Swivelling Eyes and Pivoting Minds

Utility sorters, resource shifters, and intergroup tournaments are different forms of Darwinian selection mechanisms - as in Darwin's characterization of "natural selection...[as] a power incessantly ready for action." (Charles Darwin. Origin of Species. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CD-Rom.). Each of the three weeds out what doesn't work, or, to put in Darwin's terms, what doesn't "fit...the economy of nature."

Simon Hornblower. "Greece: The History of the Classical Period." In John Boardman, Jasper Griffin, Oswyn Murray. The Oxford History of the Classical World: Greece and the Hellenistic World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988: 121-122.

In computer terms, the Persian Wars were a contest between a serial processing system - Persia, and a parallel distributed processing system, Greece. The serial processing system lines up all decisions and runs them through a central processing unit at its center - in this case, the emperor Xerxes or his appointed general, Mardonius. A parallel processing system depends on a mesh of independent decision making centers which pool their attempts at wisdom.

Herodotus, known for his exaggeration, declares that the Persian land army alone amounted to over five million - 2,641,000 soldiers augmented by support personnel. (Herodotus. The History of Herodotus. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CD-Rom; Will Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part II - The Life of Greece. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1939: 238.) For figures and details on the final battles at Plataea, Thermopylae, Salamis, and Mycale, see: Herodotus. The Histories, trans. Aubrey de Selincourt. New York: Penguin Books, 1972; Ernle Bradford. The Battle For The West: Thermopylae. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1980; Richard Ernest Dupuy and Trevor Nevitt Dupuy. The Encyclopedia of Military History from 3500 B.C. to the present. London: Macdonald & Co., 1970; "Plataea order of battle and map." De Bellis Homepagius Ancients, Medieval, and Renaissance Miniatures Wargaming. Plataea, September 1998. Dupuy calculates that at Plataea there were 80,000 Greeks pitted against 100,000 Persians, which may be an underestimate of the Persian force. Herodotus goes the other way. By his account there were roughly 75,000 Greeks against 300,000 Persians.

The turning point in the Persian Wars is generally reckoned to be the death of the Persian general Mardonius on August 27, 479 b.c. Though fighting continued for another thirteen years, Mardonius' demise forced the vast mass of troops Persia had sent to Greece to retreat from the Hellenic mainland.

W.G. Forrest. A History of Sparta: 950-192 B.C. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968: 97-100.

Sparta's Peloponnesian League was land-based and confined to the central Greek land mass. Athens' alternative, the Delian League, was a sea-based alliance of island and coastal city states. As de Landa has pointed out, land centered cities and those which act as ports are very different meshwork entities. (Manuel de Landa. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History. New York: Zone Books, 1997: 40, 50.)

"Foreigners were rarely welcomed. Usually they were made to understand that their visits must be brief: if they stayed too long they were escorted to the borders by the police. The Spartans themselves were forbidden to go abroad without permission of the government...." Will Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part II - The Life of Greece: 85.

For the manner in which Themistocles built the fleets and infrastructure of wharves and other port amenities which put sea-based war and export/import on a massive level, then Pericles hoisted them yet another rung upward (building, for example, Piraeus' grain exchange) see Will Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part II - The Life of Greece: 245-250.

Thucydides reports the Athenians reduced the inhabitants of Eion to slavery, did the same to those of Scyros, made war against Carystus, and subjugated Naxos by laying her under siege. (Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War. Translated by Richard Crawley. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CD-Rom.)

Histiaea was one city-state whose inhabitants were turned to refugees. (Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War.)

Samos, Pythagoras' former home, was one of the recipients of this more gentle social engineering - though a government of the people, by the people, and for the people was only planted by taking 100 hostages, presumably from the displaced oligarchic class, then waging a lengthy and expensive battle when some of the aristocrats who'd fled teamed up with the Byzantines to launch a nearly-successful revolt. (Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War)

Will Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part II - The Life of Greece: 251.

Here's Victor Hugo's paean to Pericles' mate: "Do you know who this Aspasia was, ladies? Although she lived in a time when women had not yet a soul, she was a soul; a soul of a rose and purple shade, more glowing than fire, fresher than the dawn. Aspasia was a being who touched the two extremes of woman, the prostitute goddess. She was Socrates, plus Manon Lescaut. Aspasia was created in case Prometheus might need a wanton." Victor Hugo. Les Miserables. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CD-Rom.

The dust-up of 459 may give some idea of why historian Simon Hornblower declares that even in their best of times, the Greeks "never managed to translate their psychological awareness of their 'Greekness' into political unity." (Simon Hornblower. "Greece: The History of the Classical Period": 122). Thucydides lists the following as the basic elements of the fracas: "the Phocians made an expedition against Doris...the Lacedaemonians...came to the aid of the Dorians...Secret encouragement had been given them by a party in Athens, who hoped to put an end to the reign of democracy...Meanwhile the Athenians marched against them with their whole levy and a thousand Argives...Some cavalry also joined the Athenians from their Thessalian allies; but these went over to the Lacedaemonians during the battle. ...Sixty-two days after the battle the Athenians marched into Boeotia under the command of Myronides, defeated the Boeotians in battle at Oenophyta, and became masters of Boeotia and Phocis." Lengthy as this account may seem, I've truncated it brutally to spare you such additional participants as the Tanagraeans, the Opuntian Locrians, "the towns of Boeum, Kitinium, and Erineum," and a cast of extras like "Nicomedes, son of Cleombrotus, commanding for King Pleistoanax, son of Pausanias, who was still a minor...." (Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War.)

Under King Pleistoanax. (Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War.)

The final series of contests which ended the long-running Peloponnesian War pitted a politics-torn Athens against Cyrus, gifted son of the Persian Emperor, and Lysander, a remarkable Spartan general. (Thucydides. History of the Peloponnesian War.)

Evidence for the swiftness of Athens' partial revival comes from the fact that the city had regained sufficient strength to join Corinth in the Corinthian War, which began in 395 b.c. Demosthenes, in his Philippic, states that during this conflict the Athenians had enough spare cash to maintain a body of mercenaries at Corinth. (Demosthenes. Philippic. 1, 24. Gregory R. Crane, editor, The Perseus Project, September, 1998.)

Durant outlines the many flaws which set in during the Athenian restoration - an increase of wealth in the hands of the rapidly rising industrial oligarchy; a virtual elimination of the farming peasantry, whose olive groves had been destroyed by Spartan armies during the wars and would have taken at least ten years to regrow; and a relative impoverishment of the urban poor through an inflationary spiral fed by the flow of silver from the mines of Laurium. (Will Durant. The Story of Civilization: Part II - The Life of Greece: 463.) The new Athens was also tilted to the right by creeping Spartanism. Its institutional structures were recast to decrease the level of democracy. (Simon Hornblower. "Ancient Greek and Roman Civilizations: To the King's Peace [386 B.C.]." Encyclopaedia Britannica CD-97. Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1997. CD-Rom.)

D. Bray. "Protein molecules as computational elements in living cells." Nature, July 27 1995: 307-12.

. G.J. Schütz, W. Trabesinger, T. Schmidt. "Direct observation of ligand colocalization on individual receptor molecules." Biophysical Journal, May, 1998: 2223-6; T.J. Graddis, K. Brasel, D. Friend, S. Srinivasan, S. Wee, S.D. Lyman, C.J. March, J.T. McGrew. "Structure-function analysis of FLT3 ligand-FLT3 receptor interactions using a rapid functional screen." Journal of Biological Chemistry, July, 1998: 17626-33; A. Moore, J.P. Basilion, E.A. Chiocca, R. Weissleder. "Measuring transferrin receptor gene expression by NMR imaging." Biochimica et Biophysica Acta. April 1998: 239-49; B.J. Willett, K. Adema, N. Heveker, A. Brelot, L. Picard, M. Alizon, J.D. Turner, J.A. Hoxie, S. Peiper, J.C. Neil, M.J. Hosie. "The second extracellular loop of CXCR4 determines its function as a receptor for feline immunodeficiency virus." Journal of Virology. August 1998: 6475-81. The molecules described in these studies are as complex in their architecture and as riddled with information processing devices as a computer. Hence my use of the otherwise coy and anthropomorphic-sounding term "smart molecule." Its application to receptors is not metaphoric but literal.

For receptor basics, see "Receptors" in MIT's Biology Hypertextbook. (The Experimental Study Group. Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology, September 1998.

D. Bray, M.D. Levin, C.J. Morton-Firth. "Receptor clustering as a cellular mechanism to control sensitivity." Nature, May 7 1998: 85-8; Martin Brookes. "Get The Message." New Scientist, August 15, 1998: 40-43. Bray has compared the web of molecules in a cell to nodes in a neural net or in a parallel distributed processor. (Dennis Bray. "Intracellular signalling as a parallel distributed process." Journal of Theoretical Biology. March 22 1990: 215-31). In other words, he sees the mesh of molecules which operate a cell as a computer or learning machine operating along complex adaptive system lines.

John H. Holland. Hidden Order: how adaptation builds complexity. New York: Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 1995: 107.

Yukimaru Sugiyama. "Social Characteristics and Socialization of Wild Chimpanzees." In Primate Socialization, edited by Frank E. Poirier. New York: Random House, 1972: 151.

John H. Kaufmann. "Social Relations in Hamadryas Baboons." In Social Communication Among Primates, edited by Stuart A. Altmann. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1967: 82, 84, 96.

For an interesting demonstration that weanling rats avoid the example of other infants and hone in on that of the biggest adult they can find, see: C.J. Gerrish, J.R. Alberts. "Differential influence of adult and juvenile conspecifics on feeding by weanling rats (Rattus norvegicus): a size-related explanation." Journal of Comparative Psychology, March 1995: 61-7. Among numerous animals, including humans, size and height are basic cues to who's on top and who is not.

Frans de Waal calls the ability of the dominant male to focus the attention of the group "the 'control role' of the alpha male." F.B. de Waal. "The organization of agonistic relations within two captive groups of Java-monkeys (Macaca fascicularis)." Zeitschrift für Tierpsychologie, July 1977: 225-82. De Waal has also demonstrated one of the points we're making here: that a dominance hierarchy is not primarily a structure for the exercise of aggression; rather it is one which generates social integration. (F.B. de Waal. "The integration of dominance and social bonding in primates." Quarterly Review of Biology, December, 1986: 459-79.)

Frans de Waal. Peacemaking Among Primates. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989; Dian Fossey. Gorillas In the Mist. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1983; Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox. The Imperial Animal. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971; Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach. New York: The Free Press, 1979: 38.

Dian Fossey. Gorillas In the Mist: 74.

Hans Kummer. "Tripartite Relations in Hamadryas Baboons." In Social Communication Among Primates: 64.

Dian Fossey. Gorillas In the Mist: 82.

R. Noe, F.B. de Waal, J.A. van Hooff. "Types of dominance in a chimpanzee colony." Folia Primatologica, 34:1-2, 1980: 90-110; D.L. Cheney, R.M. Seyfarth, J.B. Silk. "The responses of female baboons (Papio cynocephalus ursinus) to anomalous social interactions: evidence for causal reasoning?" Journal of Comparative Psychology, June 1995: 134-41; K.R.L. Hall. "Social Interactions of the Adult Male and Adult Females of a Patas Monkey Troop." In Social Communication Among Primates: 270.

S.L Washburn and D.A. Hamburg. "Aggressive Behavior in Old World Monkeys and Apes." In Primates: Studies in Adaptation and Variability, edited by Phyllis C. Jay. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968: 471.

Phyllis C. Jay. "The social behavior of the langur monkey." University of Chicago, doctoral dissertation, 1962; Stuart A. Altmann. "The Structure of Primate Social Communication." In Social Communication Among Primates: 349.

Jane Van Lawick-Goodall. "A Preliminary Report On Expressive Movements and Communication in the Gombe Stream Chimpanzees." In Primates: Studies in Adaptation and Variability: 323; Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach: 37.

John E. Frisch, S.J. "Individual Behavior and Intertroop Variability In Japanese Macaques." In Primates: Studies in Adaptation and Variability: 246-247; Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach: 38; I. DeVore, editor. Behavior: Field Studies of Monkeys and Apes. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1965.

Toshisada Nishida. "Review of Recent Findings on Mahale Chimpanzees: Implications and Future Research Directions." In Chimpanzee Cultures, edited by Richard W. Wrangham, W.C. McGrew, Frans B.M. de Waal, and Paul G. Heltne with assistance from Linda A. Marquardt. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994: 377; Konrad Lorenz. On Aggression. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1974: 46; Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach: 37-8

Michael R.A. Chance, ed., assisted by Donald R. Omark. Social Fabrics of the Mind. Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, 1988; M.R.A. Chance. and R. Larson, editors. The Structure of Social Attention. New York: Wiley, 1976; M.R.A. Chance and C. Jolly. Social Groups of Monkeys, Apes, and Men. New York: Dutton, 1970; Michael Chance. "Attention Structure as the Basis of Primate Rank Orders." J.R.A.I. 2(4), 1967: 503-518; Michael Chance. "Attention Structure as the Basis of Primate Rank Orders". Man 2: 503-518 (n.d.); J. Itani. "Social structures of African great apes." Journal of Reproduction and Fertility, Supplement 28, 1980: 33-41; G.R. Emory. "Comparison of spatial and orientational relationships as manifestations of divergent modes of social organization in captive groups of Mandrillus sphinx and Theropithecus gelada." Folia Primatologica, 24:4, 1975: 293-314; Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox. The Imperial Animal: 39-40. For a brief roundup of information on attention structures, see: Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach: 36-39.

Frans de Waal. Peacemaking Among Primates: 253; D.R. Omark, M. Omark, and M.S. Edelman. "Formation of dominance hierarchies in young children: Action and perception." In Psychological Anthropology, edited by T. Williams. The Hague: Mouton: 1975; D.R. Omark and M.S. Edelman. "The development of attention structures in young children." In Attention Structures in Primates and Man, edited by M.R.A. Chance and R. Larson. New York: John Wiley & Sons: 1977.

For the manner in which the Mayan chief Knot-eye Jaguar used the principles of the attention structure to political advantage, see Linda Schele and David Freidel. A Forest of Kings: the untold story of the ancient Maya. New York: William Morrow and Company: 264-265.

Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach: 96.

Without serotonin calming things down, rates of aggression among rats soar. To keep aggression within bounds, serotonin has to make its mark on a particular variety of receptor, that called 5-HT1B. (F. Saudou, D.A. Amara, A. Dierich, M. LeMeur, S. Ramboz, L. Segu, M.C. Buhot, R. Hen. "Enhanced aggressive behavior in mice lacking 5-HT1B receptor." Science, 23 September 1994: 1875-8; Marcia Barinaga."This Is Your Brain On Stress." Science, 19 November 1993: 1210.)

A.G. Gitter, H. Black, A. Goldman. "Role of nonverbal communication in the perception of leadership." Perceptual and Motor Skills, April 1975: 463-6; J. Welkowitz, L. Kaufman, S. Sadd. "Attribution of psychological characteristics from masked and unmasked conversations." Journal of Communication Disorders. September 1981: 387-97; H. McGinley, R. Lefevre and P. McGinley. "The influence of a communicator's body position on opinion change in others." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 31 1975: 686-690; A. Mehrabian and N. Williams. "Non-Verbal Concomitants of Perceived and Intended Persuasiveness." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 13 (1969): 37-58.

Michael A. Goldberg and Barry Katz. "The effect of nonreciprocated and reciprocated touch on power/dominance perception." Journal of Social Behavior & Personality, 5(5), 1990: 379-386; Stephen Thayer. "Close Encounters." Psychology Today, March 1988: 34. In a study of Missouri state legislators it first appeared that there were exceptions to this rule: subordinates actually touched dominants first. Later analysis revealed that this occurs only when there's ambiguity about who is subordinate to whom, and the lower in rank is desirous of moving up. (Alvin G. Goldstein and Judy Jeffords. "Status and touching behavior." Bulletin of the Psychonomic Society, February 1981: 79-81.)

Michael Argyle. "Innate and Cultural Aspects of Human Non-verbal Communication." In Mindwaves: Thoughts on Intelligence, Identity and Consciousness. Edited by Colin Blakemore and Susan Greenfield. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989: 60; M. Argyle and M. Cook. Gaze and Mutual Gaze. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1976.

Nancy M. Henley. Body politics: power, sex, and nonverbal communication. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

B. Erickson, E.A. Lind, B.C. Johnson and W.M. O'Barr. "Speech style and impression formation in a court setting: The effects of 'powerful' and 'powerless' speech." Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 14 1978: 266-279.; R.T. Lakoff. Language and Woman's Place. New York: Harper and Row, 1975. Speech qualifiers, by the way, only intensify the focus of the attention structure on messages coming from superiors. "Uhs," "umms," "I'm not sures," and other marks of a subordinate's hesitancy are perceptual repulsion signals. They insure that the speaker of lower social rank is disbelieved.

J.I. Hurwitz, A.F. Zander, and B. Hymovitch. "Some effects of power on the relations among group members." In Group Dynamics: research and theory, edited by Dorwin Cartwright and Alvin Zander, 483-492. New York: Harper & Row, 1953.

Adam Smith describes stored labor as "a certain quantity of labour stocked and stored up to be employed, if necessary, upon some other occasion." (Adam Smith. An Inquiry Into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Dublin: Whitestone, 1776.) Mathematical modelers working with a greatly oversimplified reconstruction of society in the early 1990s were forced to the conclusion that the best movement leaders are those who can mobilize the greatest number of people at the lowest cost in time and energy. The concept of stored attention which I've introduced here explains one of the reasons certain leaders are able to mobilize what the modelers called "personal networks" with superior efficiency - rather than starting from scratch, high-prestige leaders tap a pool of influence "banked" by their predecessors. (Gerald Marwell and Pamela Oliver. The Critical Mass and Collective Action. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.)

Eshel Ben-Jacob and Herbert Levine. "The Artistry of Microbes." Scientific American. October, 1988: 87; Dictyostelium WWW Server, September 1998.

Thomas D. Seeley. Honeybee Ecology: A Study of Adaptation in Social Life. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985; Thomas D. Seeley. The Wisdom of the Hive: The Social Physiology of Honey Bee Colonies. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1995; Thomas D. Seeley and Royce A. Levien. "A Colony of Mind: The Beehive As Thinking Machine." The Sciences, July/August, 1987.

Edward O. Wilson. The Insect Societies. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971: 247-271.

For a 2,800 year history of the manner in the stored influence of the Iliad was built to monumental proportions from the days of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar to those of Napoleon and Hitler, see Leo Braudy. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1987.

In the 1930s, Thorstein Veblen showed how prestige drives culture into many of its most intriguing peculiarities via his theory of conspicuous consumption. A few years later Melville J. Herskovits, in his 1940 book Economic Anthropology: The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples, went a step further and demonstrated the manner in which anthropology reveals a basic of human affairs: that the lust for prestige is more powerful than material greed. (Thorstein Veblen. The Theory of the Leisure Class; an economic study of institutions. New York: The Modern Library, 1934; Melville J. Herskovits. 1940. Economic Anthropology: The Economic Life of Primitive Peoples. New York: W.W. Norton, 1965.)

Students in one study swore that they would honk far more impatiently at the well-heeled driver of a shiny new car if he blocked their path than at the owner of a humble older auto. When faced with the reality, they treated the driver of the prestige car with great patience if he cut them off, and saved their road rage for folks who couldn't afford a vehicle betokening plutocracy. (Anthony N. Doob and Alan E. Gross. "Status of frustrator as an inhibitor of horn-honking responses." Journal of Social Psychology, 76(2), 1968: 213-218; Robert B. Cialdini. Influence: How and Why People Agree on Things. New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984: 222-3)

J.W. Thibaut and H.W. Riecken. "Some determinants and consequences of the perception of social causality." Journal of Personality, 24, 1955: 113-133; J.I. Hurwitz, A.F. Zander, and B. Hymovitch. "Some effects of power on the relations among group members." In Group Dynamics: research and theory, edited by Dorwin Cartwright and Alvin Zander, 483-492. New York: Harper & Row, 1953. For the effects of this irrational impulse in one of the most scrupulously rational of arenas, see: David L. Hull. Science As a Process: An Evolutionary Account of the Social and Conceptual Development of Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.. Hull's book demonstrates in innumerable ways that roughly two percent of those who labor in science soak up roughly 90% of the attention of their peers. Scientists tend to cluster around "great men," citing their work heavily in articles. Thus they tap the stored influence of the authority's prestige while simultaneously adding to the great man's clout. "Lesser" scientists may produce work of equal or greater potential importance, but are ignored simply because of their obscurity. Scientists are afraid that by citing these unknowns, they will be tarnished by the citees' insignificance - contaminated by the repulsion cues of anonymity. Jasanoff concludes that all this turns science into a "winner-take-all game." (S. Jasanoff. "Innovation and integrity in biomedical research." Academic Medicine, September 1993, Supplement S: 91-5.)

Irving Lorge. "Prestige, suggestion, and attitudes." Journal of Social Psychology, 7, 1936: 386-402; Harry F. Harlow. Learning To Love. New York: Jason Aronson (publisher), 1974: 152; Irving Janis, Peter Defares, Paul Grossman. "Hypervigilant Reactions to Threat." In Selye's Guide To Stress Research, Volume 3., edited by Hans Selye. New York: Scientific and Academic Editions, Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1983: 19; H. Sigall and R. Helmreich. "Opinion Change as a Function of Stress and Communicator Credibility." Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, 5 (1969): 70-78; Roland Radloff. "Opinion Evaluation and Affiliation." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 62, 1961: 578-585; E.P. Torrance. "Some Consequences of power differences on decision making in permanent and temporary three-man groups." Research Studies (Washington State College) 22, 1954: 130-140; K. Dion, E. Berscheid, E. Walster. "What Is beautiful is good." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 24, 1972: 285-290.

C. Hovland and W. Weiss. "The Influence of Source Credibility on Communication Effectiveness." Public Opinion Quarterly. 15, 1952: 635-650.

Ellen Langer. Mindfulness. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1989: 155-158.

Paul R. Wilson. "Perceptual distortion of height as a function of ascribed academic status." Journal of Social Psychology, February, 1968: 97-102; Robert B. Cialdini. Influence: How and Why People Agree on Things: 216.

We even copy the manners of our social superiors when it comes to adopting new medical practices. The greater the prestige of the patients who flock to a new medical technique, the more of us lower-rankers troop in their wake. Should the privileged shun an effective medical method, it may go unused and ignored. (J. Baruch. "The diffusion of medical technology." Med. Instrum., January-February 1979: 11-3.) For additional material on the manner in which we mimic those above us, see: Edward L. Bernays. Propaganda: The Public Mind in the Making. New York: Horace Liveright, 1928. Bernays, a cousin of Sigmund Freud, knew whereof he spoke. As a pioneer in the craft of public relations, he frequently persuaded members of the elite to use the products he promoted in order to get the masses to follow by the drove.

The Romans learned to work this trick of the attention structure nearly 2,000 years before Michael Chance, Lionel Tiger, Robin Fox, Daniel Freedman, and other scientists of the mid-20th century noticed it at work among street kids, college professors, chimps, and other interesting apes. Once the centurions had drubbed a tribe in battle and persuaded it to admit defeat, Rome's governors won hearts and minds by handing out Roman citizenship to the clobbered group's elite. Some of these native top dogs then paraded the signs that they had shaken off the shabbiness of backwater ways and had gained admission to the Empire's aristocracy. The upper crust aped Rome, and the lower crust aped their betters. Would-be sophisticates showed off as many Roman phrases as their tongues could handle, and paraded their togas, their taste for baths, and their connoisseurship of amphitheater displays. (Edward Gibbon. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, an abridged version, edited and with an introduction, by Dero Saunders. New York: Penguin Classics, 1985: 60; J.M. Roberts. The Pelican History of the World. New York: Penguin Books, 1983: 248.) The urge to imitate one's superiors was so powerful that even the leaders of tribes which successfully resisted Roman domination preached defiance while wearing Roman jewelry and decorating their homes with Roman luxuries. (John J. Wilkes. "Check Point Hadrian." Natural History, April 1989: 64-72.)

This observation by Robert Decker, director of the Palo Alto Center for Stress Related Disorders, was reported in: Larry Reibstein with Nadine Joseph. "Mimic Your Way to the Top." Newsweek, August 8, 1988: 50.

For an example from the time of Gregory of Tours, see: Charles Mackay, LL. D. Extraordinary Popular Delusions and The Madness of Crowds. 1841. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1932: 346-7.

Elias Canetti. Crowds and Power, translated by Carol Stewart. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1984: 417.

Elias Canetti. Crowds and Power: 417.

Ruth Benedict. Patterns of Culture. 1934. New York: New American Library, 1950: 176.

Carlyle was not citing a folk myth, but claimed to be drawing on observations from a naturalist of his day. (Thomas Carlyle. Voltaire. [originally published in Foreign Review, 1829]. Newport Beach, Ca: Books On Tape, c. 1983.). For extensive work on similar phenomena among humans, see the work of Ellen Langer. (Ellen Langer. Mindfulness.)

Daniel G. Freedman. Human Sociobiology: A Holistic Approach: 69, 194. Even stories about "murder, rape and incest" get far more attention if they involve someone of high status, as social scientist and historian Robert Darnton discovered during his years as a newspaperman. (Robert Darnton. The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections In Cultural History. New York: W.W. Norton, 1990: 85-86.)

F.W. Jones, A.J. Wills, I.P. McLaren. "Perceptual categorization: connectionist modelling and decision rules." Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology. B, Comparative and Physiological Psychology, February 1998: 33-58; R. Desimone. "Neural mechanisms for visual memory and their role in attention." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, November 26, 1996: 13494-9.

For an example of how this status-pull worked its way out in the culinary wars of pre-modern times, see E.N. Anderson. The Food of China. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988: 210.

Anna Freud called this "identification with the aggressor," a term she coined in 1946 at the end of the Second World War, which had demonstrated the phenomenon all too persuasively. (Anna Freud. The Ego and Mechanisms of Defense. New York: International Universities Press, 1946; H.P. Blum. "The role of identification in the resolution of trauma: the Anna Freud memorial lecture." Psychoanalytic Quarterly, October 1987: 609-27; M. Hirsch. "2 forms of identification with the aggressor - according to Ferenczi and Anna Freud." Praxis der Kinderpsychologie und Kinderpsychiatrie, July-August 1996: 198-205.)

Suzanne Ripley. "Intertroop Encounters among Ceylon Gray Langurs (Presbytis entellus)." In Social Communication Among Primates: 237-254.

David P. Barash. The Hare and The Tortoise: Culture, Biology, and Human Nature. New York: Penguin Books, 1987: 264.

Per Bruno Bettelheim, psychologist and former concentration camp victim, who had the questionable privilege of witnessing this weirdness at first hand. (Bruno Bettelheim. "Individual And Mass Behavior in Extreme Situations." Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 38, 1943: 417-452.)

Fernand Braudel. The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization & Capitalism, 15th-18th Century, Vol. 1. Translated by Sian Reynolds. New York: Perennial Library, Harper & Row, 1981: 316.

For an instance in which an entire nation was reshaped by identification with the aggressor, see: K. Michio. "Japanese responses to the defeat in World War II." International Journal of Social Psychiatry, Autumn 1984: 178-87.

Daniel Burstein. Yen: Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1988: 37. For the Japanese perspective on the Japanese economic rise, see: Shotaro Ishinomori. Japan, Inc.: Introduction to Japanese Economics. Translated by Betsy Scheiner. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988. For a look at how and why Japan was able to spring so high, see: Michio Morishima. Why Has Japan Succeeded: Western technology and the Japanese Ethos. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982; and Ira Magaziner and Mark Patinkin. The Silent War: Inside the Global Business Battles Shaping America's Future. New York: Random House, 1989. Ira Magaziner's insights helped land him a position as official Advisor to the President of the United States.

William Van Dusen Wishard. "The 21st Century Economy." In Edward Cornish, editor. The 1990s & Beyond. Bethesda, MD: World Future Society, 1990: 133.

Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987: 475-476.

Victor Hao Li. "The New Orient Express." World Monitor, November 1988: 24-35.

Daniel Burstein. Yen: Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America: 38.

Robert Whiting. Ya Gotta Have Wa: When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond. New York: MacMillan, 1989: 5. Do not be misled by the subtitle of this book. When it emerged, critics said it gave a more of a feel for the Japanese culture than 90% of the more erudite-sounding books on the subject. The critics were right.

John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene. Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions For the 1990's. New York: William Morrow, 1990: 180.

James Fallows. More Like Us: Making America Great Again. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1989: 42.

Victor Hao Li. "The New Orient Express." World Monitor, November 1988: 32.

Ezra Vogel. "Pax Nipponica?" Foreign Affairs. Spring 1986: 752-767; Leon Hollerman. Japan's Economic Strategy in Brazil: Challenge for the United States. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books, 1988: 13.

Doug Henwood. "Japan In Latin America." Left Business Observer, May 15, 1989: 2; Victor Hao Li. "The New Orient Express": 24-35; Today's Japan. Tokyo: NHK tv, June 22, 1990 (television news broadcast); Mike Mansfield. "The U.S. and Japan: Sharing Our Destinies." Foreign Affairs. Spring 1989: 11.

Tom Buckley. Violent Neighbors: El Salvador, Central America, and the United States. New York: Times Books, 1984: 167.

Susumu Awanohara. "Resurgent Rivals." Far Eastern Economic Review, reprinted in World Press Review, November 1990: 60.

Earl W. Foell. "Making Sense of the World." World Monitor, October 1988: 29.

Mike Mansfield. "The U.S. and Japan: Sharing Our Destinies": 12.

Leon Hollerman. Japan's Economic Strategy in Brazil: Challenge for the United States: 15.

Bruno Thomas. n.t. article from Le Monde, reprinted in World Press Review, April 1988: 20. For additional statistic's on Japan's position in the global economy toward the end of the 1980s, see: Paul Kennedy. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New York: Random House, 1987: 458-468.

As of the fall of 1998, the card catalogs of the five institutions included in the Washington Resource Library Consortium contained close to 3,000 books with the word Japan in their title. Washington Resource Library Consortium September 1998. The Library of Congress listed 15,070. Library of Congress Catalogs, October 1998.

Akio Morita. "Partnering for Competitiveness: The Role of Japanese Business." Harvard Business Review. May, 1992; Akio Morita. "Toward a New World Economic Order." The Atlantic, June 1993; Akio Morita. "The case for a new world economic order." PHP intersect, June, 1993; Akio Morita. "The Politics of Business: The Business of Politics." Business in the Contemporary World, v 2 n 1, 1989; Sabine Delanglade and Renaud Belleville. "Competitive Does Not Mean Cheap: Sony's chief reflects on Japanese success." L'Express. Reprinted in World Press Review, October 1988: 31-32.

Daniel Burstein. Yen: Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America: 288-9.

Leon Hollerman. Japan's Economic Strategy in Brazil: Challenge for the United States: 254-257.

Hassan Ziady. "An African View of Debt." Jeune Afrique Economie, reprinted in World Press Review, August 1989: 50.

Barry Shelby. "Japan and Africa." World Press Review, January 1989: 44.

As of 1990, more than 750 Japanese companies had manufacturing operations in Thailand. (John Clewley. "Thailand: Japan Moves Into Asia's 'Golden Land.'" Business Tokyo, April 1990: 36.)

S. Yasuoka is the author who characterized these organizations as Zaibatsu. (S. Yasuoka. "Introduction." In Family Business in the Era of Industrial Growth: Its Ownership and Management, edited by S. Yasuoka. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1984; cited in Alice Amsden. Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989: 115.) Lest one get confused, Zaibatsu and Keiretsu are both tightly-packed clusters of diverse corporations sheltered under the eves of a parent megafirm and feeding off the funds from banks at that megaorganization's center. Zaibatsu was the name used before the Second World War. After the Japanese defeat, the triumphant Allies insisted that the Zaibatsu be dismantled. A new form of industrial conglomerate arose in their place: the Keiretsu. Keiretsu were often owned by the same families as the Zaibatsu and carried the same names. A cynic might say that they were manifestations of a very old Japanese way of fulfilling an agreement: saying yes but doing no.

Daniel Burstein. Yen: Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America: 281.

Daniel Burstein. Yen: Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America: 281.

Vladimir Voinovich. "An Exile's Dilemma." Wilson Quarterly, August 1990: 114-120.

Daniel Burstein. Yen: Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America: 281.

Ian Buruma. God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey. New York: Farrar-Strauss-Giroux, 1989: 7.

Ian Buruma. God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey: 230-231.

Daniel Burstein. Yen: Japan's New Financial Empire and Its Threat to America: 282; Robert Whiting. Ya Gotta Have Wa: When Two Cultures Collide on the Baseball Diamond: 211. The impact of Japanese fashion and architecture hit particularly hard in Asia, where it set the trends. (n.a. "So You Want to Live In a World Capital." The Economist, reprinted in World Press Review, October 1988: 35.)

John Naisbitt & Patricia Aburdene. Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions For the 1990's: 181.

Deyan Sudjic. "Tokyo's 'Spectacular' Stores." The Times of London, reprinted in World Press Review October 1989: 72.

Victor Hao Li. "The New Orient Express": 32; personal correspondence, Gordon Burghardt, September, 1998; personal correspondence, Ed Miller, September 1998. Both Burghardt and Miller are American scientists who wrote enthusiastically (and with good reason) of their academic sojourns in the land of the rising sun. One cause for Japan's draw was the nation's obsession with research and development. The Hitachi company alone spent twice as much on R&D in 1988 as America's leading government R&D funder, the National Science Foundation. (Sheridan M. Tatsuno. Created in Japan: From Imitators to World-Class Innovators. New York: Harper and Row, 1989: 246.)

Clyde Prestowitz. "Japanese vs. Western Economies: Why Each Side is a Mystery to the Other." Technology Review, May/June 1988: 34.

Clyde V. Prestowitz, Jr. Trading Places: How We Allowed Japan To Take The Lead: 60-1, 76; Pat Choate. Agents of Influence. New York: A.A. Knopf, 1990.

Today's Japan. Tokyo: NHK TV, July 2, 1990. (Television News Broadcast)

Ryuji Katayama. "Can Japan Rescue The Philippines." Business Tokyo, August 1990: 31.

Ian Buruma. God's Dust: A Modern Asian Journey: 139.

Ira Magaziner and Mark Patinkin. The Silent War: Inside the Global Business Battles Shaping America's Future: 40.

Peter McGill. "Anxiety on the Road to Foreign Leadership," The Weekly Observer of London, reprinted in World Press Review, August 1992: 16.

Today's Japan. Tokyo: NHK-TV, January 22, 1990.

Andrew Clark. "Japan Goes to Europe." World Monitor, April, 1990: 40.

Robert Graham. "Latin America's Reawakening." Financial Times of London, reprinted in World Press Review, November 1990: 60-61.

Doug Henwood. "Japan in Three Countries." Left Business Observer, May 1989: 3.

Sterett Pope. "Japan in the Gulf." World Press Review, June 1989: 42.

Glen S. Fukushima. "Affirmative Action, Japanese Style." Tokyo Business, February 1994: 58.

Eisuke Sakakibara. Beyond capitalism: the Japanese model of market economics. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993.

Actually, China's leaders wanted a version of the Japanese model which made room for an authoritarian government. They found what they were looking for in Korea. The Koreans had snaffled up their system from the Japanese (Alice Amsden. Asia's Next Giant: South Korea and Late Industrialization: 215). Or, to put it differently, the Japanese had rammed their system down the Koreans' throats during their brutal military domination of Korea from 1894 to 1945 (of this period, 36 years are considered official rule). (Ki-baik Lee. A New History of Korea. Translated by Edward W. Wagner with Edward J. Shultz. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984; Marshall R. Pihl, ed. Listening to Korea: A Korean Anthology. New York: Praeger Publishers, 1973.) From 1961 until 1979, under the brilliant, entrepreneurial dictator Park Chung Hee, the Koreans had carved out their own authoritarian variation on Tokyo's economic techniques.(Michael Keon. Korean Phoenix: a Nation from the Ashes. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.) Park based his approach on Japan's 19th century Meiji Restoration, then tossed in modifications copied from such third world heroes as China's Sun Yat Sen, Turkey's Kemal Pasha Ataturk, and Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser. Yet this is by no means where the cross-cultural synapsing ends. The Japanese had methodically sucked their approach from the West during the Meiji machinations whose success fascinated Park Chung Hee.(W.G. Beasley. The Meiji Restoration. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1972.) Tokyo has continued to siphon western innovations to this day, as when its leaders invited in figures like America's W. Edwards Deming in the 1950s (n.a. "Deming, W. (William) Edwards." The biography.com database, September 1998. Run the clock back another 500 years or more and you'll find that many of the advances underlying the European and later the American techniques that so fascinated the Japanese had been borrowed from China. Run it back yet another 900 years, and much of what we think of as native Japanese culture also reveals itself as a Chinese import. The bottom line: Chinese innovations had travelled 'round the world and come back home again. As they went they grew into something radically new. So go the rounds of imitation in a creative global flow.

When Pericles smashed the aristocracies of the city-states he brought to heel, Socrates provided the conceptual wrecking ball. Socratic questioning helped shatter thought-structures which had supported the old orders' seeming permanence.

Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R.D. Hicks. (1925) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972: 279.

Socrates was an acquaintance of Plato's uncle Charmides, subject of one of the Platonic dialogs. (Plato. Charmides. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CD-Rom.)

Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. Translated by R.D. Hicks. (1925) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972: 281-282.

R.M. Doty, B.E. Peterson, D.G. Winter. "Threat and authoritarianism in the United States, 1978-1987." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, October 1991: 629-40.

In the Timaeus, Plato shows his indebtedness to the Pythagoreans for the concept of archetypes. The Timaeus, in fact, is a virtual display case for Platonism borrowed from Pythagorean science and geometry. Plato also puts words about the Pythagoreans constantly upon the tongue of Socrates in The Republic. (Plato. Republic. Library of the Future.)

Said Aristotle, "the philosophy of Plato... in most respects followed" the views of the Pythagoreans. As for archetypal forms, Aristotle felt this was a bald restatement of the Pythagorean proposition that all things reflect underlying mathematical patterns. Plato's contribution, in the opinion of Aristotle, was merely to tinker with one word - instead of "imitating" numbers (the Pythagorean term), all things "participate" in them. Here's the way Aristotle puts it: in Plato's philosophy "the many existed by participation in the Ideas that have the same name as they. Only the name 'participation' was new; for the Pythagoreans say that things exist by 'imitation' of numbers, and Plato says they exist by participation, changing the name. But what the participation or the imitation of the Forms could be they left an open question." (Aristotle. Metaphysics. Library of the Future.)

Diodorus. Historical Library. Gregory R. Crane, editor, The Perseus Project, 1998.

Manuel de Landa. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History: 168

W.G. Forrest. A History of Sparta: 950-192 B.C. New York: W.W. Norton, 1968: 30, 32, 46, 53.

N.G.L. Hammond. Alexander the Great, king, commander, and statesman. Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes Press, 1980; Mary Renault. Fire from heaven. New York: Vintage Books, 1977; Mary Renault, The nature of Alexander. London: Allen Lane, 1975.

Egypt, a major component of the Persian Empire, broke away in 404 b.c. The Persians were so tied up with troubles elsewhere that they weren't able to recapture the land of the Pharaohs until roughly 343 b.c. and even then, lost it again in 335 b.c. In other words, the fourth century b.c. was generally a tough one for Persia. (Diodorus. Historical Library, 15.29.4. Gregory R. Crane, editor, The Perseus Project, September, 1998.

For capsule biographies of Aristotle on the Internet, see: "Aristotle: a brief biography, September 1998; "Aristotle.", September 1998.

Aristotle was from Stagira, in today's Turkey. Like Macedonia, Stagira was on the path from Persia to the Greek peninsula, and didn't benefit from central Greece's protective barrier - the Aegean Sea. But unlike Macedonia, Stagira was far closer to the heartland of the Persian enemy. For a map locating Stagira, see: Ronald Tobey. "Civilization of the Hellenes: 6th-3d Centuries BCE." , Riverside, CA: University of California, Riverside -.

Though it's often associated with him, Aristotle didn't use the phrase "golden mean." His term was simply "the mean," as in this archetypal passage from his Nicomachaean Ethics: "it is the nature of... things to be destroyed by defect and excess, as we see in the case of strength and of health... both excessive and defective exercise destroys the strength, and similarly drink or food which is above or below a certain amount destroys the health, while that which is proportionate both produces and increases and preserves it. So too is it, then, in the case of temperance and courage and the other virtues. For the man who flies from and fears everything and does not stand his ground against anything becomes a coward, and the man who fears nothing at all but goes to meet every danger becomes rash; and similarly the man who indulges in every pleasure and abstains from none becomes self-indulgent, while the man who shuns every pleasure, as boors do, becomes in a way insensible; temperance and courage, then, are destroyed by excess and defect, and preserved by the mean." (Aristotle. Nicomachaean Ethics. In Library of the Future, 4th Edition, Ver. 5.0. Irvine, CA: World Library, Inc., 1996. CD-Rom.) It was the Roman Horace who attached the word "golden" when he wrote in his "Odes:" "Who makes the golden mean his guide/Shuns miser's cabin, foul and dark." (Horace. "Odes." 2.10.5. Gregory R. Crane, editor, The Perseus Project, September, 1998.)