Vision 8

This is vision eight. And we're going to talk about game theory today and statistical logic, and why the world of probability is a form of black magic and how to overcome that. Um, there are such things as knights who defend truth, and occasionally a shame will ride into the valley and handle the whole thing. I want to start, though, with another one of the medieval mystical women we've been looking at, Mechthild of Magdeburg. And you need to understand that there were maybe a dozen or two of excellent women, mystical geniuses, most of them dating from around the 1160s. And the heyday went to about the 1260s and that hundred year period. Someone once did a survey and found that in 1130, there were only three places in all of England where women could go to lead a sequestered life under the aegis of the Christian religion at the time. Only three places in the entirety of England that women had been thrown away, in the sense that it didn't enter anybody's mind, that all but just a handful of quirky Okay. Ladies would ever want to lead an interior life. They were chattel in every sense of the word. And then the Crusades drew off. The nobles and the knights had to have squires, and the squires had to have baggage men. And pretty soon the running of the estates and the families was left in the hands of women, and they had to be educated in order to just handle daily things. And by 1165 there were almost 200 places in England where women could go and lead an interior life. One generation. And out of that generation, from the 1160s, came a century of greatness of women who were not a part of the society. They were not a part of the culture. They had been left out of the religion. They were not sewn into the civilization. And so you had a century of women from 1160 to 1260, where they had a differentially conscious view of what was wrong with culture, society, civilization, life. And a lot of what was wrong, we understand today under the aegis of game theory. Game theory is all about winning the big payoff. As someone once pointed out in a book on game theory, mathematics and models of Conflict, he was appalled that he would have to put the rules of poker and poker terms in the back of this mathematical book. He assumed everyone knew how to play poker and then was told that it's not true. And so he puts in the simplest things. He says you must play poker for money. What's the sense of playing poker if there are no stakes? And it's interesting that game theory is not only about probability, but it's about money. It's about economics. It's about gambling to win money and power. And Game Theory found its origins as the big picture in 1944. And this was the book that did it. It was republished in this beautiful second edition in 1947, but Theory of Games and Economic Behavior, published by Princeton in the 1944 was the culmination of whole development of economic and military and gambling theories that coalesced in in 1944. In this book came into a synch and has dominated the world ever since. The world has been kept in a state of perpetual war and in a state of evolving towards a single economic game, and everyone on the planet is subject to that. And this has got to stop because it is pernicious. How pernicious is it? One of the classic books on game theory, lectures for economists and systems scientists, systems engineers, systems engineers who arrange everything and manage everything on earth. Your food. Your money. Your wars. Your pleasures. The media. All of it. It's interesting because this is written by a Soviet mathematician. A Soviet mathematician who is the director of mathematical methods for the Institute of Social Economic Questions in Leningrad, the Union of the Sciences of the USSR. One of the really big honchos in the Communist empire. It was proposed for English translation by a man who was at the system science department at UCLA. And this was 1970s, 70s. Early 1970s. So you had a capitalist and a communist. Mathematicians who got together. And the translator was a Jew from Philadelphia, from Temple University, and he worked with the German Institute for Gesellschaft und Wissenschaft and the University of Bonn. So you have Jews and Germans, communists and capitalists, all working together because the world was dominated, is dominated by this outlook. Everyone is in this game. And what is, um, interesting about it is that it's only a game. It's not real. And so the planet is covered with a fictitious fog. And part of this education is to dispel those clouds. Why then, would an education like this not be offered in universities? Because universities have long since been co-opted. This book, which is very hard to find now, is called education and the Cult of Efficiency, published by the University of Chicago Press, published in 1962. It says here, but the book actually was published quite a long time ago. Callahan traced back that the cult of efficiency in American education goes back to about 1900, and really got its legs going in 1911, 1913, about that time. And in the 1920s was cinched into shape because after the end of the World War, the First World War, the whole game potential was threatened by a man named Woodrow Wilson, who was the president of the United States, who didn't believe that war was essential to a international economy or to a national economy. And because he had been the president of Princeton as well as the governor of New Jersey, he knew that this was a pernicious tendency and one must fight against this. And Woodrow Wilson was very conveniently angled into a position where he was considered mentally unstable. And even Sigmund Freud wrote a book about the terrible psychic traumas of Woodrow Wilson and Wilson. Within a couple of years of the end of the First World War was dead, disgraced, thrown away, and his idea of a League of Nations was also thrown away. The education and the Cult of efficiency. A study of the social forces that have shaped the administration of the public schools. And if we turn to. This we find Callahan writing year by year after 1900. That's 101 years ago, public opinion became a more powerful force as newspapers and popular journals, fearing sensationalism and exposure, reached an increasingly larger audience. And even though criticism of the schools was relatively light before 1911, the power of public opinion and the influence of pressure groups was felt increasingly and the security of educators declined accordingly. By 1909, the situation was such that a leading administrator wrote, the professional life of the American schoolmaster is beset by uncertainty, except in very few cities which are laboriously building houses of cards. What a choice of words. Cards are one of the great vehicles for games. Houses of cards, which, no matter how much care and effort we have expended, we may tomorrow surmount with one careless addition that falls flat and tumbles the whole structure to ruin. Then came the cult of efficiency, because business practices, which had inculcated a technique to make the Industrial Revolution style of corporate business really energized, insisted that education produce a population that would service their interlocking gears and vehicles. You might have seen an image of this. Charlie Chaplin did a movie called Modern Times, where he gets caught in the gears of the big machinery. It's not just a comedy. Scientific management is based on high efficiency, but the efficiency in life is very difficult to determine. But the efficiency in a game situation can be verified before the fact, with an almost uncanny ultimate consistency. The only thing is, is that you have to make sure that everyone obeys the rules of the engagement. The superintendents. This is the American educator supply the great panacea. The superintendents arriving in Philadelphia in February of 1913 for their annual meeting and greeting the colleagues they had not seen for a year, may have well sought solace from one another, for 1912 had been a trying year. They had received enough criticism and enough advice to last a lifetime. The question, undoubtedly asked eagerly of each other was what is to be done? 1913, the year that income tax was brought into play. It is also probable that they studied the program topics and the speakers carefully, in the hope that a profit would appear to lead them out of the wilderness. The chances are that they were most expectant about the session devoted to scientific management For. After all, if this new system could work miracles in industry, perhaps it could also help solve their problems in education. Besides, they had been advised, urged and even warned by businessmen and by some of their leaders to use the new panacea. All this happened more than three generations ago, and the co-opting ability of systems engineering and game theory when it was cinched in 1944 has left almost no competition other than people who are not already co-opted. There are only two large groups uncooperative on the planet today Islam and China. Everyone else is a part of the scene, and it is so ubiquitous that no one notices anymore. The Kafkaesque quality of life. You cannot find a way to get to the castle. You can do anything that you want. You cannot quite ever get there. Good thing you also will never really be brought to trial. Although you are under indictment permanently. This was the situation in the High Middle Ages, and the only large group of human beings not co-opted at that time were the women. They were not a part of the church. King seen popes and kings had ignored women. And so you find someone like Hadewych of Brabant. Brabant is a district of the Netherlands. On a certain Pentecostal Sunday I had a vision. At dawn on that day my mind was beset so fearfully and so painfully by desirous love, that all my separate limbs threatened to break, and all my separate veins were in travail. The longing in which I then was cannot be expressed by any language or any person I know, and everything I could say about it would be unheard of. To all those who never apprehended love as something to work for, with desire, and whom love had never acknowledged as hers, I can say this about it. This is 800 years ago. I desire to have full fruition of my beloved and to understand and taste him to the full. I desired that his humanity should, to the fullest extent, be one in fruition with my humanity, and that mine then, should hold its stand and be strong enough to enter into perfection until I content him who is perfection itself, by purity and unity. And as my mind was beset with fear, I saw a great eagle flying towards me from the altar. And it said to me, if you wish to attain oneness, make yourself ready. I fell to my knees and my heart beat fearfully to worship the beloved with oneness. According to his true dignity. And that was indeed impossible for me as I well know and as God knows always to my woe and my grief. This quality of 800 years ago, of women waking to the fact that love is real but in the world is impossible. That the world as constituted will not receive love. Not that it cannot. Not that it does not. It cannot, because it's not allowed in the game. Why? Because love dissolves rules. And you cannot have a game without rules. Because how? Without rules can you calibrate value and how? Without value and rules, can you determine the victor? And if you can't win, then why fight? So the whole taproot of polarity conflict in the world is keeping the game working because everyone's putting their money on it. And yet, 800 years ago, a woman who was born in the most abject kind of social slavery grew up enough and became conscious enough to write this kind of poetry. She love bound me to herself in Union. But the storm of happiness now seems fully calmed. Thus, love left me in the lurch with many things she had promised me. With many a sweet dainty. By which inexperienced youth was fed. Choice tidbits with new delight. For which I have gladly suffered all. I complain and accuse her with new indignation. She refuses the. Happiness that consoled me. I truly know that love lives, although I thus die often. So there is a peculiarity, and the peculiarity goes back Because the overwhelming game in the Middle Ages was scholastic Christianity. It was the game which even Kings had to play gently, and they were allowed to play because you have to have a conflict polarity in order to generate the gamesmanship of the entire system. Otherwise it doesn't work. You have to have good guys and bad guys. You have to have this and that. You have to have not paradox but polarity for games to work. One of the hidden triggers of complementarity in that whole medieval Christian game thousand years ago was that the Judaism that was transformed into Christianity was not the Rabbinic Judaism that came later, which they suppose that it was. It was the Hellenistic Judaism that preceded by a couple of hundred years. Rabbinic Judaism, and one of the great documents of Hellenistic Judaism is the Wisdom of Solomon. The Solomon who wrote the Song of Songs, not who wrote like some Isaiah, warning prophetically, or even a Moses bringing the Torah into its shape. But someone like a Solomon who sings about the mysteries of divine love that enter into a human population who are not only natural that is open to nature, but are conscious, that is open to divine infinities, and that the exchange concourse between nature and consciousness is in Gullibly there in the transforms of love. The love is a secret Q secret. And hear from the wisdom of Solomon, written in the Jewish part of Alexandria about 20 BC. Wisdom's attributes. For in wisdom there is a spirit, intelligent and holy. Unique in its kind. That is to say, the spirit of love is not amenable to any kind of statistical definition is unique. That is to say, its oneness does not reoccur with any kind of periodicity. Its oneness is of a kind that it is only and always and forever that and not mixed. So that it's not amenable to manipulation of any kinds of sets or sequences. It is not polarized. It is a uniqueness which in game theory, if you have only one player, it's called a singleton. And if that player becomes disinterested, the game is over because it becomes a zero game. So when the game is reduced in you to just yourself, if you decide not to continue to play, the game is over. That's called waking up. For in wisdom there is a spirit, intelligent and holy, unique in its kind, made up of many parts subtle, free moving, lucid, spotless, clear and vulnerable, loving what is good, eager, unhindered, benevolent, beneficent, kindly towards men, steadfast, unerring, untouched by care, all powerful, all surveying, permeating, all intelligent, pure and delicate spirits. What you get is what is known as a cascade. This is not a list of properties. It is a cascade in that there is an overlapping series, so that you do not get phrases that run from point to point to point, as in an argument, as in a logical form. But you get a cascade, which is a flow which has a fluidity which will go wherever it is going. And this is a flow in Mechthild of Magdeburg, who we've been watching, listening to for three weeks. Mystical transformations, the imagery of liquids in the work of Mechthild of Magdeburg. Not only is water liquid in motion like that, but it's polarity. Fire. Fire and flames. The fires of love as well as the waters of love. The fire and water. Universal solvents. And a third universal solvent comes into play. A third universal solvent. We mentioned about a month ago. And that is a naturally occurring Fermentation that brings alcohol into play because many organic substances, you can burn them, but that's a solution of solubility that destroys them. And they're not soluble in water, but they would be soluble in alcohols. Hence the great simile that comes for thousands of years that one can be drunk on the wine of love. That wine's that fermented spirits. Water that has become spiritual is also a solvent. And it's especially a solvent for organic forms like proteins. And in our time, one of the most pernicious of the new box canyons to life is the development and the proliferation of errant proteins called prions. Mad cow disease is a manifestation of prions imbalance. And life has become so box canyon in the game theory of metabolic control, by diet, by education, by everything that nature herself is breaking down on the level of proteins becoming not because of bacteria or viruses, but because the proteins themselves become aberrant, they become prions, and they make things like Alzheimer's and mad cow disease, and it especially attacks the brain. We need to wake up and be rather intelligent about our demise before it happens completely. One of the great things to realize is that games are not possibilities in a box of probabilities that seems to characterize science, is a projection of a limited mind, and has nothing to do with science at all. Um, we need to come back to a page. In our education, we need to understand that we're looking at a double cycle, a double cycle that links together by transform. The first cycle is a cycle of integration, very powerful, very natural. And that a part of the ecology of integration is the mind. The mind is really a part of integration. It's a part of nature, the motion of the tides and motion of the atoms and motions of the cells all come to a final integral in the brain, in the neurological system. And the mind most definitely is a function spectrum of that neurological brain system. But it doesn't mean that it is defined or limited by that at all. And that consciousness is definitely a whole different ecology. Not one of integration, but one of differentiation, completely different. And that rationality is not a function of reducing things down to a mental logic. But rationality is built on ratios, on proportions, on harmonics, and that there is such a thing as real analysis, and real analysis is not a subset of synthesis. Not at all. It is a complementarity to it, and works in a differential way all the time, so that there is such a thing as an analytic which cannot be co-opted by the mind in ideologies. Because true analysis, like love, dissolves the very walls and forms that any ideology will use to sustain itself. And that consciousness is an enemy of tyranny. What about integration when it reaches its penultimate one step from its ultimate? Its ultimate being not that it ends, but that it transforms. The penultimate. The step, the last step before the transform is. The page here reads acceptance. Acceptance. The last stage of integration is surrender, the releasing of resistance to complete. There is a resistance to complete which must be given up. It's not a surrender. As I give up. Oh, I give up. Oh, I can't handle it. It's a surrender specifically that you understand that now's the time to shut up and let it be. Let it go, let it happen. It's the ultimate of wisdom. Kicking in and making a gift of further life, not for their life in the same rut, but further life in a completely new order. A conscious order. And so love is all about waking up to each other so that one understands that together we are real on a whole different order, and that there is such a thing as a community of open Paradise where human society is not based on ideologies of any kind. But is a functioning of the mutual, shareable humanity which we personally inhabit. This is the origins of a cosmic civilization, whole different game. It's not under the aegis of politics at all, of any kind. The last stage of integration is surrender. The releasing of resistance to complete affects the completion that space of focus created by our bringing together or even throwing together the ancient Greek term symbolon meant thrown together, that a symbol, a symbol is a flashpoint of all the arrows, all the vectors brought to together and by bringing them together. Not in a way which you guide them together, but they're thrown together so that there is a unique implosion. And that that implosion, because it is unique, releases something that could never have been before. It releases the energies of transformation. Curiously, the biggest problem that Robert Oppenheimer and his people had in Los Alamos in the early 1940s. To make atomic energy was to find a way to create an intense enough focus of energy that would transform matter. Uranium 235 out of its polarized existentiality into a release where the energy came out of the matter. And they found that the only way to do that was to have an explosion that goes inward, an implosion, and that the implosion had to be perfectly timed and perfectly balanced. It had to be a complete sphere. The image of it came to a young mathematician when he was standing on a porch eating an orange, and realize that you can get juice out of the orange if you squeeze it. That if you squeeze the atoms of uranium instantly everywhere, they will release their energy in a transform. And that's exactly what happened in 1943. And by 1944, that power was harnessed permanently by people into a game called the Cold War, because it's the only way to keep control of power. Just like in 1968, the decision was made not to go on with the space program because while we can control orbital vehicles, if they leave the planetary orbital gravity, if they go to the moon and beyond, they are beyond our reach. And anyone who is free of our system is a jeopardy to the entire system. As of the space program was exed out for the same reason that the Cold War was exed in. This is a rather serious lecture. In 1968. It would have gotten me killed. The last stage of integration is surrender. Not to give up, but to allow for the transform to come into play. And the first transform that comes into play is the field of consciousness. It's the first thing that comes into play. Integration. This openness is a threshold within our presence, not just the existentiality that stubborn existentiality summed up for the last 500 years by Martin Luther's phrase, here I stand. Just try and move me. Well, it isn't that. It isn't. That one stands stubbornly at all, but that one stands in the gentle zephyr of humility. Because in that gentle zephyr of humility is a climate of opening up. It's like a spring, a spring time. It's like a quality of presence which allows for the slightest, gentlest concourse of any kind of movement to continue through you. Somebody once asked, what, what's it like when two Zen masters meet? And the answer was, it's like two open doors. There's no one there to know. This openness, this threshold within presence is a no movement. It's one of the identifying marks, by the way, of a zero game. Even the Soviets at the height of the Cold War. Section 4.7, page 127. Zero games. Definition. A cooperative game with a set of players I or one is called a zero game if its characteristic function is identically zero. What is a characteristic function in game theory? It means the biggest payoff that you can guarantee for all the participants in the coalition. That's the characteristic function. It's not very mathematical, is it? Zero games reflect the total lack of interest of players in the game. Theorem. An inessential game is strategically equivalent to a zero game. An inessential game is one that is dismissed because you don't really need it anymore. One of the ways to achieve planetary freedom is to realize we don't have to fight to be together. Let's take a break. A Schultz grimace. A threshold. Is like a watershed. These rivers run this way and these run this way. The threshold is chance and change. You cannot have a game without chance. You cannot have the real without change. And they're mutually exclusive. As long as we play games, we're not real. When we're real, we can play. But we're not playing the games. We're in the play. Someone like Shakespeare writing the famous phrase the play's the thing. But the play's the thing. When all the world is the stage. It would not have been possible to have Shakespeare without Chaucer. Shakespeare came about 190 years, 180 years after Chaucer. Chaucer dissolved the medieval game in favor of people. When asked once what he wrote about, Chaucer said, A fair field full of folk. He wrote about the field of humanity who were more interesting than the destinations that they were supposed to get to. The Canterbury Tales is about the journey, not about Canterbury. It's not about the Archbishop of Canterbury, who's the head of the Catholic religion of the whole island. And you better get there on time. It's about a journey that no one cares if they ever get there, because it's the pilgrimage ongoing in humanity that's of interest. And the first tale in The Canterbury Tales, which we're reading now, if you're reading The Canterbury Tales, we have those year long readings. In the first year, you had either Moby Dick or The Odyssey, and the second year you have Virgil's Aeneid or Chaucer's Canterbury Tale. And the first of the Canterbury Tales is The Knight's Tale. And it's a tale. It's a romance, it's a romance. If you turn to something like the Oxford Guides to Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales Romance. Of all the generic varieties available to the Middle Ages, the romance was the most widespread but least clearly designated because the medieval world did not know how to designate a romance. It was a despicable designatable. It wasn't assignable of some place in the game in the pecking order. Why? Because the romance was largely a secular and not a religious form. By etymology, romance means a work in the vernacular. Not in Latin, in the way in which human beings speak to each other personally in their humanity. Romance is a story told by ordinary people about the highest aspirations that they could look for. About the nobility of the human spirit. It's a noble story. Romances are substantial narratives about highborn people set far away or long ago, or both. And their plots are concerned with love, always with love, especially with love that has the comportment of chivalry, which is not a game. But the point of chivalry was that a knight knew when to not any longer play the game and give himself up to love. The greatest epic of romance is Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which we looked at last year. But the greatest epic in romance is The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer. It is an epic, unlike Virgil's Aeneid, which is the epic of the founding of the Roman Empire. The Aeneid is about founding the ultimate game of the time. The Roman Empire was the ultimate game of the time, the ultimate game theory. When the, as they called it in Augustus Caesar, say when the prince Principate was founded, the Principate brought together and co-opted the entire world. Everything that was worthwhile was woven in, and anything that was left out was left out permanently. And especially one of the one of the almost psychotic compulsions at the founding of the Roman Empire was that there would not be a single sheet of prophetic language left loose in the world. All the sheets of prophetic writing, all the fragments, all the documents, were carefully brought to Rome and sifted through to see what could be woven in and what was not to be allowed. And especially important to the founding of the Roman Empire were the Sibylline Prophecies. And there was a special place in the Roman, in the Foro Romano, the Roman Forum, a building specially to house the import of the Sibylline Prophecies, and it was called the Ara Pacis Augustae. The building of the eternal peace of the Augustan Principate. The Roman Empire that it will never change, because we have taken all the wisdom of the world, and sealed it with all the prophetic writings about all the future probabilities, and we now have an eternal doctrine that need never change. We only modify its application. And so the idea in an ideological game is not to change, but to manipulate and to commandeer all of the chances. All of the probabilities so that everything is weighted in your favor. The house always wins because its house rules. And so what is jeopardizing to that structure, to that entire form is any kind of deviation, any kind of heresy, any kind of outside energy that could pop the bubble? What is necessary for change is memory. You cannot have change without memory. If you do not have functioning conscious memory, you don't know what has changed or if anything has changed or that change. Change is always a ratio in a proportion which has an analytic capacity to be understood. It has a calibration that has ultimately a harmonic, so that one understands all of the orders that are possible, and not to be coopted by a mere surface of probability. In a cosmos of memorable change. Uniqueness can occur, whereas in an ideological game the unique is immediately suspect as being a potential sabotage, so that there is always, if you look at the films of the adventures of human beings trying to get out of the Third Reich entanglements. Why are the Nazis always trying to ferret out the last person who would disagree? Could that person possibly be a jeopardy to the entire Third Reich? Yes. If anyone is free, it's possible that the whole jig could be up. This is the nature of tyranny. It must be that way. And the ultimate tyranny is the mind that is convinced that its symbolic ideology is not only logical, but has all of the permutations that are necessary and sufficient for carrying it on indefinitely. And the mind projects out a concept that this is, um, these truths that they hold are eternal. But there is such a thing as an eternal not. There's no such thing as an eternal. Not. There are endless knots, but endless knots. The more endlessly they are endless. Run time out, and time is the dimension that is necessary to keep probability within its integral bound. Without time, there's no way to make sure that your knots will hold. And one of the great flaws in the industrial, civilized, education co-opted empire that pretends to run the world is that it is based ultimately on a Cartesian space and a Newtonian application. But they never understood time at all. And they are really vulnerable, and it doesn't take very many people very long to undo it all. In fact, it only takes one quite quickly to undo it all. It's very, very irrational. A romance like the Canterbury Tales. Romances are not allegorical. I'm reading from the Cambridge Guide to Chaucer. They're not allegorical, but the more courtly ones are those with pretensions to poetic quality, or concerned to express some kind of inner meaning, an inner meaning which is not allegorical. One of the qualities of Dante in The Divine Comedy. Taking Virgil as his guide is that it can be read in four different ways. Especially it can be read allegorically or analogically. You cannot read The Canterbury Tales allegorically, because it is not about people in any kind of game theory system whatsoever. We don't know what's going to come out, and some of the tellers of the tales in The Canterbury Tales are incredibly interesting. Once one realises that they are being chosen as exemplary of figures who would be a part of a game. But because they're on this pilgrimage together, they're out of the game. And so their characters are revealed in a not in situ, but unnatural, and a cosmic realization comes out as one moves from pilgrim to pilgrim to pilgrim, and you become acquainted with the entire troop. It's rather like actors who are acting with a professional troop or able to portray Shakespeare's plays beautifully. You become Shakespearean, not in some reductive way, but you learn to be real on the stage, because one of the qualities of Shakespeare is to show life and not the roles assigned. There's always a plentiful sequence that leads to a popping of the play to moments of reality in Shakespeare. The plays are not about staying in the plays, but of coming to junctures again and again, where the poetry of language transcends the roles. And you could say those very words in your very life elsewhere. Many times it's a completely different way of looking at mankind and the cosmos. Two of the pilgrims, the summoner and the Pardoner. What are they? Summoners and partners of. Of what? The summoner comes embedded in the system of arch diagonal courts that produced him. He's a bill collector for the court, for the religious courts that have you and the summoner calls you to the tribunal of the religious courts. The Pardoner is the one who pardons you from the honest of what the summoner has done. And these are called indulgences, as you might well have guessed. The summoner comes embedded in the system of archdeacons courts that produced him with their jargon. A game always has a jargon. It does not have a language. It has a jargon. It's not a tongue, it's a sub tongue. Even Robby the robot in Forbidden Planet could speak 170 languages and all their sub tongue. If you're going to be a robot serving people in games, you have to be able to speak. Subtitles. Notice that a sub tongue is different from a a dialect. In the 1960s, when the movement was to have a revolution in education, to open it up He at San Francisco State. One of the one of the great hopes in 1965 was to let in 500 black students from the slums of San Francisco to welcome them in and let them have a college education, even though they couldn't pass any tests. Just to give them the chance and the feeling that they could be a part of the university system. And within a couple of months, there was such a seething rage in that population, because they felt that the entire academic thing was laughing at them, making them ridiculous because they couldn't understand the English being used because they were at home in black English and no one understood academically at the time. There was such a thing as black English, but the street language usage of English in black ghettos for several dozen generations had produced a sense of language whose cadence and inflection were completely different, and the academic mode was clearly one to them of pretense on every level. And that it wasn't real by anyone's standards. One of the phrases by late 65 was black consciousness, meaning those white professors are lying to themselves and everyone else, and they don't even know it because they're not speaking like human beings. They're speaking according to the system rules that are trying to co-opt us in, and we're not going. And the realization of the poignancy of that point led to, within a couple of years, completely shutting down San Francisco Franciscus day I was there. It was completely shut down. There were 5000 police helmeted in police buses, with the barred windows that stretched about two miles along the Great Highway. There were about 15,000 people protesting that, because it came out of the realization that it was a game, that the entire educational system was a game that was a power game being played on a very big level. The hero of the game, S.I. Hayakawa, was a little professor famous for quelling the rebellion. I was standing right next to him and he reached down and pulled the plug on a loudspeaker. That's what he called the rebellion. He pulled the plug on a loudspeaker with his little Scottish Beret hat. And the next thing you know, he's a US senator. Whereas the man he replaced as president of San Francisco State, John Summerskill, when he realized what was really going on, he quit the game. He joined the Peace Corps and went off to Africa just to serve humanity. Whereas S.I. Hayakawa welcomed the chance to have a star role in the game. And then he could sleep very nicely in the Senate where many people are asleep. The summoner comes embedded in a system. Of religious courts that produced him. Without the system, there is no summoner. And the summoning happens with a jargon And a complete range of vices. Possibilities of accusations. They were supposed to punish the Pardoner, and the one in The Canterbury Tales is the partner of Runcible. He belongs to this little parish. Runcible is set with greater particularity in the late 14th century world, for the abuses attendant on the attempts made by the Hospital of Saint Mary Roosevelt to raise money through the sale of indulgences. Part of the game is always the moolah. The money. Yes, you've sinned, but you can be forgiven. But it's going to cost. Chaucer defines the pardoner as a rascal almost as much by associating him with the places, by associating him also with the summoner. The theory behind indulgences was that Christ and the Saints had laid up an infinite treasury of merit under the guardianship of the Pope, on which Christians could, in effect, draw cheques in return for a cash payment, a payment that supposedly demonstrated their penance and so fulfilled the punishment, required a satisfaction and for reparation of sin. It's pretty revolutionary, isn't it? These Cambridge, these Oxford guides to Chaucer, it's quite extraordinary. Contributions to the theory of games. Princeton University, 1950. 1950 was a big year for the for the games. For the systems of Empire. In 1950, the Korean War started, and in 1950 the development of the space program was cut off. Late 1949, a two stage WACC corporal rocket went 250 miles high, high enough to go into orbit with just a little bit extra kick. If it had a third stage, we could have. In 1949, had something in orbit. The Secretary of State, James Forrestal, cut the MX program, the MX funding, so that the corporal program was cut off and everyone who was an engineer was assigned to test and retest and write up reports on German V-2 rockets that were ten years old at that point, and the whole program was revived in the late 1950s because, my God, Sputnik, how did they get up ahead of us? So 1950 was a big year for empires. Princeton is very, very, very well connected. It's the place where if you want to teach foreign policy, you have to have some association. It's the place where the Institute of Advanced Study collected all of the prophetic brains, including Einsteins, that were in the world during the Second World War. Princeton was the place where all the intelligence about the universe was gathered together in one convenient spot so they could be watched. We want to hear about it first, and we'll give you a nice positions, and you will be taken care of. Part of Einstein's hair was the electrostatic environment in which he had to operate. By the way, a beautiful film was made in 1950 that starred Sam Jaffe playing Einstein. It's called The Day the Earth Stood Still, and it's set there on the campus environment, transposed to Washington, DC. The director of the film was one of the world's great directors, Robert Wise. Really magnificent. The foundations of a mathematical theory of games of strategy was laid by John von Neumann in several successive stages between 1928 and 1941. The climax of the pioneering period of development came in 1944 with his publication of Theory of Games and Economic Behavior. Emphasizing a new approach to competitive economic behavior through a mathematical reduction to suitable games of strategy. Not only suitable games of strategy for economics, but for military application, because they worked the same way not only for military and economic, but for education, because they all worked the same way. Given the assumptions that a Cartesian space should exist inside the head. Also, they knew nothing about diffraction of infinities. They knew nothing about Mandelbrot sets. The present study these nice orange. There's a whole shelf of orange wrapped mathematical studies that hardly anyone reads anymore, but someone still remembers. The present study comprises a collection of contributions to this theory and answers some questions raised explicitly or implicitly by von Neumann. His last book was called The Computer and the brain. In order to describe the organization and content of this volume. It would be necessary to clarify certain concepts associated with a game which are confused and ambiguous in common use. Just having Chaucer's humane language even transformed by Shakespeare even further, algorithmically energized by Shelley, even raised by Yeats and Faulkner to an incredible level is not enough. Hence the kind of language you're hearing here. A language that never stays put because it doesn't have a place where it stops. A game is simply the set of rules which describe it, which, while every particular instance in which the game is played from beginning to end is a play of that game. Not a play as in play, but a play as in a throw of the dice. And what did Einstein beautifully say? I don't think God plays dice. It was a poignancy lost on many people sense, because they didn't understand the context in which he said it. He said it on Princeton's campus when this was new. And he said it of this. A similar distinction is drawn between the occasion of the selection of one among several alternatives to be made by one of the players, or by some chance device, which is called a move and the actual choice made in a particular play. A game consists of a sequence of moves, while they play consists of a sequence of choices and for sequence. In both cases, you can read ritual. Games only work if you can reduce what counts to a ritual comportment to an action existentiality, which you can influence. Which is why art is so radical to the whole situation, because artists are not going to stay in the ritual rules. They color outside the lines. They're like Matisse. They don't even care if there are lines. You can have a or like Rembrandt, you can have a cheerio. Scale of paintings. There are no lines in Rembrandt paintings at all. There are scintillating oceans of browns and golds and light and shadow. And out of this you get what's called a portrait. You get a human being who is so cosmic that they belong in any heaven. The decisive step in the mathematical treatment of games is the normalization achieved by the introduction of pure strategies. We don't want any contaminants in our strategies. A pure strategy is a plan formulated by a player prior to the play. We will tell you what the rules of engagement are and if you do anything, you know what's coming. It will cover all the possible decisions. Look how glib they are. All the possible. Except it's qualified. It's decisions, not possibilities. Oh my goodness, oh my goodness. You have to be sort of an Akim Tamiroff to deliver that. Oh my goodness. In in the film Topkapi with the Melina mercouri and Maximilian Schell, Akim Tamiroff is the is the grubby, uh, Turkish cook that Peter Ustinov is trying to convince him that he's not a part of the spy ring, and he's a he's officially working for the Turkish police. And Akim Tamiroff says, fish. Especially fish. Of course. Fish. So this is all fish. When memory comes into play. Not as a reductive, straight laced memorization of rote, categorical assigned places when memory comes differentially conscious into play. What happens is that all of the chances lose their gamesmanship and become amenable to the truly magical world of change. Everything is different now because it's not the same, and because it is new and unique and different really, and can thus open itself up to any possibility whatsoever. A Cosmos has so much freedom that freedom itself is free. That our spirituality is so wide that to call it endless is a reductive quality. And this indeed is one of the difficulties in Shakespeare's The Tempest, The Tempest, which we'll get to next week along with Shelley's Prometheus Unbound. We're going to take vision to an even higher order of energy, a higher level. Prospero in The Tempest a magician, a very powerful magician exiled from the game of court power politics in Renaissance Italy, stranded on this island of the Bermudas in the New World, an ocean away from everybody he knew and stranded there with just his daughter, Miranda. This site, the Bermuda of Shakespeare's day, was also the site that Francis Bacon chose to position his utopia of a possible rational future. In his book, The Advancement of Learning and in the Advancement of Learning of 1607, he laid some of the possibilities for a social order that was open to scientific finding out, despite religious confines and Shakespeare's The Tempest, coming a few years later, about five years later, is an opening up, an exposing of the limitations of Francis Bacon's so-called utopia in the advancement of learning, something which people even now don't quite get and keep going back as if to have a universal plan, delivers a cosmos, a universal plan always delivers a planned universe. I could write it out on a blackboard logically, if you'd like. Prospero says to his daughter, Miranda, a ship has been wrecked in a storm generated by Prospero through his agent Ariel. This intrepid spirit using a little Elizabethan English. Ariel, who has such a high, pure energy of freedom that he can when he's really freed, disappear like the highest whistle into the vanishing point of the sky. One thing that a Cartesian geometry based game cannot countenance is vanishing, a point of vanishing. Because the only stability that's there in game theory is something called the saddle point, which is the seat of all of the rationality that a system, any system, any system, ever has. And you cannot have that saddle shaped point in Cartesian mental space if you have a point that vanishes. It produces a zero game instantly. It's not only that that game is over. It's that the possibility of games is over. It's called enlightenment moment. Satori. Huh? Prospero says to his daughter, Miranda. No. Thus forth by accident. Most strange, Bountiful fortune. Now, my dear lady, hath mine enemies been brought to this shore. And by my prescience I find my zenith doth depend upon a most auspicious star. Whose influence. If now I court not. But omit. My fortunes will ever after droop. Here seest more questions. What is he talking about? He's talking about a woman of the wild things that in the medieval worldview was called Dame Fortune because. Dame fortune has to do with the wildness of her bestowal of luck. And in games of chance you. Cannot, even if you control the house, beat luck. Dame fortune is not a celestial mother co-opted into an ideology. She is the lady of the wild Things because luck will go where she wants to go. She is the medieval presentation of Sophia. Solomon's wisdom lady. And the real chivalry is all about respecting that and wearing her garter in the tournaments With whoever takes the field. It is a very complex and very profound aspect, something which someone like Shakespeare learned by not closely reading his Virgil, but by closely reading his Ovid. Because while Virgil is about building the Roman Empire, Ovid is his epic is called the Metamorphoses. The changes, even the gods change. Isn't that an amazing thing? More next week.