems to me that such a change in education and, as a result, in perspective will remove a great deal of the intellectual pollution rationalists deplore. The change of perspective makes it clear that there are many ways of ordering the world that surrounds us, that the hated constraints of one set of standards may be broken by freely accepting standards of a different kind, and that there is no need to reject all order and to allow oneself to be reduced to a whining stream of consciousness. A society that is based on a set of well-defined and restrictive rules, so that being human becomes synonymous with obeying these rules, forces the dissenter into a no-man's-land of no rules at all and thus robs him of his reason and his humanity. It is the paradox of modern irrationalism that its proponents silently identify rationalism with order and articulate speech and thus see themselves forced to promote stammering and absurdity - many forms of 'mysticism' and 'existentialism' are impossible without a firm but unrealized commitment to some principles of the despised ideology (just remember the 'theory' that poetry is nothing but emotions colourfully expressed). Remove the principles, admit the possibility of many different forms of life, and such phenomena will disappear like a bad dream.

Page 163

Charlatans have existed at all times and in the most tightly-knit professions. Some of the examples which Lakatos mentions seem to indicate that the problem is created by too much control and not by too little. This is especially true of the new 'revolutionaries' and their 'reform' of the universities. Their fault is that they are Puritans and not that they are libertines. Besides, who would expect that cowards will improve the intellectual climate more readily than will libertines? (Einstein saw this problem and he therefore advised people not to connect their research with their profession: research has to be free from the pressures which professions are likely to impose.) We must also remember that those rare cases where liberal methodologies do encourage empty verbiage and loose thinking ('loose' from one point of view, though perhaps not from another) may be inevitable in the sense that the guilty liberalism is also a precondition of a free and human life.

Page 164

I have much sympathy with the view, formulated clearly and elegantly by Whorf (and anticipated by Bacon), that languages and the reaction patterns they involve are not merely instruments for describing events (facts, states of affair), but that they are also shapers of events (facts, states of affairs), that their 'grammar' contains a cosmology, a comprehensive view of the world, of society, of the situation of man which influences thought, behaviour, perception.

Footnote 1:

According to Whorf 'the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing system for voicing ideas, but rather is itself a shaper of ideas, the programme and guide for the individual's mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade.'

Page 171/172

We also find that realism often precedes more schematic forms of presentation. This is true of the Old Stone Age, of Egyptian Art, of Attic Geometric Art. In all these cases the 'archaic style' is the result of a conscious effort (which may of course be aided, or hindered, by unconscious tendencies and physiological laws) rather than a natural reaction to internal deposits of external stimuli. Instead of looking for the psychological causes of a 'style' we should therefore rather try to discover its elements, analyse their function, compare them with other phenomena of the same culture (literary style, sentence construction, grammar, ideology) and thus arrive at an outline of the underlying world-view including an account of the way in which this world-view influences perception, thought, argument, and of the limits it imposes on the roaming about of the imagination. We shall see that such an analysis of outlines provides a better understanding of the process of conceptual change than either a naturalistic account which recognizes only one 'reality' and orders artworks by their closeness to it, or trite slogans such as 'a critical discussion and and a comparison of ... various frameworks is always possible.' Of course, some kind of comparison is always possible (for example, one physical theory may sound more melodious when read aloud to the accompaniment of a guitar than another physical theory). But lay down specific rules for the process of comparison, such as the rules of logic as applied to the relation of content classes, or some simple rules of perspective and you will find exceptions, undue restrictions, and you will be forced to talk your way out of trouble at every turn. It is much more interesting and instructive to examine what kinds of things can be said (represented) and what kinds of things cannot be said (represented) if the comparison has to take place within a certain specified and historically well-entrenched framework. For such an examination we must go beyond generalities and study frameworks in detail. I start with an account of some examples of the archaic style.

Page 173/174/175

... (We have what is called a paratactic aggregate: the elements of such an aggregate are all given equal importance, the only relation between them is sequential, there is no hierarchy, no part is presented as being subordinate to and determined by others.) The picture reads: ferocious lion, peaceful kid, swallowing of kid by lion.

The need to show every essential part of a situation often leads to a separation of parts which are actually in contact. The picture becomes a list. Thus a charioteer standing in a carriage is shown as standing above the floor (which is presented in its fullest view) and unencumbered by the rails so that his feet, the floor, the rails can all be clearly seen. No trouble arises if we regard the painting as a visual catalogue of the parts of an event rather than as an illusory rendering of the event itself (no trouble arises when we say: his feet touched the floor which is rectangular, and he was surrounded by a railing...) But such an interpretation must be learned, it cannot be simply read off the picture.

...

(Being able to 'read' a certain style also includes knowledge of what features are irrelevant Not every feature of an archaic list has representational value just as not every feature of a written sentence plays a role in articulating its content. This was overlooked by the Greeks who started inquiring into the reasons for the 'dignified postures' of Egyptian statues (already Plato commented on this). Such a question 'might have struck an Egyptian artist as it would strike us if someone inquired about the age or the mood of the king on the chessboard'.)

...

Archaic pictures are paratactic aggregates, not hypotactic systems. The elements of the aggregate may be physical parts such as heads, arms, wheels, they may be states of affair such as the fact that a body is dead, they may be actions, such as the action of swallowing.

Page 176

Such a realistic interpretation of styles would be in line with Whorf's thesis that in addition to being instruments for describing events (which may have other features, not covered by any description) languages are also shapers of events (so that there is a linguistic limit to what can be said in a given language, and this limit coincides with the limits of the thing itself) but it would go beyond it by including non-linguistic means of representation.

Page 184/185/186

Similar remarks apply to the 'theory of knowledge' that is implicit in this early world view. The Muses in Iliad, 2.284ff, have knowledge because they are close to things - they do not have to rely on rumours - and because they know all the many things that are of interest to the writer, one after the other. 'Quantity, not intensity is Homer's standard of judgement' and of knowledge as becomes clear from such words as ... 'much pondering' and 'much thinking', as well as from later criticisms such as 'Learning of many things does not teach intelligence'. An interest in, and a wish to understand, many amazing things (such as earthquakes, eclipses of the sun and the moon, the paradoxical rising and falling of the Nile), each of them explained in its own particular way and without the use of universal principles, persists in the coastal descriptions of the 8th and 7th (and later) centuries (which simply enumerate the tribes, tribal habits, and coastal formations that are successively met during the journey), and even a thinker such as Thales is satisfied with making many interesting observations and providing many explanations without trying to tie them together in a system. (The first thinker to construct a 'system' was Anaximander, who followed Hesiod.) Knowledge so conceived is not obtained by trying to grasp an essence behind the reports of the senses, but by (1) putting the observer in the right position relative to the object (process, aggregate), by inserting him into the appropriate place in the complex pattern that constitutes the world, and (2) by adding up the elements which are noted under these circumstances. It is the result of a complex survey carried out from suitable vantage points. One may doubt a vague report, or a fifth-hand account, but it is not possible to doubt what one can clearly see with one's own eyes. The object depicted or described is the proper arrangements of the elements which may include foreshortenings and other perspectoid phenomena. The fact that an oar looks broken in water lacks here the skeptical force it assumes in another ideology. Just as Achilles sitting does not make us doubt that he is swift-footed - as a matter of fact, we would start doubting his swiftness if it turned out that he is in principle incapable of sitting - in the very same way the bent oar does not make us doubt that it is perfectly straight in air - as a matter of fact, we would start doubting its straightness if it did not look bent in water. The bent oar is not an aspect that denies what another aspect says about the nature of the oar, it is a particular part (situation) of the real oar that is not only compatible with its straightness, but that demands it: the objects of knowledge are as additive as the visible lists of the archaic artist and the situations described by the archaic poet.

Page 193/194

8. Logicians and philosophers of science do not see the situation in this way. Being both unwilling and unable to carry out an informal discussion, they demand that the main terms of the discussion be 'clarified'. And to 'clarify' the terms of a discussion does not mean to study the additional and as yet unknown properties of the domain in question which one needs to make them fully understood, it means to fill them with existing notions from the entirely different domain of logic and common sense, preferably observational ideas, until they sound common themselves, and to take care that the process of filling obeys the accepted laws of logic. The discussion is permitted to proceed only after its initial steps have been modified in this manner. So the course of an investigation is deflected into the narrow channels of things already understood and the possibility of fundamental conceptual discovery (or of fundamental conceptual change) is considerably reduced. Fundamental conceptual change, on the other hand, presupposes new world-views and new languages capable of expressing them Now, building a new world-view, and a corresponding new language, is a process that takes time, in science as well as in meta-science. The terms of the new language become clear only when the process is fairly advanced, so that each single word is the centre of numerous lines connecting it with other words, sentences, bits of reasoning, gestures which sound absurd at first but which become perfectly reasonable once the connections are made. Arguments, theories, terms, points of view and debates can therefore be clarified in at least two different ways: (a) in the manner already described, which leads back to the familiar ideas and treats the new as a special case of things already understood, and (b) by incorporation into a language of the future, which means that one must learn to argue with unexplained terms and to use sentences for which no clear rules of usage are yet available. Just as a child who starts using words without yet understanding them, who adds more and more uncomprehended linguistic fragments to his playful activity, discovers the sense-giving linguistic fragments to his playful activity, discovers the sense-giving principle only after he has been active in this way for a long time - activity being a necessary presupposition of the final blossoming forth of sense - in the very same way the inventor of a new world-view (and the philosopher of science who tries to understand his procedure) must be able to talk nonsense until the amount of nonsense crated by him and his friends is big enough to give sense to all its parts. There is again to better account of this process than the description which John Stuart Mill has left us of the vicissitudes of his education. Referring to the explanations which his father gave him on logical matters, he wrote: 'The explanations did not make the matter at all clear to me at the time, but they were not therefor useless; they remained as a nucleus for my observations and reflections to crystallise upon; the import of his general remarks being interpreted to me, by the particular instances which came under my notice afterwards.' Building a new language (for understanding the world, or knowledge) is a process of exactly the same kind except that the initial 'nuclei' are not given, but must be invented. We see here how essential it is to learn talking in riddles, and how disastrous an effect the drive for instant clarity must have on our understanding. (In addition, such a drive betrays a rather narrow and barbaric mentality: 'To use words and phrases in an easy going way without scrutinizing them too curiously is not, in general, a mark of ill breading; on the contrary, there is something low bred in being too precise...')

Page 198

The archaic cosmology (which from no on I shall call cosmology A) contains things, events, their parts; it does not contain appearances. Complete knowledge of an object is complete enumeration of its parts and peculiarities. Humans cannot have complete knowledge. There are too many things, too many events, too many situations (Iliad, 2.488), and they can be close to only a few of them (Iliad, 2.485) But although humans cannot have complete knowledge, they can have a sizable amount of it. The wider their experience, the great the number of adventures, of things seen, heard, read, the greater their knowledge.

The new cosmology (cosmology B) that arises in the 7th to 5th centuries BC distinguishes between much-knowing and true knowledge, and it warns against trusting 'custom born of manifold experience'. Such a distinction and such a warning makes sense only in a world whose structure differs from the structure of A. In one version which played a large role in the development of Western civilization and which underlies such problems as the problem of the existence of theoretical entities and the problem of alienation other new events form what one might call a True World, while the events of everyday life are no appearances that are but its dim and misleading reflection. The True World is simple and coherent, and it can be described in a uniform way. So can every act by which its elements are comprehended: a few abstract notions replace the numerous concepts that were used in cosmology A for describing how humans might be 'inserted' into their surroundings and for expressing the equally numerous types of information thus gained. From now on there is only one important type of information, and that is: knowledge.

Page 199

In painting this leads to the development of what one can only call systematic methods for deceiving the eye: the archaic artist treats the surface on which he paints as a writer might treat a piece of papyrus; it is> a real surface, it is supposed to be seen as a real surface (though attention is not always directed to it) and the marks he draws on it are comparable to the lines of a blueprint or the letters of a word. They are symbols that inform the reader of the structure of the object, of its parts, of the way in which the parts are related to each other. The simple drawing overleaf, for example, may represent thee paths meeting at a point. The artist using perspective on the other hand, regards the surface and the marks he puts on it as stimuli that trigger the illusion of an arrangement of three-dimensional objects. The illusion occurs because the human mind is capable of producing illusory experiences when properly stimulated.

Page 200/201

Just as a trraveller explores all parts of a strange country and describes them in a 'periegesis' that enumerates its peculaiarities, one by one, in the same way the student of simple objects such as oars, boats, horses, people inserts himself into the 'major oar-situaitons', apprehends them in the appropriate way, and reports them in a list of properties, events, relations. And just as detailed periegesis exhausts what can be said about a country, in the same way a detailed list exhausts what can be said about an object. 'Broken in water' belongs to the oar as does 'straight to the hand'; it is 'equally real'. In cosmology B, however, 'broken in water' is a 'semblance' that contradicts what is suggested by the 'semblance' of straightness and thus shows the basic untrustworthiness of all semblances. The concept of an object has changed from the concept of an aggregate of equi-important perceptible parts to the concept of an imperceptible essence underlying a multitude of deceptive phenomena. (We may guess that the appearance of an object has changed in a similar way, that objects now look less 'flat' than before.)

...

The elements of A are relatively independent parts of objects which enter into external relations. They participate in aggregates without changing their intrinsic properties. The 'nature' of a particular aggregate is determined by its parts and by the way in which the parts are related to each other. Enumerate the parts in the proper order, and you have the object. This applies to physical aggregates, to humans (minds and bodies), to animals, but it also applies to social aggregates such as the honour of a warrior.

The elements of B fall into two classes: essences (objects) and appearances (of objects - what follows is true only of some rather streamlined versions of B). Objects (events, etc.) may again combine. They may form harmonious totalities where each part gives meaning to the whole and receives meaning from it (an extreme case is Parmenides where isolated parts are not only unrecognizable, but altogether unthinkable). Aspects properly combined do not produce objects, but psychological conditions for the apprehension of phantoms which are but other aspects, and particularly misleading ones at that (they look so convincing). No enumeration of aspects is identical with the object (problem of induction). (Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 202 *

Now one might be inclined to explain the transition as follows: archaic man has a limited cosmology; he discovered some things, he missed others. His universe lacks important objects, his language lacks important concept, his perception lacks important structures. Add the missing elements to cosmos A, the missing terms to language A, the missing structures to the perceptual world of A, and you obtain cosmos B, language B, perception B.

Some time ago I called the theory underlying such an explanation the 'hole theory' or the 'Swiss cheese theory' of language (and other means of representation). According to the whole theory every cosmology (every language, every mode of perception) has sizable lacunae which can be filled, leaving everything else unchanged. The hole theory is beset by numerous difficulties. In the present case there is the difficulty that cosmos B does not contain a single element of cosmos A. Neither common-sense terms, nor philosophical theories; neither painting and statuary, nor artistic conceptions; neither religion, nor theological speculation contain a single element of A once the transition to B has been completed. This is a historical fact.

Footnote 111:

This fact is not easy to establish. May presentations of A, including some very detailed and sophisticated ones, are infected by B-concepts. An example is quoted in footnote 97 to the present chapter. Here as elsewhere only the anthropological method can lean to knowledge that is more than a reflection of wishful thinking. ...

Footnote 97 (198):
... (referring to Homer), speaks of a 'knowledge that proceeds from appearances and draws their multitude together in a unit which is then posited as their true essence'. This may apply to the Presocratics, it does not apply to Homer. In the case of Homer 'the world is comprehended ass the sum of things, visible in space, and not as reason acting intensively'

Page 203/204

Precisely the same remarks apply to the 'discovery' of an individual I that is different from faces, behavior, objective 'mental states' of the type that occur in A, to the 'discovery' of a substance behind 'appearances' (formerly elements of A), or to the 'discovery' that honour may be lacking despite the presence of all its outer manifestations. A statement such as Heraclitus' 'you could not find the limits of the soul though you are travelling every way, so deep is its logos (Diels, B 45) does not just add to cosmos A, it undercuts the principles which are needed in the construction of A-type 'mental states' while Heraclitus' rejection of ... and Parmenides' rejection of an ... undercuts rules that govern the construction of every single fact of A. An entire world-view, an entire universe of thought, speech, perception was dissolved.

It is interesting to see how this process of dissolving manifests itself in particular cases. In his long speech in Iliad, 9.308ff, Achilles wants to say that honour may be absent even though all its outer manifestations are present. The terms of the language he uses are so intimately tied to definite social situations that he 'has no language to express his disillusionment. Yet he expresses it, and in a remarkable way. He does it by misusing the language he disposes of. He asks questions that cannot be answered and makes demands that cannot be met. He acts in a most 'irrational' way.

Page 205 *

Remember the circumstancews which are responsible for this situation. EWe have a point of view (theory, framework, cosmos mode of representaiton) whose elements (concepts, 'facts', pictures) are built up in accordance with certain principles of construction. The principles involve something like a 'clsoure': there are things that cannot be said, or 'discovered', without violating the principles (which does not> mean contradicting them). Say the things, make the discovery, and the principles are suspended. Now take those constructive principles that underlie every element of the cosmos (of the theory), every fact (every concept). Let us call such principles universal principles of the theory in question. Suspending universal principles means suspending all facts and all concepts. Finally, let us call a discovery, or a statement, or an attitude incommensurable with the cosmos (the theory, the framework) if it suspends some of its universal principles. Heraclitus B 45 is incommensurable with psychological part of A: it suspends the rules that are needed for constituting individuals and puts an end to all A-facts about individuals (phenomena corresponding to such facts may of course persist for a considerable time as not all conceptual changes lead to changes in perception and as there exist conceptual changes that never leave a trace in the appearances; however, such phenomena can no longer be described in the customary way and cannot therefore count as observations of the customary 'objective facts')

Page 206

How is the 'irrationality' of the transition period overcome? It is overcome in the usual way (cf. item 8 above), i.e. by the determined production of nonsense until the material produced is rich enough to permit the rebels to reveal, and everyone else to recognize, new universal principles. (Such revealing need not consist in writing the principles down in the form of clear and precise statements.) Madness turns into sanity provided it is sufficiently rich and sufficiently regular to function as the basis of a new world-view. And when that happens, then we have a new problem: how can the old view be compared with the new view?

Page 207

Now it seems to me that the relation between, say, classical mechanics (interpreted realistically) and quantum mechanics (interpreted in a ccordance with the views of Niels Bohr), or between Newtonian mechanics (interpreted realistically) and the general theory of relativity (also interpreted realistically) is in many respects similar to the relation between cosmology A and cosmology B. Thus every fact of Newton's mechanics presumes that shapes, masses, periods are changed only by physical interactions and this presumption is suspended by the theory of relativity. Similarly the quantum theory constitutes facts in accordance with the uncertainty relations which are suspended by the classical approach.

Page 209

Whorf ... says that 'time, velocity, and matter are not essential to the construction of a consistent picture of the universe, and he asserts that 'we cut up nature, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are partial to an agreement to organize it in this way', which would seem to imply widely different languages posit not just different ideas for the ordering of the same facts, but that they posit also different facts.

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Page 216/217/218 *

I think that incommensurability turns up when we sharpen our concepts in the manner demanded by the logical positivists and their offspring and that it undermines their ideas on explanation, reduction and progress. Incommensurability disappears when we use concepts as scientists use them, in an open, ambiguous and often counter intuitive manner. Incommensurability is a problem for philosophers not for scientists, though the latter may become psychologically. confused by unusual things. I arrived at the phenomenon while studying the early literature on the basic statements and by considering the possibility of perceptions radically different from our own. In my thesis I examined the meaning of observational statements. I considered the idea that such statements describe 'what is given' and tried to identify this 'given' Phenomenologically this did not seem to be possible; we notice objects, their properties, their relations, not 'the given'. It is of course true that we can give quick reports on the properties of everyday objects but this does not change them into non-objects but only shows that we have a special relation to them. Phenomenologically what is given consists of the same things which can also exist unobserved - it is not a new kind of object. Special arrangements such as the reduction screen introduce new conditions, they do not reveal ingredients in objects we already know. ResultL the given cannot be isolated by observation.

The second possibility was to isolate it by logical means: what is given can be ascertained with certainty, hence I obtain the the given contained in the table before me by removing from the statement 'there is a table' all the consequence that make future corrections possible. This shows that the given is the result of an unreasonable decision: untestable statements cannot serve as a basis for science.

Following this argument I introduced the assumption that the meaning of observation statements depends on the nature of the objects described and, as this nature depends on the most advanced theories, on the content of these theories. Or as I formulated in my first English paper on the topic: the interpretation of an observation language is determined by the theories which we use to explain what we observe, and it changes as soon as these theories change. In a word: observation statements are not just theory-laden (the views of Toulmin, Hanson and apparently also Khun) but fully theoretical and the distinction between observation statements ('protocol statements' in the terminology of the Vienna Circle) and theoretical statements is a pragmatic distinction, not a semantic distinction' there are no special 'observational meanings'. Thus in the same year as Hanson (Hanson's Patterns of Discovery appeared in 1958) and four years before Khun I formulated a thesis a weaker form of which became very popular later on. Moreover, my thesis not only was stronger than the thesis of theory-ladenness, it also came from a different source. For while Toulmin and Hanson were inspired by Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations I I started from and returned to ideas that had been developed in the Vienna Circle - and I said so. Quine, whose philosophy shows close connections to the philosophy of the Vienna Circle, also used a criterion of observability that is rather similar to mine.

...

Now considering any interaction of traditions we may ask tow kinds of questions which I shall call observer questions and participant questions respectively.

Observer questions are concerned with the details of an interaction. They want to give a historical account of the interaction and, perhaps, formulate laws, or rules of thumb, that apply to all interactions. Hegel's triad: position, negation, synthesis (negation of the negation) is such a rule.

Participant questions deal with the attitude the members of a practice or a tradition are supposed to take towards the (possible) intrusion of another. The observer asks: what happens and what is going to happen? the participant asks: what shall I doShall I support the interaction? Shall I oppose it? Or shall I simply forget about it?

In the case of the Copernican Revolution, for example, the observer asks: what impact did Copernicus have on Wittenberg astronomers at about 1560? how did they react to his work? Did they change some of their beliefs and if so, why? Did their change of opinion have an effect on other astronomers, or were they an isolated group, not taken seriously by the rest of the profession?

The question of a participant are: this is a strange book indeed - should I take it seriously? Should I study it in detail or only superficially or should I simply continue as before? The main theses seem absurd at first sight - but, maybe, there is something in them? How shall I find out? And so on.

It is clear that observer questions must take the questions of the participants into account and participants will also listen most carefully (if they are inclined that way, that is) to what observers have to say on the matter - but the intention is different in both cases. Observers want to know what is going on, participants what to do. An observer describes a life he does not lead (except accidentally), a participant wants to arrange his own life and asks himself what attitude to take towards the things that may influence it.

Participants can be opportunists and act in a straightforward and practical way. In the late 16th century many princes became Protestants because this furthered their interests and some of their subjects became Protestants in order to be left in peace. When British colonial official replaced the laws and habits of foreign tribes and cultures by their own 'civilized' laws the latter were often accepted because they were the laws of the king, or because one had no way to oppose them, and not because of any intrinsic excellence. The source of their power and 'validity' was clearly understood, both by the officials and by the more astute of their unfortunate subjects. In the sciences and especially in pure mathematics one often pursues a particular line of research not because it is regard as intrinsically perfect, but because one wants to see where it leads. I shall call the philosophy underlying such an attitude of a participant a pragmatic philosophy.

A pragmatic philosophy can flourish only if the traditions to be judged and the developments to be influenced are seen as temporary makeshifts and not as lasting constituents of thoughts and action. A participant with a pragmatic philosophy views practices and traditions much as traveller views foreign countries. Each country has features he likes and things he abhors. In deciding to settle down a traveller will have to compare climate, landscape, language, temperament of the inhabitants, possibilities of change, privacy, looks of male and female population, theatre, opportunities for advancement, quality of vices and so on. He will also remember that his initial demands and expectations may not be very sensible and so permit the process of choice to affect and change his 'nature' as well which, after all is just another (and minor) practice or tradition entering the process (Emphasis Added -Danny) So a pragmatist must be both a participant and an observer even in those extreme cases where he decides to live in accordance with his momentary whims entirely.

Few individuals and groups are pragmatists in the sense just described band one can see why: it is very difficult to see one's own most cherished ideas in perspective, as parts of a changing and, perhaps, absurd tradition. Moreover this inability not only exists, it is also encouraged as an attitude proper to those engaged in the study and the improvement of man, society, knowledge. Hardly any religion has ever presented itself just as something worth trying. The claim is much stronger: the religion is the truth, everything else is error and those who know it, understand it but still reject it are rotten to the core (or hopeless idiots).(Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 222/223/230/231 *

After this preparation let us now look at what has been called 'the relation between reason and practice'.

Simplifying matters somewhat we can say that there exists three views on the matter.

A. Reason guides practice its authority is independent of the authority of practices and traditions and it shapes the practice in accordance with its demands. This we may call the idealistic version of the relation.

B. Reason receives both its content and its authority from practice. It describes the way in which practice works and formulates its underlying principles. This version has been called naturalism and it has occasionally been attributed to Hegel (though erroneously so)..

Both idealism and naturalism have difficulties.

The difficulties of idealism are that the idealist does not only want to 'act rationally' he also wants his rational actions to have results. And he wants these results to occur not only among the idealizations he uses but in the real world he inhabits.

...

The difficulties of naturalism and idealism have certain elements in common. The inadequacy of standards often becomes clear from the barrenness of the practice the engender, the shortcomings of practices often are very obvious when practices based on different standards flourish. This suggest that reason and practice are not two different kinds of entities but parts of a single dialectical process.

The suggestion can be illustrated by the relation between a map and the adventures of a person using it or by the relation between an artisan and his instruments. Originally maps were constructed as images of and guides to reality and so, presumably, was reason. But maps like reason contain idealizations (Hecataeus of Miletus, for example, imposed the general outlines of Anaximander's cosmology on his account of the occupied world and represented continents by geometrical figures). The wanderer uses the map to find his way but he also corrects it as he proceeds, removing old idealizations and introducing new ones. Using the map no matter what will soon get him into trouble. But it is better to have maps than to proceed without them. In the same way, the example says, reason without the guidance of a practice will lead us astray while practice is vastly improved by the addition of reason.

...

I shall discuss the answers given by idealism, naturalism and by a third position, not yet mentioned, which I shall call naive anarchism.

According to idealismit is rational (proper, in accordance with the will of the gods - or whatever other encouraging words are being used to befuddle the natives) to do certain things - come what may. It is rational (proper, etc) to kill the enemies of the faith, to avoid ad hoc hypotheses, to despise the desires of the body, to remove inconsistencies, to support progressive research programmes and so on. Rationality (justice, the Divine Law) are universal, independent of mood, context, historical circumstances and give rise to equally universal rules and standards.

There is a version of idealism that seems to be somewhat more sophisticated but actually is not. Rationality (the law, etc) is no longer said to be universal, but there are universally valid conditional statements asserting what is rational in what context and there are corresponding conditional rules.

jSome reviewers have classified me as an idealist in the sense just described with the proviso that I try to replace familiar rules and standards by more 'revolutionary' rules such as proliferation and counterinduction and almost everyone ha ascribed to me a 'methodology' with 'anything goes' as its one 'basic principle'. But in Chapter 2 I say quite explicitly that 'my intention is not to replace one set of general rules by another such set: my intention is, rather, to convince the reader that, all methodologies, event the most obvious ones have their limits' or, to express it in terms just explained, my intention is to show that idealism, whether of the simple or of the context-dependent kind is the wrong solution for the problems of scientific rationality. These problems are not solved by a change of standards but by taking a different view of standards altogether.

...

The limitation of all rules and standards is recognized by naive anarchism. A naive anarchist says (a) that both absolute rules and context-dependent rules have their limits and infers (b) that all rules and standards are worthless and should be given up. Most reviewers regard me as a naive anarchist in this sense, overlooking the many passages where I show how certain procedures aided scientists in their research. For i my studies of Galileo, of Brownian motion, of the Presocratics I not only demonstrate the failures of familiar standards, I also try to show what not so familiar procedures did actually succeed . thus while I agree with (a) I do not agree with (b). I argue that all rules have their limits and that there is no comprehensive 'rationality', I do not argue that we should proceed without rules and standards. I also argue for a contextual account but again the contextual rules are not to replace the absolute rules, they are to supplement them. Moreover, I suggest a new relation between rules and practices. It is this relation and not any particular rule-content that characterizes the position I wish to defend.
(Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 225/226/227/228/229 *

i. Traditions are neither good nor bad, they simply are. ...

ii. A tradition assumes desirable or undesirable properties only when compared with some tradition ...

iii. i. and ii. imply a relativism of precisely the kind that seems to have been defended by Protagoras...

iv. Every tradition has special ways of gaining followers...

v. ... judging a historical process one may use an as yet unspecified and unspecifiable practice....

vi. There are therefore at least two different ways of collectively deciding an issue which I shall call a guided exchange and an open exchange respectively. ... An open exchange, on the other hand, is guided by a pragmatic philosophy. The tradition adopted by the parties is unspecified in the beginning and develops as the exchange proceeds. The participants get immersed into each other's way of thiking, feeling, perceiving to such an extent that their ideas, perceptions, world-views may be entirely changed - they become different people partipating in a new and different tradition . An open exchange respects the partner whether he is an individual or an entire culture, hwile a rational exchange promises respect only within the framework of a rational debate. An open exchange establishes connections between different traditions and transcends the relativism of points ii and iv. However, it transcends it in a way that cannot be made objective but depends in an unforeseeable manner on the (historical, psychological, material) conditions in which it occurs (Cf. also the last paragraph of Chapter 16).

vii. A free society is a society in which all traditions are given equal rights, equal access to education and other positions of power. ... A free society thus cannot be based on any particular creed; for example, it cannot be based on rationalism or on humanitarian considerations. The basic structure of a free society is a protective structure, not an ideology, it functionslike an iron railing not like a conviction. But how is this structure to be conceived? Is it not necessary to debate the matter or should the structure be simplyimposed? And if it is necessary to debate the matter then should this debate not be kept free from subjective influences and based on 'objective' considerations only? This is how intellectuals try to convience their fellow citizens that the money paid to them is well spent and that their ideology should continue to assume the central position it now has. I have already exposed the errors-cum-deceptions behind the phrase of the 'objectivity of a rational debate': the standards of such a debate are not 'objective' they only appear to be 'objective' because reference to the group that profits from their use has been omitted. They are like the invitations of a clever tyrant who instead of saying 'I want you to do ...' or 'I and my wife want you to to do ...' says 'What all of us want is ...' or 'what the gods want of us is ... ' or, even better, 'it is rational to do ...' and so seems to leave out his own person entirely. It is somewhat depressing to see how many intelligent people have fallen for such a shallow trick. (Emphasis Added - Danny) We remove it by observing:

vii. that a free society will not be imposed but will emerge only where people engaging in an open exchange (cf. vi above) introduce protecteive structures of the kind alluded to...

ix. The debates settling the structure of a free society are open debates not guided debates ..

x. A free society insists on the separation of science and society ... (Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 248

The idea of a world machine and the related idea that nature is material to be shaped by man should not be blamed on modern, i.e. post-Cartesian, science. It is older and stronger than a purely philosophical doctrine could ever be. The expression 'world machine' is found Pseudo Dionysius Areopagita, a mystic of unknown identity who wrote about 500 AD and had tremendous influence.

Page 253

The playwright (and his colleague, the teacher) must try not to anticipate the decision of the audience (of the pupils) or replace it by a decision of his own should they turn out to be incapable of making up their own minds. Under no circumstances must he try to be a 'moral force'. A moral force, whether for good or for evil, turns people into slaves and slavery, even slavery in the service of The Good, or of God Himself, is the most abject condition of all. This is how I see the situation today. However, it took me a long time before I arrived at this view.(Emphasis Added - Danny)

Page 262

Two events made me realize the futility of such attempts. One was a discussion with Professor C.F. von Weizsacker in Hamburg (1965) on the foundations of the quantum theory. Von Weizsacker showed how quantum mechanics arose from concrete research while I complained, on general methodological grounds, that important alternatives had been omitted. The arguments supporting my complain were quite good - they are the arguments summarized in Chapter 3 - but it was suddenly clear to me that imposed without regard to circumstances they were a hindrance rather than a help: a person trying to solve a problem whether in science or elsewhere must be given complete freedom and cannot be restricted by any demands, norms, however plausible they may seem to the logician or the philosopher who has thought them out in the privacy of his study. Norms and demands must be checked by research, not by appeal to theories of rationality. In a lengthy article I explained how Bohr had used his philosophy and how it differs from more abstract procedures. Thus Professor von Weizsacker has prime responsibility fro my change to 'anarchism' - though he was not all pleased when I told him so in 1977.

Page 265/266/267

I envisaged a new kind of education that would live from a rich reservoir of different points of view permitting the choice of traditions most advantageous to the individual. The teacher's task would consist in facilitating the choice, not in replacing it by some 'truth' of his own. Such a reservoir, I thought, would have been much in common with a theatre of ideas as imagined by Piscator and Brecht and it would be lead to the development of a great variety of means of presentation. The 'objective' scientific account would be one way of presenting a case, a play another way (remember that for Aristotle tragedy is 'more philosophical' than history because it reveals the structure of historical process and not only its accidental details), a novel still another way. Why should knowledge be shown in the garment of academic prose and reasoning? Had no Plato observed that written sentences in a book are but transitory stages of a complex process of growth that contains gestures, jokes, asides, emotions and had he not tried to catch this process by means of the dialogue? And were there not different forms of knowledge, some much more detailed and realistic than what arose as 'rationalism' in the 7th and 6th century in Greece? Then there was Dadism. I had studied Dadaism after the Second World War. What attracted me to this movement was the style its inventors used when not engaged in Dadaistic activities. It was clear, luminous, simple without being banal, precise without being narrow; it was a style adapted to the expression of thought as well as of emotion. I connected this style with the Dadaistic exercises themselves. Assume you tear language apart, you live for days and weeks in a world of cacophonic sounds, jumbled words, nonsensical events. Then, after this preparation, you sit down and write: 'the cat is on the ma'. This simple sentence which we usually utter without thought, like talking machines (and much of our talk is indeed routine)j, no seems like the creation of an entire world: God said let there be light and there was light. Nobody in modern times has understood the miracle of language and thought as well as the Dadaists for nobody has been able to imagine, let alone create, a world in which they play no role.Having discovered the nature of a living order, of a reason that is not merely mechanical, the Dadaists soon noticed the deterioration of such an order into routine. They diagnosed the deterioration of language that preceded the First World War and created the mentality that made it possible. AFter the diagnosis their exercises assumed another, more sinister meaning. The revealed the frightening similarity between the language of the foremost commercial travelers in 'importance', the language of philosophers, politicians, theologians, and brute inarticulation. The praise of honour, patriotism, truth, rationality, honesty that fills our schools, pulpits, political meetings imperceptibly merges into inarticulation no matter how much it has been wrapped into literary language and no matter how hard its authors try to copy the style of the classics and the authors themselves are in the end hardly distinguishable from a pack of grunting pigs. Is there a way to prevent such deterioration? I thought there was. I thought that regarding all achievements as transitory, restricted and personal and every truth as created by our love for it and not as 'found' would prevent the deterioration of once promising fairy-tales and I also thought that it was necessary to develop a new philosophy or a new religion to give substance to this unsystematic conjecture.

I now realize that these considerations were just another example of intellectualistic conceit and folly. It is conceited to assume that one has solutions for people whose lives one does not share and whose problems one does not know. It is foolish to assume that such an exercise in distant humanitarianism will have effects pleasing to the people concerned. From the very beginning of Western Rationalism intellectuals have regarded themselves as teachers, the world as a school and 'people' as obedient pupils. In Plato this is very clear. The same phenomenon occurs among Christians, Rationalists, Fascists, Marxists. Marxists did not try to learn from those they wanted to liberate; they attacked each other about interpretations, viewpoints, evidence and took it for granted that the resulting intellectual hash would make fine food for the natives (Bakunin was aware of the doctrinarian tendencies of contemporary Marxism and he intended to return all power - power over ideas included - to the people immediately concerned). My own view differed from those just mentioned but it was still a view, an abstract fancy I had invented and now tried to sell without having shared even an ounce of the lives of the receivers. This I now regard as insufferable conceit. So - what remains?

Two things remain. I could follow my own advice to address and try to influence only those people whom I think I understand on a personal basis. This includes some of my friends,; it may include philosophers I have not met but who seem to be interested in similar problems and who are not too upset by my style and my general approach. It may also include people from different cultures who are attracted, even fascinated by Wester science and Western intellectual life, who have started participating in it but who still remember, in thought as well as in feeling the life of the culture they left behind. My account might lessen the emotional tension they liable to feel and make them see a way of uniting, rather than opposing to each other, the various stages of their lives.

Page 269

A guided exchange adopts 'a well-specified tradition and accept[s] only those responses that correspond to its standards. If one party has not yet become a participant ... he will be badgered, persuaded, 'educated' until he does - and then the exchange begins.' 'A rational debate', I continue, 'is a special case of a guided exchange.' In the case of open exchange 'the participants get immersed into each other's ways of thinking, feeling, perceiving to such an extent that their ideas, perceptions, world-views may be entirely changed - they become different people participating in a new and different tradition. An open exchange respects the partner whether he is an individual or an entire culture, while a rational exchange promises respect only within the framework of a rational debate. An open exchange has no organon though it may invent one; there is no logic though new forms of logic may emerge in its course.' In sum, an open exchange is part of an as yet unspecified and unspecifiable practice.

Certain To Win by Chet Richards

Notes on Certain To Win, The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business by Chet Richards

In this text, Richards -- the essence of boyds mannuever strategy, and TPS

Page 10

After considerable research, Boyd concluded that a small set of principles formed the foundation for the German victory and that they wer primarily cultural, that is, they dealt with the behavior of people in groups. These "principles of the Blitzkrieg" do not give instructions on how to deploy tanks on the battlefield. Rather they aim to attack the ability of the other side to make effective decisions under conditions of danger, fear, and uncertainty and to increase our ability to function well under these same conditions. There was, in other words, little exclusively military about Boyd's philosophy of conflict.

Page 22

... somehow the Germans had evolved a way to cope with the chaos. Since they could cope with it, it was in their best interest to create it, and they designed the strategy of the Blitzkrieg to do just that. As for the French, panic and confusion seemed to snowball as the battle progressed.

...

It was a powerful force and should have been able to throw a roadblock in front of the fast-moving Germans. As the French force stopped to refuel, however, Major General Erwin Rommel's 7th Panzer Division, joined by the 5th Panzers, ambushed them and destroyed all but 17 out of the original 175 French tanks. Now Rommel did something that characterizes Blitzkrieg warfare. Rather than dig in and "consolidate his position," or otherwise savor the fruits of victory, he proceeded to use his advantage in time to neutralize his opponents' forces and weapons. Battle-weary as they must have been, rommel's troops remounted their vehicles, pressed on to the west, and actually reached the new French defensive line before the French.

Page 23/24

... British military historian Basil Liddel hart had to say:

The issue turned on the time factor at stage after stage. French countermovements were repeatedly thrown out of gear because their timing was too slow to catch up with the changing situation ... The french, trained in the slow-motion methods of World War I, were mentally unfit to cope with the new tempo, and it caused a spreading paralysis among them.

Or from the British general whom the Germans credit as one of the sources of the Blitzkrieg, J. F. C. Fuller:

It was to employ mobility as a psychological weapon: not to kill but to move, not to move to kill but to move to terrify, to bewilder, to perplex, to cause consternation, doubt and confusion in the rear of the enemy...

In other words, the purpose of the Blitzkrieg strategy was not so much to cope with chaos, but to cause and then exploit it, and it is this cascading of panic and chaos that accounts for the German's "string of luck."

Page 25

Our view of the world, our "orientation," as Boyd called it, depends heavily on things happening close in time to when we expect them to happen. Mismatches in time - such as when things don't appear to be happening in a continuous and predictable (even if very rapid) manner - can be disorienting. Under stress, disoriented people become demoralized, frustrated, and panicked. Once in this condition, they can easily be defeated, regardless of the weapons that remain in their possession.

Page 29/30

... a concept known as agility, another word that has lost its original meaning through careless application. Boyd, however, used the term in a specific sense, to mean the ability to rapidly change one's orientation - roughly, worldview - in response to what is happening in the external world.

...

The essence of agility and of applying Boyd's ideas to any form of competition is to keep one's orientation well matched to the real world during times of ambiguity, confusion, and rapid change, when the natural tendency is to become disoriented.

Page 39

There is a saying that the battle is not always to the strong, but that's the way to bet. If by stronger, you mean bigger, or more advanced technologically, you are going to lose your bet fairly often even you're wagering (or investing in ) business.

....

There have always been strategists down through history, in the East in particular, who have held the "bigger is better"notion in special contempt. The noted Chinese strategist Sun Tzu (c. 5th century B.C.), who is still widely studied today, dismissed the fascination with size thusly: "Numbers alone confer no advantage." Japans favorite strategist, the 17th Century samurai warrior-philosopher, Miyamoto Musashi, wrote with blunt contempt that "it does not matter who is stronger or who is faster."

Page 42

Forrest put his arm around him and uttered those immortal words of strategy, "Ah Colonel, all is fair in love and war, you know."

• "All warfare is based upon deception" - Sun Tzu
• "War is trickery." - Muhammad, Prophet of Islam
• "Mystify, mislead and surprise" - Stonewall Jackson
• "I put the scare on them, and I keep it on. " - Nathan Bedford Forrest

Page 43

Table I - What Wins
Things We Want To Have On Our Side:

• Sense of Mission
• Morale
• Leadership
• Harmony
• Teamwork

Which Allows Us To:

• Appear Ambiguous
• Be Deceptive
• Generate Surprise & Panic
• Seize & Keep The Initiative
• Create and Exploit Opportunities

Which Cause These In The Enemy:

• Bickering
• Scapegoating
• Confusion
• Panic
• Rout
• Mass Defections & Surrender

Page 44/45/46

So there might be a set of equations that tie the inflation rate to stock prices, and another set that relates unemployment to housing starts, and so on. The idea is that once all these equations are joined together, you can raise the discount by one-half point and the model will tell you the effect on unemployment (or whatever).

...

So you think that by now, somone would have invented a model of the economy that works. Then, at least in theory, economic policymaking would be simple: Play with the model until you et a result you like (or can live with) and then implement the policy (the model inputs) that produced it.

...

... Perhaps the problem is, as I have suggested for strategy, that modeling by it's very nature cannot address the underlying basis of economics.

Nobel Laureate Frederick Hayek eloquently makes this case in his book, The Fatal Conceit. Hayek inveighed against the notion of ever being able to plan a productive economy. he argues that formal planning methodologies -- which are models of how an economy works -- do not capture what really drives a competitive economy, in particular the information processed through decisions made daily by millions of buyers and sellers. Conversely, countries try to run their economies through a central state planning mechanism cannot process information nearly as well as the multitude of players in a decentralized system. Hayek's theories were validated in the last half of the 20th century, when countries that relied on Soviet style planning collapsed in competition with those that evolved decentralized, capitalist economies.

Another reason economies are impossible to model involves the messy presence of human beings. Financially massive organizations warp the environment they inhabit much like the way gravitationally massive bodies warp space-time in physics: Normal rules do not apply to them. Giant companies influence Congress, the executive branch, and local governing bodies to pass legislation they want - granting them subsidies, protection, environmental relief, favorable tax status, and so on - and otherwise treat them in way that are perfectly legal, but outside what the equations of economics predict.

These favors can range from protective tariffs to outright grants (often inserted by pet Congressional representatives into obscure sections of appropriation bills) to program that continue to bleed tax dollars long after any need for them has disappeared. As an aside, this last effect - often called "pork" - is well known to those in defense, and former President Eisenhower warned of it in the Farewell Address (January 1961):

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

These are the soft, political, impossible-to-model but critical aspects of the economy. Any company that attempted to ignore them, to predict in a step-by-step fashion the results of its moves, creates a form of macroeconomic model because it is also predicting effects on at least part of the larger economy. So it will fall victim to the limitations of any such model - including Hayek's information processing arguments and political activities that change the rules. The upshot will be a strategy that works no better for business than did its counterparts for war: A company using such a model would make itself vulnerable to competitors who better understand the real economy.

Page 48

Boyd was famous for browbeating his audiences with the mantra, "People, ideas, and hardware - in that order!" What we have seen so far reinforces Boyd's conclusion. In all the battles and business examples noted in chapter II, as well as in the Pentagon and World Trade Center attacks, groups of dedicated people found and exploited weaknesses in their larger and better-financed adversaries.

..

The reason for this reversal, in business and in war, appears to be that these smaller organizations were able to avoid or negate the larger's advantages in size and strength. Somehow they had managed not to become systems in the eyes of their larger opponents. This might lead one to suspect that in any competitive endeavor, if you can be modeled ("sand-tabled, " as Boyd referred to it) you aren't using strategy at all and you can be defeated.

Page 51

After the war, American strategists did get the opportunity to talk at length with many of the practitioners of the Blitzkrieg. Amidst all the war stories, a pattern became clear: The roots of success in 1940 lay in the German system for dealing with people; it was cultural, rather than technical. Here, I am using "cultural" in the sense of "business culture," not as a national trait. From his conversations with the German generals and his study of their experiences and doctrine, Boyd extracted the four concepts shown below as the primary reason for the Germans' success: You don't have to be a tank commander in central Europe to exploit these cultural properties. Boyd called them "an organizational climate for operational success," and the organization can be a business, a political campaign, or, of course, an army.

Key Attributes of the Blitkrieg

• Einehit: Mutual trust, unity, and cohesion
• Fingerspitzengefuhl:Intuitive feel, especially for complex and potentially chaotic situations
• Auftragstaktik:Mission, generally considered as a contract between superior and subbordinate
• Schwerpunkt:Any concept that provides focus and direction to the operation

Page 53/54

Boyd's Maneuver Warfare Handbook :

Both leadership and monitoring are values without trust. The "contracts" . . . of intent and mission express that trust . . . that his subordinates will understand and carry out his desires and trust by his subordinates that they will be supported when exercising their initiative.

If there is a universally accepted truth in the military science, the fundamental role played by cohesion, unity, and trust may be it. Twenty-four hundred years before Fuller, Sun Tzu had concluded that, "He whose ranks are united in purpose will be victorious." The Arab historian ibn Khaldun, who is generally credited with writings the first modern analysis of history, echoed this theme in 1377 A.D., "What is in fact proven to make for superiority is the situation with regard to group feeling." The rule is simple: The side with the stronger group feeling has a great advantage.

...

Such an anvil of shared experience appears to be necessary ingredient in forging a bond of trust.

Page 57

This brings us to Schwerpunkt, which is any device or concept that gives focus and direction to our efforts. The world literally translates as "hard/difficult point," but its real meaning is more like center of gravity, focal point, or main focus. It can also mean "emphasis."

The distinguishing characteristic of an effective focus is that all other activities of the organization must support it and that the people conducting these activities understand what the main effort is and know that they must support it. Conversely, subordinates are expected to use their own initiatives to exploit opportunities, even if it means setting aside a previously issued order, whenever they can further the accomplishment of the focusing-and-directing mission (communicating this change back to the commander, of course). As you can see, this is a powerful concept for motivating subordinates, while at the same time harmonizing their energy to accomplish the commander's intent.

...

This notion of "setting-up" activities followed by a knockout punch is as old a concept as mutual trust. Its known roots go back thousands of years, and the ancient Chinese even had expressions for this type of strategy, calling the setting-up, "cheng maneuvers," to be followed at the decisive moment by the "ch'i" knockout punch.

Page 58

The ability to rapidly shift the focus of one's efforts is a key element in how a smaller force defeats a larger, since it enables the smaller force to create and exploit opportunities before the larger force can marshal reinforcements. Lind notes, and this is especially relevant to business, that the focus is often a concept rather than a unit, and so shifting it requires a mental as well as a physical change.

Page 60/61

... Boyd decided that the F-86 won because it could generate something he called "asymmetric fast transients." A "transient" is a shift from one state to another, "fast" refers to the time it takes to make the shift (not, as is often thought, the velocity of the aircraft itself), and "asymmetric" means that one side is better at it than the other.

An "asymmetric fast transient," though, is not a traditional maneuver done more quickly, even much more quickly. In business, it should not conjure up an image of doing what you're doing now, just doing it faster. The "transient" is the change between maneuvers. In Boyd's concept, the ideal asymmetric fast transient is an abrupt, unexpected, jerky, disorienting change that causes at least a hesitation and preferably plants the seeds of panic in the other side. It's a "what-the f__k!" change in circumstances, and in the interval when the opponent is trying to comprehend what the f__k is, Boyd would strike. What this described vis-a-vis the MiG and the F-86 is that the American fighter could setup novel and unexpected conditions and exploit them before the Russian could react with his sometimes superior EM capability.

Page 62

After examining many wars, battles, and engagements, Boyd synthesized his no well-known "OODA Loop." A participant in a conflict, any conflict, may be thought of as engaging in four distinctive although not distinct activities:

• He must observe the environment, which includes himself, his opponent, the physical, mental, and moral situation, and potential allies and opponents.
• he must orient himself to decide what it all means. Boyd calls orientation a "many-sided, implicit cross-referencing" process involving the information observed, one's genetic heritage, social environment, and prior experiences, and the results of analyses one conducts and synthesis that one forms.
• He must reach some type of decision.
• He must attempt to carry out that decision. That is, he must act.

Page 63

Since what you're looking for is mismatches, a general rule is that bad news is the only kind that will do you any good.

Page 65

[GOOD OODA DIAGRAM]

Page 66

... Boyd defined "agility" in these terms: A side in a conflict or competition is more agilethan its opponent if it can execute its OODA loops more quickly.

Page 67

Ambiguityis a terrible thing, much more effective as a strategy than deception, with which it is often confused. Deception is correctly described as a tactic: If you are deceived, you will be surprised when you discover the truth, and it is possible that you will be led to do some things, perhaps even fatal things, that you would not have done if you had realized the truth earlier. It can be extremely effective tactic, even though your ability to function as a thinking human being is not at risk. This s exactly what you can attack and destroy using ambiguity.

...

If something vital, such as life itself, is at stake, losing track of deadly threat in the fog of ambiguity can quickly lead to confusion, panic, and terror ...

Page 69/70/71/72

The Army was the first to put the concept of agility into formal written doctrine. In their Field Manual 3-0, Operations the Army tells its soldiers that:

Agility is the ability to move and adjust quickly and easily. It springs form trained and disciplined forces. Agility requires that subordinates act to achieve the commander's intent and fight through any obstacle to accomplish the mission.

Operational agility stems from the capability to deploy and employ forces across the range of Army operations. Army forces and commanders shift among offensive, defensive, stability, and support operations as circumstances and missions require. This capability is not merely physical; it requires conceptual sophistication and intellectual flexibility.

Tactical agility is the ability of a friendly force to react faster than the enemy. It is essential to seizing, retaining, and exploiting the initiative. Agility is mental and physical. Agile commanders quickly comprehend unfamiliar situations, creatively apply doctrine, and make timely decisions.

...

Note the Army omits the time element from operational agility, making it more like "flexibility" than Boyd's concept of agility.

...

[The Air Force's] 1984 Basic Doctrine Manual made it clear what they expected to accomplish:

Timing and tempo allow friendly forces to "dominate the action, remain unpredictable, and create uncertainty in the mind of the enemy."

...

Naval Command and Control (NDP 6), they state that:

However, the essential lesson of the decision and execution cycle is the absolute importance of generating tempo. Maintaining rapid decision and execution cycles-and thus a rapid tempo of operations - requires that seniors and subordinates alike have an accurate image of the battlespace and a shared vision of what needs to be done. With this common perspective, commanders are able to experience superior situational awareness and make more effective decisions, enabling them to exercise initiative during combat.

...

MCDP1, Warfighting, lays out a concept of maneuver warfare entirely consistent with the ideas of agility that we have been exploring:

By our actions, we seek to impose menacing dilemmas in which events happen unexpectedly and faster than the enemy can keep up with them ... The ultiamte goal is panic and paralysis, an enemy who has lost the will to resist.

Page 75

When discussing the notions of grand strategy, Boyd concluded that: What is needed is a vision rooted in human nature so noble, so attractive that it not only attracts the uncommitted and magnifies the spirit and strength of its adherents, but also undermines the dedication and determination of any competitors or adversaries. Moreover, such a unifying notion should be so compelling that it acts as a catalyst or beacon around which to evolve those qualities that permit a collective entity or organic whole to improve its stature int he scheme of things.

Page 77/78

[Strategy Definitions]

From War:

The art and science of employing the armed forces of a nation or alliance to secure policy objectives by the application of that of military force. US Army Field Manual 100-5, Operations, 1986

Victory is achieved in the way of conflict by ascertaining the rhythm of each opponent, by attacking with a rhythm not anticipated by the opponent, and by the use of knowledge of the rhythm of the abstract. Miyamoto Musashi, samurai strategist, 17th century Japan, Nihon Services Group trans.

From business:

Strategy is a deliberate search for a plan of action that will develop a business's competitive advantage and compound it. Bruce Hnderson, Founder, the Boston Consulting Group.

Strategy isn't beating the competition, it's serving the customer's real needs. Kenich Ohmae, Managing Director, McKinsey & Co, Tokyo Office

From everyday life:

The art of the possible in a world where constraints force us to choose between unpleasant or imperfect alternatives. Retired Pentagon official and long-time Boyd associate Franklin C. Spinney, author of Defense Facts of Life

Page 79

A plan is an intention about how to get from where we are now to where we want to be in the future.

...

The term strategy will be used for higher-order devices for creating and managing plans.

Page 84

Boyd's Definition:

Strategy is a mental tapestry of changing intentions for harmonizing and focusing our efforts as a basis for realizing some aim or purpose in an unfolding and often unforeseen world of many bewildering events and many contending interests.

Page 87 *

... then break the enemy formation into meaningless chunks that didn't know what they were doing .. the way they fought seemed like the only intellegent way ... the only possible way. Orson Scott Card, Ender's Game

Page 89

A Simple Example of Agility

Go find the best chess player you can and offer to play for $1,000 under the following conditions:

• Your opponent moves first.
• You move twice for every move of his or hers.

In fact, you can even offer to give up some pieces, to make it more fair. You will find that, unless you are playing somebody at the grandmaster level, you can give up practically everything and still win. Keep the knights and maybe a rook.

This is a graphic illustration of how the smaller side, using agility, can overcome a large disadvantage in numbers. Does it strike you as farfetched and removed from what happens in the real world? Consider that Honda and Toyota can bring out a new model in roughly 2 years, with superb quality, while it still takes Detroit at least a year longer.

Page 91

How to tell you strategy is working in business

• Your competitor's new products are consistently late and lack your features or quality.
• He starts blaming the customer, or insisting that his sales force "educate the customer."
• Personnel turnover is high.
• He becomes even more "Theory X," instituting rigid, explicit controls, frequently in the name of containing costs.
• He launches witch hunts and other ever-intensifying internal searches for "the cause of the problem."

Page 93

To think that you can predict what needs to be done a year from now is sheer arrogance.

Page 94

In this case [LEAN], competitive advantage comes not from better ways to handle inventory, but from fundamental changes that enable a goal of abolishing altogether. This is an exact analogy to the military case, in which conventional strategy glossed over the factors that actually produce victory, like cohesion/trust, and instead considered only numbers and weapon effectiveness.

Page 96

There is nothing wrong with conducting post-mortem investigations into your success and failures and you should do this as a matter of course. Problems arise when you change strategies after every one. Management theorists call this tendency to chase the last data point the "Nelson Funnel."

Page 114

Communications is the bottoms-up aspect of command and control, and the Marines define "control," to be this stream of information:

Control takes the form of feedback = the continuous flow of information about the unfolding situation returning to the command - which allows the commander to adjust and modify command action as needed.

Page 121

Futurist James Ogilvy simply denouned managing through goal setting as "bunk." Instead, he recommend that:

Organizations should tread near the edge of the future, making it up as they go along, with as much sensitivity, awareness, knowledge, compassion, feeling and beauty as they can muster.

Page 124/125

[Boyd]

Schwerpunkt represents a unifying medium that provides a directed way to tie initiative of many subordinate actions with superior intent as a basis to diminish friction and compress time in order to generate a favorable mismatch in time/ability to shape and adapt to unfolding circumstances.

Page 129/120

[GOOD DIAGRAM - how the core concepts integrate/example]

Page 132

... the use of time as a shaping and exploiting mechanism, and the emphasis on a culture/organizational climate that makes this possible - apply equally well to both.

Page 133

To Read - Boyd Briefing: Organic Design for Command and Control. Google Power Point

Page 149

The key to understanding cheng and ch'i in looking carefully at the nature of the terms themselves rather at their specific applications in war. One of the main themes of this book has been that the essence of Boyd's strategy in buisness competition is ot shape ourselves and the marketplace to improve our capacity for independent action - to survive on our terms - generally at the expense of our competitors. The nature of war is to shape the enemy. Detect a connection? The nature of cheng / ch'i, in both cases as it will turn out is not "frontal versus flank" but something more fundamental: "shaping" using orthodox (expected) in conjunction with the unorthodox (surprising). Engage with the cheng and win with the ch'i, in business as in war.

Page 154/155

Musashi is clear at many places in his book that although such expected excellence is essential, it is not the key to victory. You cannot become so technically proficient that you are asured of winning every fight: If you achieved a 97% chance of winning a fight, which would be spectacular against people who train just as hard as you do, you odds of surviving 25 fights is less than 50%. Musashi won 60 duels, so clearly he was not thinking of taking that kind of risk. He wanted no risk at all.

For that, one needs to develop an ability to do the unexpected and then exploit its results quickly. The key to this strategy is a different type of training, where students practice generating ch'i and using it with cheng as instinctively as they previously practiced manipulating the sword.

...

Boyd insisted that "ch'i" and "Schwerpunkt" are essentially the same, that is finding an exploiting the magical element should be what gives your enterprise focus and direction.

...

In warfare, one purpose of using cheng/ch'i is to generate the jerky, abrupt, unexpected and disorienting changes that Boyd called "asymmetric fast transients."

Page 162/163

What You Really Do With OODA LOOPS

...

• Uncover, create, and exploit many vulnerabilities and weaknesses, hence many opportunities, to pull adversary apart and isolate remnants for mop-up or absorption
• Generate uncertainty, confusion, disorder, panic, chaos ... to shatter cohesion, produce paralysis and bring about collapse
• Destroy the moral bonds (of the enemy) that permit an organic whole to exist
• Create moral bonds that permit us, as organic whole, to shape and adapt to change

With a strategy this powerful, your aim is not to respond to but to create the market conditions that you want.

Page 166

The need for a change in underlying assumptions is what distinguishes maneuver conflict in all its forms from activities like "business process reengineering." As a result of implementing maneuver conflict, many of the existing processes and the relationships between them are going to disappear, and so it would be a waste of time and money to "improve" them. This breaking of relationships ("shattering of domains," as Boyd referred to it) is a prerequisite to implementing maneuver conflict, which is one reason why all successful implementing have eliminated roughly 25-40% of management positions, since those reflect the existing processes and relationships.

Page 168

The weakness in the book is that there is no recognition that the TPS is based on a deeper set of principles that do apply to other human activities, like warfare. The index is devoid of such basic terms as trust, cohesion, initiative, or even "maneuver," which was adopted as official USMC doctrine seven years before Lean Thinking appeared so was hardly esoteric when that book was written. Without a climate like the one I have described in this book you will find it difficult to create a company capable of employing the ideas Womack and Jones present.

This essay presents an interesting and challenging account of power and its use. It’s exposition of the impact of law and statelessness on the actions taken by bureaucrats is enlightening. His Marxist and Religious dogma detract from the arguments presented, and in some way blind him to what I perceive the true ramifications of his essay. Below, I have sketched out seven key conclusions that I derived from the work.

1. Any government should treat all people as people, regardless of their status as a citizen – thus, even though noncitizens may not have the ability to participate in a governing structure, all rules and regulations must apply equally to them.

   A current example of where this is not the case, is the United States use of the term “Enemy Combatant” and the use of extrajudicial processes and locations, such as CIA blacksites and Guantanamo Bay.

   "Always treat people as ends in themselves, never as means to an end." — Kant

2. And perhaps more radically, that the use of force, is fundamentally immoral except in matters of self-defense. And those arbitrary regulations such as those used against the Jews were in effect an attack, and that they would have been justified in the use of force to protect themselves.

3. Power structures, especially those calcified in the form strict bureaucracies, can be easily co-opted - providing legitimacy, and disarming those upon which they operate. The co-option, of various Jewish organizations greatly increased the ease at which they were controlled and ultimately slaughtered. From this, it becomes apparent that those power structures should be severely limited, and their authority must be constantly challenged.

   As evidenced by Milgrim’s famous experiment, the removal of responsibility and the distancing of direct infliction facilitate individuals in carrying out acts of unspeakable horror. Thus, if we are serious about institutional reform, one would think that rotations that serve to remove the distance a bureaucrat has from their actions and the effect of those upon which they are inflicted would be considered the standard operating procedure.

4. Government bureaucracies, and others that rely upon force to maintain their funding and resources, provide a difficult challenge for those affected by their actions to alter the system. In a society in which individuals are free to interact, the market provides a means by which one can punish the remote bureaucrat. Resources can be removed to weaken, take down, and ultimately impact the bureaucrat that “sleeps easily.”
5. The discussion of the ethics involved in the Tuskegee experiments should provide insight into current discussions about the FDA and its approval of drugs. Individuals have no choice but to take part in double blind studies, thus they have no control of their lives. Though differing in key fundamental ways modern drug trials are functionally equivalent to the Tuskegee experiments – the patient is given or a placebo or not, and observed. Luckily in modern FDA trials the patient knows that they may be given a placebo, but the end results are the same – if the medicine would have saved them, then they are condemned to death for science. This is not to discount the benefits that accrue due to these trials or to argue about the system that should replace it, merely to highlight the current system has fundamental ethical issues that must be addressed – it’s hard to find a solution, if the problem isn’t articulated.
6. The attacks against corporations and the arguments against capitalism seem to be misguided. Sure there are evil corporations, and groups of people, but their ability to inflict pain and suffering on the general populace is significantly less than that of governments as shown throughout the history of the 20th century. It would seem foolish to trust a serial killer to keep tabs on a shoplifter.In the above thoughts, I tried to capture my thinking in response to the act of reading this essay. Premature, as they are, they perhaps provide a hint to ways in which I will continue to think about justice, ethics, power, power structures, and their impacts on the populace.

Notes:

Page 2

This power must also alter the texture of foreign relation. According to Max Weber, "The sate is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of force within a given territory.” Auschwitz has enlarged our conception of the state’s capacity to do violence. A barrier has been overcome in what for millennia had been regarded as the permissible limits of political action. The Nazi period serves as a warning of what we can all too easily become were we faced with a political or an economic crisis of overwhelming proportions. The public may be fascinated by the Nazis; hopefully, it is also warned by them.

Page 14/15/16/17

As the stateless refugees entered the countries of the West, especially France, it was soon discovered that these were people who could neither be repatriated nor granted citizenship by the host country. The stateless were truly men without any political community. No country wanted them or cared about their fate.
…

In dealing with the apatride who could not be repatriated, the host country could either suffer his presence at liberty, subject at all times to police surveillance, or it could set up concentration camps in which to detain him. In either case, the apatride, although not a criminal, was for all practical purposes an outlaw. He was subject to the kind of police surveillance and control that was not in turn subject to judicial review. Stateless persons were thus among the first Europeans in the twentieth century to experience unrestricted police domination. Once the police tasted the freedom of dominating one class of men unhindered by judicial process or legal restraint, they sought to extend their power to others. This process reached its zenith in Nazi Germany towards the end of the war when the power of the Gestapo and the SS over the German people was almost completely unhindered by any competing institution.

While individual apatrides were permitted to pursue whatever manner of life they could find as refugees within the urban centers of the host countries, as soon as large numbers of apatrides, such as the veterans of the Spanish Republican army, entered a host country en masse, they were placed in detention camps which were in reality concentration camps.

Initially, the concentration camps were established to accommodate detainees who had been placed under “protective custody” (Schutzhaft) by the Nazi regime. Those arrested were people whom the regime wished to detain although there was no clear legal justification for so doing. Almost all of the original detainees were German communists, not Jews. Had the Nazi’s political prisoners been brought before a German court in the first year or two of Hitler’s regime, the judiciary would have been compelled to dismiss the case. This was not because the German judiciary was anti-Nazi, but because it was bureaucratic in structure. In the early stages of the Nazi regime, there was a no formula in law to cover all the political prisoners the Nazis wanted to arrest. This problem was solved by holding them under “protective custody” and setting up camps outside of the regular prison system to receive them. Incidentally, the American government did something very similar when it interned Japanese-American citizens during World War II. They had committed no crime. No Court would have convicted them.

…

Like the original political prisoners in the German camps, there was no legal basis for the detention of the apatrides. Yet, the host countries’ leaders were convinced that it was in their nation’s interest to hold them. Camps were established for those who had no status in law and for whom no law existed that could justify their being held. The unifying bond between the apatrides and the first prisoners in the German concentration camps was that both groups were outlaws.

Neither the apatrides nor the German political prisoners were outlaws because of any crime they had committed, but because their status had been altered by their country’s civil service or police bureaucracy. They had been deprived of all political status by bureaucratic definition. As such, they had become superfluous men. Those apatrides in the detention camps were among the living dead. Sooner or later, most of the living dead were destined to join that vast company Gil Eliot has called “the nation of the dead,” the millions who perished by large-scale human violence in this bloodiest of centuries.

…

Before World War II, the number of stateless persons increased with every passing year. Statesmen and police officials were agreed that a solution to the problem had to be found. The stateless could neither be assimilated nor, in most cases, expelled. International conferences on the “refugee problem” were held, but to no avail. There seemed to be no solution. In reality, there was a “solution” that was obvious to Hitler. When one has surplus livestock that are a drain on resources, one gets rid of them. Neither Hitler nor Stalin saw any reason why people ought to be treated differently. The “solution” had logic on its side, yet there remained a sentimental obstacle: In the prewar period, it was not yet possible to exterminate surplus people the way a farmer might kill off surplus cattle.

…

The British government was by no means averse to the “final solution” as long as the Germans did most of the dirty work.

Page 21

… we are more likely to understand the Holocaust if we regard it as the expression of some of the most profound tendencies of Western civilization in the twentieth century. Given Britain’s imperial commitments, Europe’s Jews were as much a superfluous population for Great Britain as they were for Germany. In the moral universe of the twentieth century, the most “rational” and least costly “solution” of the problem of disposing of a surplus population is unfortunately extermination. Properly executed, extermination is the problem-solving strategy least likely to entail unanticipated feedback hazards for its planners. From a purely bureaucratic perspective, the extermination of the Jews of Europe was the “final solution” for the British as well as the Germans.

Page 24/25/26

Himmler does not seem to have been a sadist. During the war, he did not like to watch killing operations and became upset when he did. But, Himmler was the perfect bureaucrat. He did what he believed was his duty sin ira et studio, without bias or scorn.

…

One of the examples of Himmler’s organizing ability was his involvement in the concentration camp at Dachu which he founded in 1933. Originally, there was little to distinguish Dachu from any of the early “wild” Nazi camps. Under Himmler’s guidance, Dachu became a model for the systematically managed camps of World War II. Under his direction, the sporadic terror of the “wild” camps was replaced by impersonal, systemized terror.

…

The intent of Eicke’s regulations was to eliminate all arbitrary punishment by individual guards and to replace it with impersonal, anonymous punishment. The impersonal nature of the transaction was heightened by the fact that any guard could be called on to inflict punishment. Even if a guard was struck by a prisoner, he could not retaliate personally, at least insofar as the regulations were concerned. Like everything else at the camps, under Himmler punishment was bureaucratized and depersonalized. Bureaucratic mass murder reached its fullest development when gas chambers with a capacity for killing two thousand people at a time were installed at Auschwitz. As Hannah Arendt has observed, the very size of the chambers emphasized the complete depersonalization of the killing process.

Under Himmler, there was no objection to cruelty, provided it was disciplined and systematized. This preference was also shared by the German civil service bureaucracy. According to Hilberg, the measure that gave the civil service bureaucrats least difficulty in exterminating their victims was the imposition of a starvation diet. In a bureaucratically controlled society where every individual’s ration can be strictly determined, starvation is the ideal instrument of “clean” violence. A few numbers are manipulated on paper in an office hundred of miles away from the killing centers and millions can be condemned to a prolonged and painful death. In addition, both the death rate and the desired level of vitality of the inmates can easily be regulated by the same bureaucrats. As starvation proceeds, the victim’s appearance is so drastically altered that by the time death finally releases him, he hardly seems like a human being worth saving. The very manner of death confirms the rationalization with which the killing was justified in the first place. The Nazis assigned the paranthropoid identity of a tiermensch, a subhuman, to their victims. By the time of death that identity seemed like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yet, the bureaucrat need loose no sleep over his victims. He never confronts the results of his distinctive kind of homicidal violence.

Page 27

It was only possible to overcome the moral barrier that had in the past prevented the systematic riddance of surplus populations when the project was taken out of the hands of bullies and hoodlums and delegated to bureaucrats.

Page 31/32/33

In order to understand more fully the connection between bureaucracy and mass death, it will be necessary to return to the apatrides. They were the first modern Europeans who had become politically and legally superfluous and for whom the most “rational” way of dealing with them was ultimately murder. A majority of the apatrides had lost their political status by a process of bureaucratic definition, denationalization. Miss Ardent lists a World War I measure of the French (1915) as the first such measure.

…

At the time of the denationalization decrees were first promulgated, few people dreamed of the ultimate jeopardy to which stateless persons had been condemned by the paper violence of the bureaucrats.

…

Men without political rights are superfluous men. They have lost all right to life and human dignity. Political rights are neither God-given, autonomous nor self-validating. The Germans understood that no person has any rights unless they are guaranteed by an organized community with the power to defend such rights. They were perfectly consistent in demanding that the deportees be made stateless before being transported to the camps. They also understood that by exterminating stateless men and women, they violated no law because such people were covered by no law.

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As we have noted, had the Germans won the war, mass sterilization would have been an important aspect of their program for the subject peoples. It must be remembered that with both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks, victory inevitably led to an intensification rather than a diminution of terror. Mass sterilization of Poles, Russians and, in the more distant future, the French and the Italians, would have permitted the Germans to exploit the vanquished at their own convenience in the certain knowledge that the subject peoples’ national existence was at an end. Whether extermination or killing was the means of securing absolute dominance or whether a certain number of the vanquished might be permitted to reproduce in exactly calculable quantities would have depended solely on the requirements of the German masters. The victims would have had as little control over their own destiny as cattle in a stockyard. In a society of total domination, helots could be killed, bred, or sterilized at will.

Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to see the medical experiments as the outcome of some special viciousness of which only German doctors are capable. The Germans have no monopoly on the kind of mentality that would utilize powerless human beings as unwilling or unsuspecting subjects of such experiments. Recently, it became known that a group of black prisoners suffering from syphilis in an American prison were divided into two groups, one of which was given medication to cure or control the disease, the other was given a placebo. The object of the experiment was to compare the effects of medication with that of letting the disease run its course. The organizers of the experiment had cold-bloodedly condemned the prisoners who received the placebo to the mutilating effects of disease and/or death in the name of scientific rationality. The experiment that did come to light was different from the Nazi experiments only in that the American prisoners were completely unaware of what was being done to them. Most of the Nazi victims had some idea of what was happening. The same “modern” mentality that gives a higher priority to solving an administratively defined problem than to its effect on human beings characterized both the American and the German experiments.

Furthermore, the practice of using prisoner “volunteers” for medical experiments is currently very widespread in the United States. According to Jessica Mitford, on e reputable American scientist was reputed to have said, “Criminals in our penitentiaries are fine experimental material – and much cheaper than chimpanzees.” According to the Food and Drug Administration, as of 1973, such experiments were being carried on in about fifty prisons in twenty-four states. Prisoners are usually “paid” one dollar a day for their participation. Unfortunately, there is much permanent damage to the “volunteers” and even loss of life. During World War II, the great German pharmaceutical corporation, Bayer A. G. of Leverkusen, made extensive use of death-camp inmates for their experiments on human beings. Today, Bayer’s American corporate counterparts, such as Lederle, Bristol-Myers, Squibb, Merck, Sharp and Dohme, and Upjohn, have found a plentiful supply of subjects (objects?) in America’s prisons for their “voluntary” experiments on human beings. The experiments in American prisons have the cooperation and the approval of such federal bureaucracies as the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare and the Food and Drug Administration. Ms. Mitford quotes Dr. Sheldon Margen, a physician opposed to the experiments, as saying,

If the researchers really believe these experiments are safe for humans, why do they go to the prisons for the subjects? Why don’t they try them out in their own labs on students? … Because they know the university would never permit this … They make a distinction between people they think of as social equals or colleagues and men behind bars, whom they regard as less than human.

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Bayer’s experiments were relatively innocent. This was not true of most of I.G. Farben’s corporate activities at Auschwitz. I.G. Farben was the most important German corporate employer of slave labor at Auschwitz. The corporation’s activities are at Auschwitz are an important part of the story of the camp as a society of total domination. In the nineteenth century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had observed that the economic triumph of the bourgeoisie, the class of modern capitalists that owned the “means of production”, had “left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous cash payment.” Marx and Engels were pointing to the same process of “dehumanized” rationalization as had Weber, who regarded the large corporation as a type of bureaucratic organization that rivaled the state bureaucracy in achieving rational efficiency and calculated results. According to Marx, the bourgeoisie had reduced industrial labor to a commodity “like every other article of commerce.” Marx claimed that in capitalist enterprise the cost of labor was restricted to the “means of subsistence” required by the laborer “for his maintenance and the propagation of the race.” In view of the conditions of the working class in England, Europe’s most industrialized nation in the 1840s, the observations were more than justified. As uprooted men and women were forced to move from the countryside to the cities, they had little choice but to accept the subsistence wages offered to them in the mills and factories. The alternative was starvation. There was an abundant labor supply and its cost was kept at a minimum. Unlike the old feudal order, the relations between the mill and mine workers and their employers were totally impersonal. The workers were unsentimentally regarded as a necessary component in the production mechanism, but each worker was seen as an interchangeable, easily replaceable unit in a depersonalized mechanism that was calculated solely in terms of minimum costs and maximum profits.

…

In Victorian Egnald, the wage slaves had become servo-mechanism of the machines they tended. As Marx has observed, “as machines become more human, men become more like machines.”

Page 58/59

I.G Farben’s decision to locate at Auschwitz was based upon the very same criteria by which contemporary multinational corporations relocate their plants in utter indifference to the social consequences of such moves: wherever possible costs, especially labor costs, must be minimized and profits maximized.

…

According to the affidavit of Dr. Raymon van den Straaten, a slave at Auschwitz, on one occasion, five of I. G. Farben’s top directors made an inspection tour of I. G. Auschwitz. As one of the directors passed a slave scientist, Dr. Fritz Lohner-Beda, the Director remarked, “The Jewish swine could work a little faster.” Another I. G. Farben director responded, “If they don’t work, let them perish in the gas chamber.” Dr. Lohner-Beda was then pulled out of his group and kicked to death.

Page 60

My point in stressing Dr. Ter Meer’s American corporate connections is not to suggest that corporate executives are possessed of some distinctive quality of villainy. It is to emphasize the extent to which the same attitude of impersonal rationality is required to run successfully a large corporation, a death camp slave labor factory and an extermination center. All three are part of the same world. At least in Germany, the top executives of all three enterprises often felt at home with each other.

Page 61

Only one incentive was necessary to keep the slaves working at maximum capacity, terror. The workers knew that the moment they were no longer capable of meeting work schedules, they would be sent tot the gas chambers. No other incentive was required. None was given. If the slaves did not keep up with the schedule, they were gassed; if they did keep up with it, the work itself killed them within a few months. Their only hope of remaining alive was to maintain a schedule that was calculated finally to kill them.

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To repeat, no laws were broken and no crimes were committed at Auschwitz. Those who were condemned to the society of total domination were stripped of all protection of the law before they entered. Finally, no credible punishment was meted out. Truly, the twentieth century has been the century par excellence that is beyond good an devil.

As time passes, it becomes apparent that the horrors perpetrated by the Nazis in their society of total domination, such as mutilating and homicidal medical experiments on human beings and corporate utilization of death-camp slave labor, merely carried to a logical conclusion operational attitudes and procedures that are every predominant in the workings of bureaucracy and modern corporate enterprise.

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On May 3, 1994, at the height of the savage deportation process, the Central Jewish Council of Hungary wrote a letter seeking an audience with Andor Jarosz, the puppet minister of the interior who had been hand-picked by the Germans to facilitate the deportation of almost 1,000,000 Jews: “We emphatically declare that we do not seek the audience to lodge complaints about the merit of the measures adopted, but merely to ask that they be carried out in a humane spirit.” (Italics added.) There was to be no protest about mass extermination, only discussion of how to make the deaths easier for the victims. It was actually easier for the Germans to exterminate the Hungarian Jews than it had been for them to kill those who had previously been exterminated. The Hungarian Jewish response is significant because it demonstrates that it made no difference whether a Jewish community knew of the fate that awaited them or not.

….

In addition to the cultural conditioning that affected even the most assimilated Jews, the organized Jewish community was a major factor in preventing effective resistance. Wherever the extermination process was put into effect, the Germans utilized the existing leadership and organizations of the Jewish community to assist them. It was not necessary to find traitors or collaborators to do their work. The compliance reaction was automatic. It was only necessary to delegate to the existing Jewish communal leaders the responsibility for transmitting and executing German orders.

The process of taking over the Jewish communal bureaucracies and transforming them into components in the extermination process was one of the organizational triumphs of the Nazis. In the face of the German determination to murder all Jews, most Jews instinctively relied on their own communal organizations to defend their interests whenever possible. Unfortunately, these very organizations were transformed into subsidiaries of the German police and state bureaucracies.

…

At first, the Reichsvereinigung performed the bureaucratic preliminary work necessary for the later stages of the destruction process. Jewish statisticians informed the SS of births, deaths, and other demographic changes. The communal newspaper (Judisches Nachrichtenblatt) kept people informed of German decrees. Jewish bureaucrats sat at their desks and performed the tasks assigned to them by German bureaucrats further up the chain of authority. According to Weber, “The principles of office hierarchy and of levels of graded authority mean a firmly ordered system of super- and subordination in which there is a supervision of the lower offices by higher ones.” One of the most important reasons for the system of graded authority in a bureaucracy, according to Weber is that the subordinate must fulfill assigned tasks “without any will of his own.” As subordinates, the Jewish bureaucrats had no effective will of their own.

…

Thus, the official agency of German Jews led by the most distinguished German rabbi of the twentieth century, a man in whose memory an important rabbinical seminary has been named (London’s Leo Baeck College), undertook such tasks as selecting those who were to be deported, notifying the families and, finally, of sending the Jewish police to round up the victims. In the Warsaw Ghetto and in Lodz, Poland, the Jewish council, or Judenrat, did not resist German directives even when the Germans demanded the “selection” of 10,000 Jews a day for deportation. Jewish bureaucrats made the selection; Jewish police rounded up the victims.

Page 79

As we know, the twentieth century has witnessed extraordinary “progress” in the unlimited intensification of human destructiveness and the radicalization of the forms of human domination. Nevertheless, it was the organizational skill of the Nazis rather than their new weapons that made the society of total domination a reality. And, most of the organizational tools with which such a society can be set up have been greatly improved since World War II. Of supreme importance as a weapon of bureaucratic domination is the modern computer. Few weapons were as indispensable to the Gestapo as its files. When one compares the laborious task of maintaining comprehensive files as short a time back as World War II with the instantaneous retrieval of data about anyone the police or any other governmental agency might be interested in today, we see how greatly the problem of keeping tabs on people has been simplified.

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One of the gravest threats to constitutional government posed by foreign ventures is the possibility that government leaders might ignore constitutional restraints and employ the kind of “dirty” tactics they customarily use against foreigners in dealing with domestic opposition. That is why any domestic use of the CIA is so great a threat to American freedom. The domestic spying activities and the raid on the office of Dr. Lewis Fielding, Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, by members of the extralegal White House “plumbers” unit are examples of the use of CIA trained personnel and the CIA itself, in domestic political conflicts. And, it is hardly likely that we will ever know the whole story of those episodes. (c ) Nixon sought to secure consent to his program, if not by physical terror, then certainly by the beginnings of bureaucratic terror. Perhaps this was best seen in his attempts to utilize the Internal Revenue Service to harass political opponents as well as public personalities whose style of life or political commitments were distasteful to him. In addition to tax harassment, there were other attempts at bureaucratic harassment such as the threat to revoke the licenses of television stations owned by the Washington Post. The intent of the threatened punitive action was clear: opponents were warned that there were heavy penalties involved in opposing Richard Nixon. Such use of power was an important initial step in the direction of government by terror. Fortunately, the administrators of the most important government agency involved, the Internal Revenue Service, were seldom willing to go along. In this respect the federal bureaucracy, whatever its faults, still retained a measure of independence from the chief executive, something the German bureaucracy felt honor bound not to do after Hitler’s accession to power.
It may seem a long way from the improper use of the Internal Revenue Service, the FBI, the CIA and other federal agencies to harass opponents to a society of total domination, but Nixon had taken several important steps in that direction. He attempted to replace the give and take of the normal American political process by bureaucratic harassment. Fear was to replace debate and persuasion. In addition, h had established a category of citizens, the so-called “enemies’ lists”, who were to be subject to punitive government action, although they had broken no law and for whom there was no legal justification for any kind of government hostility. Those who had opposed him had, in fact, done nothing more than exercise their normal right to take a stand on political issues.

…

It would be comforting to think that the abuses of power that occurred in the Nixon administration were due solely to his moral and political shortcomings. Unfortunately, the problem will not go away with the departure of Richard Nixon. The abuses occurred because the structure of government put the capacity to act as did Nixon in the hands of any president willing to employ it and clever enough to get away with such behavior.

…

The overwhelming power of modern government is bound to increase no matter who is president. And not every President will be as clumsy or as noncharismatic as Nixon.

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The unlimited character of the state’s sovereignty even in the extermination of its own citizens was recognized by Justice Robert Jackson the presiding American judge at the Nuremberg war crimes trials. Jackson expressed the opinion that the Nazies involved in the extermination of the Jews could not be prosecuted for murdering Jews of German nationality. He argued that no state can sit in judgment of another’s treatment of its minorities. Jackson felt compelled to assert the ultimacy of national sovereignty over all conflicting claims, even the right to life itself. He did not, of course, approve of the Nazi actions. He sought to include the extermination project in the catalogue of war crimes, but only because the project was pursued as part of a war of unjustified aggression, not because the extermination was a crime in itself. The right of a state to define the conditions under which capital punishment will be inflicted has not been impaired by the Holocaust.

…
The Nuremburg trials were not a giant step forward in international law. They were in all likelihood an elaborate exercise in national vengeance. In ancient times it was not considered the function of the state to punish private injury. The greatest deterrent against the would-be aggressor was his calculation of the victim’s ability to avenge a wrong, either alone or in concert with members of his family or tribe. The ancient law of tribal vengeance may have been primitive but, in the absence of any impartial public institution for meting out punishment, it did serve to contain violence. The need for the Nuremberg trials arose out of a similar situation: there was no disinterested supranational institution that could enact and enforce laws binding on sovereign states. The situation between sovereign states is not unlike that which in ancient times led to the law of tribal vengeance. The power to injure remains the most credible deterrent to a would –be aggressor’s violence. At Nuremberg the Allies avenged wrongs done to themselves and their clients. Those who had the power could avenge. The Jews had no power and the interest of the Allies in acting on their behalf diminished radically as West German military cooperation against the Soviet bloc assumed importance.

…

Some may claim vengeance is indefensible in a world of evolving, higher moral sensibilities, yet it is difficult to see what other deterrent can exist in a world in which a legal system is binding within a state but never between political communities.

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Similarly, if it is no crime for a state to exterminate its citizens or subject peoples, it is also no crime to inflict upon them the kind of slavery the Nazis inflicted upon the camp inmates. This fact was as clearly understood by the Bolsheviks as by the Nazis. Both the Nazis and the Bolsheviks under Stalin have demonstrated that a properly organized modern state can inflict total domination upon any segment of its population it chooses. Unfortunately, there are no categories arising out of traditional political, religious, or ethical norms with which such problems can realistically be confronted. It is, of course, possible to reiterate traditional affirmations about the innate dignity of human beings, but the existence of bureaucratically administered societies of total domination is the most compelling empirical refutation of all such claims. In the face of the new forms of domination, assertions about innate human dignity are either false or meaningless.

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Auschwitz was perhaps the terminal expression of an urban culture that first arose when an ancient protobourgeoisie liberated its work life from the haphazard, unpredictable, and seasonable character of agriculture and sustained itself by work which was, in the words Max Weber, “continuous and rational.”

….

There is no private right or privilege that ought to be permitted to subvert the right of every person to a place of dignity and social utility within his or her community.

I recently finished this book and thought it was great. There were lots of little details and stories about Rand that I didn't know, and I didn't know how she fit into the history of libertarianism. This book is a relatively quick read, I'd highly recommend it.

Reason TV interview with the author:

Reason Magazine Review: http://reason.com/archives/2009/12/01/ayn-rand-close-up

Short talk by Burns:

Page 32

Communism is a cruel system that crushes the virtuous and rewards the corrupt.

Page 36

The Nation doubted that "petty officials in Soviet Russia ride to the opera in foreign limousines while the worker goes wheatless and meatless."

Page 38

She was further unnerved by the radicals that seemed to swarm around Roosevelt and had wormed their way into the highest citadels of American intellectual and political life. Rand could see little difference between armed Communist revolution and Roosevelt's rapid expansion of the federal government. She rallied against both.

Page 39

Rand was suspicious of both democracy and capitalism, unsure if either system could be trusted to safeguard individual rights against the dangers of the mob.

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One day she probed this difference, asking the other woman what her "goal in life" was. Rand's abstract query, so typical of her approach to other people, brought a swift and ready response. "Here's what I want out of life," her neighbor lectured Rand. "If nobody had an automobile, I would not want one. If automobiles exist and some people don't have them, I want an automobile. If some people have two automobiles, I want two automobiles."

Rand was aghast. This piece of petty Hollywood braggadocio opened an entire social universe to her. Here, she thought furiously, was someone who appeared selfish but was actually self-less. Under her neighbor's feverish scheming and desperate career maneuverings was simply a hollow desire to appear important in other people's eyes. It was a motivation Rand, the eternal outsider, could never understand. But once identified the concept seemed the key to understanding nearly everything around her.

Swiftly Rand expanded her neighbor's response into a whole theory of human psychology. The neighbor's daughter was a "second-hander," someone who followed the ideas and values of others. Her opposite would be an individualist like Rand, someone who wanted to create certain ideas, books, or movies rather than attain a generic level of success. Within days Rand had identified the differences between her and the neighbor as "the basic distinction between two types of people in the world." She visualized the dim outlines of two clashing characters, the second-ander and the individualist, who would drive the plot and theme of her next novel.

Page 42

To effect this transvaluation of values Rand had to carefully redefine selfishness itself. Egoism or selfishness typically described one who "puts oneself above all and crushes everything in one's way to get the best for oneself," she wrote. "Fine!" But this understanding was missing something critical. The important element, ethically speaking, was "not what one does or how one does it, but why one does it." Selfishness was a matter of motivation, not outcome. Therefore anyone who sought power for power's sake was not truly selfish. Like Rand's neighbor, the stereotypical egoist was seeking a goal defined by others, living as "they want him to live and conquer to the extent of a home, a yacht and a full stomach." By contrast, a true egoist, in Rand's sense of the term, would put "his own 'I,' his standard of values, above all things, and [conquer] to live as he pleases, as he chooses and as he believes." Nor would a truly selfish person seek to dominate others, for that would mean living for others, adjusting his values and standards to maintain his superiority. Instead, "an egoist is a man who lives for himself."

...

"A man has a code of ethics primarily for his own sake, not for anyone else's," Rand asserted.

Page 45/46

By contrast, her characters were starkly etched in her mind. Rand designed an elegant, almost geometric structure for the book. Howard Roark was her ideal man, an uncompromising individualist and creator. The other primary characters were variations on his theme. As she explained in a notebook, "Howard Roark: the man who can be and is. Gail Wynand: the man who could have been. Peter Keating: the man who never could be and doesn't know it. Ellsworth M. Toohey: the man who never could be -- and knows it." Rand also created two love interests for Roark Vesta Dunning and Dominique Francon.

Rand's characterizations flowed directly from her architectural research, her knowledge of current events, and her developing opposition to American liberalism. To give Roark form and specificity she drew on the career of the modernist pioneer Frank Lloyd Wright, whose avant-garde style she admired. Numerous details of Wright's life as described in his autobiography would recur in the novel, and she gave Roark a cranky, embittered mentor in the vein of Wright's own teacher, Louis Sullivan. Second-hander Peter Keating was based on a contemporary mediocrity, the popular architect Thomas Hastings. As Rand noted excitedly after reading a book on Hastings, "If I take this book and Wright's autobiography, there is practically the entire story."

Other titans appeared in the novel as well. Gail Wynand was modeled after William Randolph Hearst, whose career Rand had closely followed. She was struck in particular by his failed bids for mayor and governor of New York. Here was a man who claimed great influence but had little success in actually grasping the levers of power. Hearst had been thoroughly humbled, Rand thought, overlooking his two terms in Congress and the authority he continued to wield through his media empire. To her Hearst's strength was a chimera. His power was not his own, but could be granted or withheld by the masses whom he served. In her novel Wynand would illustrate this principle, with his failings contrasted starkly to Roark's independence and agency.

Her villain, Ellsworth Toohey, promised to transform Rand's supposedly nonpolitical novel into a sharp satire on the leftist literary culture of 1930 New York. One evening she and Frank reluctantly accompanied two friends to a a talk by the British socialist Harold Laski at the leftist New School for Social Research. When Laski took the stage Rand was thrilled. Here was Ellsworth Toohey himself! She scribbled frantically in her notebook, sketching out a brief picture of Laski's face and noting his every tic and mannerism. She and Frank went back twice more in the following evenings.

Most of Rand's notes on Laski's lecture, and her resultant description of Toohey, showcased her distate for all things feminine. Rand was repelled by the women in the New School audience, whom she characterized as sexless, unfashionable, and unfeminine. She and Frank scoffed at their dowdy lisle stockings, trading snide notes back and forth. Rand was infuriated most by the "intellectual vulgarity" of the audience, who seemed to her half-wits unable to comprehend the evil of Laski's socialism. What could be done about such a "horrible, horrible, horrible" spectacle, besides "perhaps restricting higher education, particularly for women?" she asked in her notes on the lecture. This misogyny rubbed off on Rand's portrait of Toohey, who was insipidly feminine, prone to gossip, and maliciously catty "in the manner of a woman or nance." Through Toohey, Rand would code leftism as fey, effeminate, and unnatural, as opposed to the rough-hewn masculinity of Roark's individualism.

Before she saw Laski, Toohey was an abstracted antithesis of Roark. But a socialist intellectual fit her purposes just as well, even as the characterization shifted the novel ever closer to a commentary on current events. Laski was not the sole inspiration, for Rand also used bits of the American critics Heywood Broun, Lewis Mumford, and Clifton Fadiman to round out Toohey's persona. Fitting Toohey so squarely into the leftist literary culture signaled Rand's emerging dual purposes for the book and ensured that when it was finally published, the novel would be understood as a political event as much as a literary achievement.

Page 49

The one organized anti-Roosevelt group, the Liberty League, was a secretive cabal of wealthy businessmen hoping to wrest control of government from the masses. Although the Liberty League made several awkward attempts at populism, it's main financial backers were the conservative Du Pont family. Tarred as fascists after several of the group's members praised Mussolini and called for an American dictator, the Liberty League disintegrated within a few years of its founding.

Page 56

These spontaneous sessions began to shake Rand loose from her preconceived notions about American voters. Before campaigning, Rand had been suspicious of American democracy. Instead of government of, for, and by the people, she thought the state should be "a means for the convenience of the higher type of man." Her earliest fiction, heavy with contempt for the masses, reflected this sensibility. Now she found herself impressed by the questions her working-class audience asked and their responsiveness to her capitalist message. She said of her timee in the theaters, "[It] supported my impression of the common man, that they really were much better to deal with than the office and the Madison Avenue Republicans." It seemed that the faceless crowds she condemned, rather than their social and intellectual betters, understood the dangers of the Roosevelt administration.

Page 61

The result was Rand's thirty-two-page "Manifesto of Individualism," the first full statement of her political and philosophical beliefs.

Page 63

She praised the American Revolution as a rare historic moment when men worked collectively to establish "the freedom of the Individual and the establishment of a society to ensure this freedom," and called "give me liberty or give me death," Patrick Henry's dramatic words in support of the American Revolution, "the statement of a profound truth."

Page 68

After another discussion of her novel, Watkins [[Her Agent]] told Rand, "You always ask for reasons. I can't always give reasons. I just go by feelings." The statement came as a "traumatic shock" to Rand. To her it was a shameful confession of personal and intellectual inadequacy. She could tolerate criticism of her book that was carefully and consciously justified, but to be attacked on the basis of unspecified feelings galled her. Watkins's confession also destroyed any possibility of an ongoing professional relationship. Rand told her as much in a long philosophical letter announcing that she no longer wanted Watkins to represent her work.

Page 84

Swayed by Roark's argument, the jury promptly votes unanimously to acquit. The jury proved critical, helping Rand democratize her vision and reaffirm the basic wisdom of the free-thinking, independent American. Although none of the jurors aren't the history-making creator that Roark represents, Rand makes clear that they can share in his glory simply by understanding and affirming the principle of individualism.

Page 87/88

The Fountainhead finessed this contradiction and escaped libertarianism's fatal elitism through Rand's theory of ethics. For all her bluster, Rand's ethics were rather anodyne. Roark tells the jury, "Degrees of ability vary, but the basic principle remains the same; the degree of mans independence, initiative, and personal love for his work determine his talent as a worker and his worth as a man" (681). The book's hierarchy of values is not exclusive, for anyone could join Rand's elite simply by loving their work. Instead of talking about the wealthy, she talked about the independent, thereby sidestepping social class. Inequalities or differences between characters are discussed in specific, individual terms, without references to larger social structures. Denizens of Hell's Kitchen and the city's toniest drawing rooms are evaluated by the same standard of independence.

Page 103

The Fountainhead and The Road to Serfdom were even made into comic books, a testimony to their wide appeal.

Page 105/106

At the end of Hayek's second chapter Rand summarized her thoughts: "Nineteenth Century Liberalism made the mistake of associating liberty, rights of man etc. with the ideas of 'fighting for the people', 'for the downtrodden,' for the poor,' etc. They made it an altruistic movement. But altruism is collectivism. That is why collectivism took the liberals over." The solution, then, was to shift the principles of nineteenth-century liberalism onto different ethical grounds that avoided altruism. Rand had a ready candidate at hand: her own system of selfishness that she had articulated in the The Fountainhead.

Page 107

The film as never produced, but Rand's encounter with Oppenheimer provided fuel for a character in her developing novel, the scientist Robert Stadler.

Page 116/117

From the start she pushed Read to assume a stance that mirrored her own. She was particularly insistent that Read promote her moral views. he must explain that profit and individual gain were "the capitalist's real and proper motive" and ought to be defended as such. Otherwise, if the very motive of capitalism was "declared to be immoral, the whole system becomes immoral, and the motor of the system stops dead." It was the same criticism she had made of Hayek: a partial case for the free market was worse than no argument at all. Read was naturally more cautious. Like Rand he believed that government functions such as rent control, public education, the Interstate Commerce Commission, military training, and the Post Office should all be done by "voluntary action."

...

Rand believed that Friedman and Stigler were insincere in their arguments against rent control because they failed to invoke any moral principles to support their case. And when they did mention morality, it was to speak favorably of equality and humanitarianism. She fumed to Mullendor, "Not one word about the inalienable right of landlords and property owners ... not one one word about any kind of principles. Just expediency ... and humanitarian ... concern for those who can find no houses." In addition to her eight-page letter to Mullendore, replete with exclamation points and capitalized sentences, Rand sent a short note to Read. She called the pamphlet "the most pernicious thing ever issued by an avowedly conservative organization" and told him she could have no further connection with FEE. To Rose Wilder Lane she described the incident as "a crushing disappointment," adding, "It is awfully hard to see a last hope go."

Page 129

Paterson responded with more New York gossip, including a tidbit about Don Levine's bizarre new concept of competing government agencies. It was the first glimmer of anarcho-capitalism, Rand's bete noire in the years ahead. But now Levine's strange views simply signaled to both Rand and Paterson that his newest venture was not worth supporting.

Page 134

While driving back from New York, she and Frank visited Ouray, Colorado, a small town tucked in a seam of mountains. Right away Rand knew Ouray would be the model for her capitalist Shangri-la, the valley where her strikers would create their own utopian society.

Page 143

Rand now had two arguments to deploy against anti-trust. The first was her moralistic argument that antitrust laws unfairly punished the successful. The second was Mises's contention that monopolies were not the fault of business, but of government regulation. Rand could therefore cite monopolies as evidence that the United States had never experienced true free-market capitalism. As Paterson had before, Mises helped Rand strengthen, define, and defend her ideas.

Page 154

Rand and Mises argued over conscription, which Rand saw as tantamount to slavery. Mises, his eyes on history, argued that only conscription could prevent the rise of dangerous mercenary armies.

Page 159

During the two years she struggled to write Galt's speech, Rand's pronounced nervous tension wreaked havoc on those closest to her.

Page 175/176

Chambers was also unsettled by Rand's godless capitalism, which might be even worse than godless Communism. Where Rand saw the free market as an essentially spiritual realm and competition as the meaning of life itself, Chambers saw only a heartless machine world. In the 1940s Rand had been one of man intellectuals seeking a plausible grounding for individual rights and democracy. By the 1950s conservatives had found an answer in religion. Defining Communism as essentially atheistic, they were able to frame Christianity and capitalism as natural partners in the fight against government regulation. If the two impulses were paradoxical or contradictory at base, that was the very point, for conservatives wanted the free market set within an explicitly Christian society. Only religion could balance the "materialism" of free enterprise, with the Christian emphasis on charity, humility, and equality blunting the harsher edges of laissez-faire. But now Rand appeared to be tacking back to the earlier nineteenth-century vision of Darwinian capitalist competition, absent the sooting balm of Christian egalitarianism.

Atlas Shrugged represented a fundamental challenge to the new conservative synthesis, for it argued explicitly that a true morality of capitalism would be diametrically opposed to Christianity. By spinning out the logic of capitalism to its ultimate conclusion Atlas Shrugged showcased the paradox of defending free market capitalism while at the same time advocating Christianity. Rand's ideas threatened to undermine or redirect the whole conservative venture. Even worse, given her popularity, there was the significant danger that Rand would be seized on by liberals as a spokesperson for conservatism. She might then confirm the liberal stereotype that conservatism was nothing more than an ideological cover for the naked class interests of the haves. For all these reasons, Rand would have to be cast out of the respectable right. More than just a literary judgement, the National Review article was an exercise in a talbet keeping. The review signified Buckley's breaking with the secular libertarian tradition Rand represented and his efforts to create a new ideological synthesis that gave religion a paramount role. It was as Nathan had foreseen: Rand and the conservatives were not on the same side.

Page 183

Instead, the academic conference became the grounds for a bitter final breakup between Rothbard and the Rand circle. Tensions had been building over Rothbard's stubborn allegiance to anarchism. After almost six months of regular contact Rand and the Collective expected Rothbard to be convinced that anarchism was unworkable. In July 1958 a special Saturday night session was scheduled for Rothbard and Rand to debate. By then Rothbard had realized, "I hated the guts of [Nathan] and Ayn and the rest of the gang."

Page 186

To Peikoff, Kant's argument that the means of perception structured humans' sense of reality undermined objective reality, reason, and all absolutes. Kan's ideas had opened the philosophical gates to destructive ideas lik relativism and existentialism, which created the poisonous atmosphere that greeted Atlas Shrugged.

Page 194

The reaction to Rand fell neatly into a pattern established years before. Since the advent of Joseph McCarthy, Wisconsin's famously anti-Communist senator, liberals had trouble treating conservative ideas as legitimate. A prominent 1955 volumen, The Radical Right, set the tone by treating libertarianism and anti-Communism as psychological syndromes, an expression of paranoia or status anxiety. Accordingly liberal commentators derided Rand her following as a fringe element with little to contribue to the nation's intellectual life. But Rand's popularity appeared impervious to attack by the most esteemed members of the establishment. The more guardians of respectability criticized Rand, the more irresistible she became to conservatives who loved thumbing their noses at the ascendant liberal order.

Page 205/206

As the campaign wore on, Rand was outraged to see Goldwater caricatured as racist by the mass media. It was true that both she and Goldwater opposed the 1964 Civil Rights Act, a litmus test of liberal acceptability, but neither she nor Goldwater was truly prejudiced. Rand inveighed against racism as "the lowest, most crudely primitive form of collectivism," and Goldwater had integrated his family's business years before and was even a member of the NAACP. But Goldwater's libertarianism trumped his racial liberalism. He was among a handful of senators who voted against the bill, a sweeping piece of legislation intended to address the intractable legacy of racial discrimination in the South. Goldwater's vote was based on principles he had held for years. A firm supporter of state's rights, he was alarmed at the expansive powers granted the federal government under the act. Following the analysis of his friends William Rehnquist and Robert Bork, he also believed the act was unconstitutional because it infringed on private property rights. In the scrum of electoral politics such distinctions were academic. Goldwater's vote went down as a vote segregation.

...

But she was equally appealed by the act's clauses II and VII, which forbade discrimination in public accommodations and employment. If the act passed it would be the "worst breach of property rights in the sorry record of American history," she wrote. Early civil rights activists who struggled against government-enforced segregation drew Rand's approval. Now she criticized "Negro leaders" for forfeiting their moral case against discrimination by "demanding special race privileges." Rand considered race a collectivist fiction, a peripheral category to be subsumed into her larger philosophy...

Page 210

... Rand proposed a new book, The Fascist New Frontier, after her essay of the same name.

...

The title was intentionally provocative but also reflect Rand's deep revulsion at the Kennedy administration. The famous line from Kennedy's inaugural speech, "Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country, " inflamed Rand. (Milton Friedman also found this sentiment objectionable, attacking Kennedy's statement in the very first sentence of Capitalism and Freedom.) In the title essay she juxtaposed excerpts from speeches by Kennedy and Hitler to demonstrate their similarity; to her, both were collectivists who demanded that men live for the state.

Page 212

She repeated the idea in Atlas Shrugged and For the New Intellectual, making it a basic tenet of her ethics: "No man has the right to initiate the use of physical force against others." Physical force was a core concern of Rand's political philosophy, for she held that rights could only be violated by physical force.

...

Although it sounded straightforward, Rand's definition of force was nuanced. She defined fraud, extortion, and breach of contract as force, thus enabling government to establish a legal regime that would create a framework for commerce. Critically, Rand also considered taxation to be an "initiation of physical force" since it was obtained, ultimately, "at the point of a gun." This led her to a radical conclusion: that taxation itself was immoral.

Page 214

Ted Turner, then a little-known media executive, personally paid for 248 billboards scattered throughout the South that read simply "Who is John Galt?" Ten years after the publication of Atlas Shrugged she was at the apex of her fame.

Page 218

Nathan closed with a strong attack against another group of Rand readers, the "craven parasites" who sought to use Objectivism for non-Objectivist ends. Into this category fell anyone who advocated political anarchism and anyone who tried to recruit NBI students into schemes for a new free market nation or territory.

Page 218/219

In 1962 Rothbard published his two-volume, Man, Economy, and the State, an exegesis of his mentor Ludwig Von Mises's thought. The book was written with a concluding set of chapters advocating anarchism, which Rothbard's sponsors at the Volker Fund quietly excised. Rothbard took his ideas to a more receptive audience, founding a magazine called Left and Right that hoped to attract student rebels from both ends of the political spectrum. Although anarchism was a minority position, to say the least, the very idea of it infuriated Rand. But some students saw anarchism as a the logical next step after Objectivism. Others, infatuated with Rand's idea of a capitalist utopia, hatched elaborate plans for a new libertarian Atlantis. A truly free market society could be found in uninhabited lands or even established on offshore floating platforms, they believed. Rand found these schemes ludicrous.

Page 229

Rand saw the draft as a sure sin that freedom was already in grave danger. She was deeply opposed to the draft and its implications for society. "Of all the statist violations of individual rights ... the military draft is the worst," she told her audience. "It negates man's fundamental right, the right to life, and establishes the fundamental principle of statism - that a man's life belongs to the state, and the state may claim it by compelling him to sacrifice it in battle. Once that principle is accepted, the rest is only a matter of time."

...

Framed as a statist violation of rights, conscription fit seamlessly into her larger opposition to coercion and the initiation of force.

Page 247/248

The schisms of the 1968 were a disaster for Rand but a boon for many of her readers.

...

No longer "students of Objectivism," those who liked Rand were free to call themselves Objectivists or libertarians. They could follow the logic of their antistatism all the way to the newly popular position of anarchism or, with a nod to Rand, anarcho-capitalism. Rand's works were to potent and too popular to be confined or controlled, even by their creator.

...

The greatest contribution of Rand's Objectivism was to moor the libertarian movement to the right side of the political spectrum. In turn, libertarians kept Rand's ideas actively circulating in the years after NBI's demise. Rand denounced libertarian appropriation of her work, never accepting that with her success came a commensurate loss of control. Objectivism, Atlas Shrugged, John Galt - they no longer belonged to Rand exclusively. She had set them loose in the world, and their fortunes were no longer tied to hers.

Page 250/251/252/253

Despite its stated orientation, The Rational Individualist published the first serious challenge to Rand's hegemony, an "Open Letter to Ayn Rand
by Roy Childs Jr., a student at the State University of New York, Buffalo. Childs admired Rand but questioned her stance on government as he gravitated toward an anarchist position. With his letter, sent to Rand on July 4, 1969, Childs repudiated Objectivism and debuted as the enfant terrible of anarcho-capitalism. Boldly Childs opened with a straightforward declaration: "The purpose of this letter is to convert you to free market anarchism." Relying heavily on Objectivist concepts and Randian words and phrases, Childs argued that Rand's advocacy of a limited state was contradicted by her own philosophy. Her(sp) told her, "Your political philosophy cannot be maintained without contradiction that, in fact , you are advocating the maintenance of an institution - the state - which is a moral evil." Beyond offering an ethical critique, Childs also turned Rand's terminology against her, arguing that her idea of a limited government that did not initiate force as a "floating abstraction." According to Childs, all governments must initiate force to survive as governments and maintain their monopoly on coercion. And if the initiation of force was forbidden in both the Objectivist and libertarian worlds, then the state itself must be opposed. Childs lectured Rand, "Your approach to the matter is not yet radical, not yet fundamental: it is the existence of the state itself which must be challenged by the new radicals. It must be understood that the state is an unnecessary evil. Rand was unimpressed by Childs's logic. Her only response was to cancel his subscription to The Objectivist.

...

How was it possible to oppose the initiation of force (a key Randian tenet), yet still defend a minimal state? R.W. Bradford, later an editor or Liberty magazine, remembered, "A few were willing to accept her obfuscations on the issue, but the overwhelming majority were unwilling to evade the problem. Virtually all these people became anarchists." To many libertarians tutored in Rand's absolutist style of thought, the steps were simple: the state was bad, so why not abolish it entirely? Childs put it this way: "As in ehtics there are only two sides to any question - the good and the evil - so too are the only two logical sides to the political question of the state: either you are for it, or you are against it."

...

... Atlas Shrugged had indelibly etched the idea of a stateless capitalist utopia onto the right-wing psyche. Anarchists were right to recognize that Rand's ideas had first opened them to the possibility of radical antistatism. By denying the morality of both conscription and taxation, Objectivism de-legitimized two fundamental functions of any state. At the same time Rand's fiction suggested that an alternative world was within reach. Once imagined, Galt's Gulch could never be forgotten.

Page 255/256

On the third day of the conference [[YAF Annual Conference (1969)]] libertarian frustration bubbled over when their anti-draft resolution went down to defeat. Not only did the convention reject the libertarian plank, but in the plank that passed they included a pointed clause condemning draft resistance and the burning of draft cards. The convention's decision to endorse abolition of the draft, but not resistance to it, was critical. It signaled that there were definite limits to YAF''s antistatism. The organization would remain firmly within the political establishment. Rhetorical support of limited government was fine, but anarchism and radical libertarianism were beyond the pale.

In the face of this insult, the libertarians could no longer resist their innate impulse to challenge authority. A small pack of students gathered in a conspiratorial knot. One of the group had a facsimile of his draft card. (Apparently the conservative within him lived still, for he was unwilling to sacrifice the actual card.) Another dissident seized a microphone and announced to the assembly that any person had a right to defend himself against violence, including state violence. Then "he raised a card, touched it with a flame from a cigarette lighter, and lifted it over his head while it burned freely into a curling black ash." The symbol of YAF, a hand holding the torch of liberty, had been deftly satirized and openly mocked.

After a few moments of shocked silence, pandemonium erupted on the convention floor. "Kill the commies" yelled the patriotic majority. Amid shouts, shoving, and fisticuffs, the traitorous facsimile draft card burners were ejected from the convention floor. Around three hundred of their ideological brethren followed the rebels out of the convention, and out of Young Americans for Freedom. A chasm now separated the libertarians and the traditionalists. By the end of the year a substantial number of YAF chapters had either left the organization or had their charters rescinded. California alone lost twenty-four chapters.

This libertarian secession was the culmination of a dynamic that had plagued modern American conservatism since its emergence earlier in the century. Postwar conservatives had crafted a careful synthetic ideology with a productive contradiction at its core: the tension between free market capitalism and cultural traditionalism. Clashes over the balance of power had broken out regularly ever since, with Rand's excommunication by National Review among the most prominent. The cultural upheavals of the late 1960s were a watershed, for they made stark the difference between laissez-faire libertarians and tradition-bound conservatives. Taking inspiration from the revolutionary language of the New Left, libertarians finally had enough confidence and strength to identify themselves as a distinct political movement. They were no longer conservatives, but following in Rand's footsteps they would remain part of the right.

Immediately after the convention Murray Rothbard and his new comrade Karl Hess attempted to pull the exodus of libertarians to the left, but it was Rand who emerged as a more decisive influence.

Page 258

Rand had little appreciation for her new fan base. During her annual public appearances she called libertarians "scum," "intellectual cranks," and "plagiarists." Because she defined Objectivism as her personal property, she viewed libertarian use of her ideas as theft. What others would see as tribute or recognition of her work, Rand defined as "cashing in" or plagiarism. "If such hippies hope to make me their Marcuse, it will not work," she wrote sourly. Her comment was not far off the mark, for Rand's writings were a sort of ur-text for the libertarian movement. They could be challenged, interpreted, reinterpreted, adopted, celebrated - but never ignored. Whether she liked it or not, libertarians would always consider Rand a vital part of their intellectual heritage.

Page 259

As the joke went, "If you put half a dozen libertarians into a room together, you will eventually end up with four factions, 2 conspiracies, 3 newsletters, 2 splinter groups and 4 withdrawals of sanction!"
...
Rand helped libertarians create a cohesive subculture without sacrificing autonomy or independence.

Page 260

... 'Freedom' is the bill of goods we try to sell to the flower children and the leftists." Continuing in a Randian vein, he noted, "if we wish to advocate capitalism, we must advocate it from a moral stand - we must assert that production is aright for man, that rational self-interest is right for man, that aside from (and in addition to) the fact that man should be free, he should also be selfish and productive. Here the restrictions that Rand put on libertarianism were clear. Rand had made capitalism a sacrosanct ideal for most libertarians, an allegiance that rapidly marginalized leaders like Karl Hess who hoped to draw libertarians to the left.

Page 261/262

More substantively Rand's patriotism and her reverence for the Founding Fathers were controversial in a movement that considered the Constitution a coercive document (because it claimed justification over even those who had not signed). Rand's account of the Apollo 11 launch crystalized this difference for many. In the Objectivist she described how she had been invited to a VIP viewing of the rocket launch. Shepherded past the masses within three miles of the take-off, Rand was awestruck. Apollo 11 was "the concretized abstraction of man's greatness," and as she saw the rocket rise she had "a feeling that was not triumph: but more : the feeling that that white object's unobstructed streak of motion was the only thing that mattered in the universe." It was a masterful piece of writing that become one of Rand's personal favorites.

...

What libertarian critics of the "moon jaunt" missed was how Rand's appreciation of Apollo 11 was tied to her ever=present worry that the United States was going backward, regressing to Petrograd circa 1920. Her fears were stirred anew by the emergence of the environmental movement, which she viewed as a virulent atavism that would drag mankind back to primitive existence. In her 1970 lecture to the Ford Hall Forum she attacked environmentalism as "the Anti-Industrial Revolution."

...

"Clean air is not the issue nor the goal of the ecologists' crusade.... it is technology and progress that the nature-lovers are out to destroy," she told her listeners.

Nature was not benevolent to Rand, but a force to be kept at bay by man's reason.

...

In this context Apollo 11 stood out for Rand as a bright sign of hope; it was not the powers of the state that she celebrated, but the wonders of technology and human achievement.

Page 263

... foreshadowed the emerging culture of cyberspace, which was strikingly libertarian from the beginning.

Page 264

What infuriated Rand the most was that feminism, as she saw it, was a claim based on weakness, a rebellion "against strength as such, by those who neither attempt nor intend to develop it." Feminists elevated their gender above their individuality and intelligence and then expected unearned success, to be enforced by government quotas and regulations.

Page266/267

The real rift between Rand and the libertarians came with the founding of the Libertarian Party in 1971. The party's founder, David Nolan was an MIT graduate and Rand fan. He was galvanized to action by Nixon's announcement of wage and price controls, intended to curb inflation. (By contrast Rand endorsed Nixon twice, regarding him as the lesser of two evils.) Nolan and a few friends announced plans for a libertarian national convention, held in Denver the following year. At the convention libertarians organized themselves into a loose network of state parties, coordinated by an elected central committee. they adopted organizational bylaws and a platform calling for withdrawal from Vietnam, draft amnesty, and abolition of victimless crimes and the Federal Communications Commission. The Party's statement of principles declared, in hyperbolic language, "We the members of the Libertarian Party, challenge the cult of the omnipotent state and defend the rights of the individual." By liberation standards the Party was a smashing success. At the June convention the Party claimed one thousand members and doubled its numbers by election day. By the end of 1973 it had three thousand members, with organizations in thirty-two states.

Page 268

Although the Party earned only 3,671 votes, it gained one electoral vote - and national media coverage - when a renegade Virginia elector, Roger MacBride, cast his vote for Hospers-Nathan. The nominally Republican MacBride had been tutored in the fundamentals of libertarianism b no less a luminary than Rose Wilder Lane, who considered him her adopted grandson and made him her literary heir. His rebellion made Nathan the first woman to receive an electoral college vote, an event that drew television news trucks to the normally said Richmond Capital building where electors voted. They Party's quixotic decision to run candidates had turned out to be a savvy move, garnering national news coverage far beyond what was warranted by the campaign. MacBride became an instant hero to Party members and sympathizers and would go on to be the Party's next presidential candidate.

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