George Orwell - 1984

*** George Orwell – 1984 ***
- “Who controls the past,” ran the Party slogan, “controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” And yet the past, though of its nature alterable, never had been altered. Whatever was true now was true from everlasting to everlasting.
- His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again: and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself. That was the ultimate subtlety: consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed. Even to understand the word “doublethink” involved the use of doublethink.
- “It’s a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. Of course the great wastage is in the verbs and adjectives, but there are hundreds of nouns that can be got rid of as well. It isn’t only the synonyms; there are also the antonyms. After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? A word contains its opposite in itself. Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well -- better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of ‘good’, what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like ‘excellent’ and ‘splendid’ and all the rest of them? ‘Plusgood’ covers the meaning, or ‘doubleplusgood’ if you want something stronger still. Of course we use those forms already. but in the final version of Newspeak there’ll be nothing else. In the end the whole notion of goodness and badness will be covered by only six words -- in reality, only one word.
- Orthodoxy means not thinking -- not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.
- Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your own nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.
- Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.
- Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable what then?
- Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.
- Facts, at any rate, could not be kept hidden. They could be tracked down by enquiry, they could be squeezed out of you by torture. But if the object was not to stay alive but to stay human, what difference did it ultimately make? They could not alter your feelings: for that matter you could not alter them yourself, even if you wanted to. They could lay bare in the utmost detail everything that you had done or said or thought; but the inner heart, whose workings were mysterious even to yourself, remained impregnable.
- Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle, and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other. The aims of these groups are entirely irreconcilable...
- An all-round increase in wealth threatened the destruction -indeed, in some sense was the destruction -- of a hierarchical society. In a world in which everyone worked short hours, had enough to eat, lived in a house with a bathroom and a refrigerator, and possessed a motor-car or even an aeroplane, the most obvious and perhaps the most important form of inequality would already have disappeared. If it once became general, wealth would confer no distinction. It was possible, no doubt, to imagine a society in which wealth, in the sense of personal possessions and luxuries, should be evenly distributed, while power remained in the hands of a small privileged caste. But in practice such a society could not long remain stable. For if leisure and security were enjoyed by all alike, the great mass of human beings who are normally stupefied by poverty would become literate and would learn to think for themselves; and when once they had done this, they would sooner or later realize that the privileged minority had no function, and they would sweep it away. In the long run, a hierarchical society was only possible on a basis of poverty and ignorance.
- The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim -- for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives -- is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again.
- For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims.
- It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.
- In the past the need for a hierarchical form of society had been the doctrine specifically of the High. It had been preached by kings and aristocrats and by the priests, lawyers, and the like who were parasitical upon them, and it had generally been softened by promises of compensation in an imaginary world beyond the grave.
- The Middle, so long as it was struggling for power, had always made use of such terms as freedom, justice, and fraternity.
- In the past the Middle had made revolutions under the banner of equality, and then had established a fresh tyranny as soon as the old one was overthrown.
- As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, human equality had become technically possible. It was still true that men were not equal in their native talents and that functions had to be specialized in ways that favoured some individuals against others; but there was no longer any real need for class distinctions or for large differences of wealth. In earlier ages, class distinctions had been not only inevitable but desirable. Inequality was the price of civilization. With the development of machine production, however, the case was altered. Even if it was still necessary for human beings to do different kinds of work, it was no longer necessary for them to live at different social or economic levels.
- It had long been realized that the only secure basis for oligarchy is collectivism. Wealth and privilege are most easily defended when they are possessed jointly.
- He did not see that the continuity of an oligarchy need not be physical, nor did he pause to reflect that hereditary aristocracies have always been shortlived, whereas adoptive organizations such as the Catholic Church have sometimes lasted for hundreds or thousands of years. The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life, imposed by the dead upon the living. A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors.
- Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.
- Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc, and of being bored or repelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop, in short, means protective stupidity.
- The mutability of the past is the central tenet of Ingsoc. Past events, it is argued, have no objective existence, but survive only in written records and in human memories. The past is whatever the records and the memories agree upon.
- For when it has been recreated in whatever shape is needed at the moment, then this new version is the past, and no different past can ever have existed. This holds good even when, as often happens, the same event has to be altered out of recognition several times in the course of a year.
- Doublethink means the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.
- To tell deliberate lies while genuinely believing in them, to forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and then, when it becomes necessary again, to draw it back from oblivion for just so long as it is needed, to deny the existence of objective reality and all the while to take account of the reality which one denies -- all this is indispensably necessary. Even in using the word doublethink it is necessary to exercise doublethink. For by using the word one admits that one is tampering with reality; by a fresh act of doublethink one erases this knowledge; and so on indefinitely, with the lie always one leap ahead of the truth.
- In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.
- For it is only by reconciling contradictions that power can be retained indefinitely. In no other way could the ancient cycle be broken. If human equality is to be for ever averted -- if the High, as we have called them, are to keep their places permanently -- then the prevailing mental condition must be controlled insanity.
- Being in a minority, even a minority of one, did not make you mad. There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad. Sanity is not statistical.
- Only the disciplined mind can see reality, Winston. You believe that reality is something objective, external, existing in its own right. You also believe that the nature of reality is self-evident. When you delude yourself into thinking that you see something, you assume that everyone else sees the same thing as you. But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. Not in the individual mind, which can make mistakes, and in any case soon perishes:
- We do not destroy the heretic because he resists us: so long as he resists us we never destroy him. We convert him, we capture his inner mind, we reshape him. We burn all evil and all illusion out of him; we bring him over to our side, not in appearance, but genuinely, heart and soul. We make him one of ourselves before we kill him. It is intolerable to us that an erroneous thought should exist anywhere in the world, however secret and powerless it may be. Even in the instant of death we cannot permit any deviation.
- In the old days the heretic walked to the stake still a heretic, proclaiming his heresy, exulting in it. Even the victim of the Russian purges could carry rebellion locked up in his skull as he walked down the passage waiting for the bullet. But we make the brain perfect before we blow it out. The command of the old despotisms was ‘Thou shalt not’. The command of the totalitarians was ‘Thou shalt’. Our command is ‘Thou art’.
- That the choice for mankind lay between freedom and happiness, and that, for the great bulk of mankind, happiness was better.
- What can you do, thought Winston, against the lunatic who is more intelligent than yourself, who gives your arguments a fair hearing and then simply persists in his lunacy?
- We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship.
- “How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.
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Naomi Woolf - The Beauty Myth Pt 2

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A man is unlikely to be brought within earshot of women as they judge men’s appearance, height, muscle tone, sexual technique, penis size, personal grooming, or taste in clothes—all of which we do. The fact is that women are able to view men just as men view women, as subjects for sexual and aesthetic evaluation; we too are effortlessly able to choose the male “ideal” from a lineup; and if we could have male beauty as well as everything else, most of us would not say no.

-          Women could probably be trained quite easily to see men first as sexual things. If girls never experienced sexual violence; if a girl’s only window on male sexuality were a stream of easily available, well-lit, cheap images of boys slightly older than herself, in their late teens, smiling encouragingly and revealing cuddly erect penises the color of roses or mocha, she might well look at, masturbate to, and, as an adult, “need” beauty pornography based on the bodies of men. And if those initiating penises were represented to the girl as pneumatically erectible, swerving neither left nor right, tasting of cinnamon or forest berries, innocent of random hairs, and ever ready; if they were presented alongside their measurements, length, and circumference to the quarter inch; if they seemed to be available to her with no troublesome personality attached; if her sweet pleasure seemed to be the only reason for them to exist—then a real young man would probably approach the young woman’s bed with, to say the least, a failing heart.

-          Imagery that is focused exclusively on the female body was encouraged in an environment in which men could no longer control sex but had for the first time to win it. Women who were preoccupied with their own desirability were less likely to express and seek out what they themselves desired.

-          Women are vulnerable to absorbing the beauty myth’s intervention in our sexuality because our sexual education is set up to ensure that vulnerability. Female sexuality is turned inside out from birth, so “beauty” can take its place, keeping women’s eyes lowered to their own bodies, glancing up only to check their reflections in the eyes of men.

-          We see that, sanctioned by the culture, men’s sexuality simply is. They do not have to earn it with their appearance. We see that men’s desire precedes contact with women. It does not lie dormant waiting to spring into being only in response to a woman’s will.

-          Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually; many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt; many confuse desiring with being desirable.

-          Women say that when they lose weight they “feel sexier”; but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don’t multiply with weight loss.

-          Could it be then that women’s famous slowness of arousal relative to men’s, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the cultural prohibition against seeing men’s bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it relate to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?

-          One trouble with soft-core sexual imagery aimed at young men is that the women photographed are not actually responding sexually to anything; young men grow up trained to eroticize images that teach them nothing about female desire. Nor are young women taught to eroticize female desire. Both men and women, then, tend to eroticize only the woman’s body and the man’s desire. That means that women are exaggeratedly sensitive to male desire for their own arousal, and men are exaggeratedly insensitive to female desire for theirs.

-          Today’s children and young men and women have sexual identities that spiral around paper and celluloid phantoms: from Playboy to music videos to the blank female torsos in women’s magazines, features obscured and eyes extinguished, they are being imprinted with a sexuality that is mass-produced, deliberately dehumanizing and inhuman.

-          Let’s say a man really loves a woman; he sees her as his equal, his ally, his colleague; but she enters this other realm and becomes unfathomable. In the krypton spotlight, which he doesn’t even see, she falls ill, out of his caste, and turns into an untouchable. He may know her as confident; she stands on the bathroom scale and sinks into a keening of self-abuse. He knows her as mature; she comes home with a failed haircut, weeping from a vexation she is ashamed even to express. He knows her as prudent; she goes without winter boots because she spent half a week’s paycheck on artfully packaged mineral oil. He knows her as sharing his love of the country; she refuses to go with him to the seaside until her springtime fast is ended. She’s convivial; but she rudely refuses a slice of birthday cake, only to devour the ruins of anything at all in a frigid light at dawn.

-          Nothing he can say about this is right. He can’t speak. Whatever he says hurts her more. If he comforts her by calling the issue trivial, he doesn’t understand. It isn’t trivial at all. If he agrees with her that it’s serious, even worse: He can’t possibly love her, he thinks she’s fat and ugly. If he says he loves her just as she is, worse still: He doesn’t think she’s beautiful. If he lets her know that he loves her because she’s beautiful, worst of all, though she can’t talk about this to anyone. That is supposed to be what she wants most in the world, but it makes her feel bereft, unloved, and alone.

-          So the beauty myth sets it up this way: A high rating as an art object is the most valuable tribute a woman can exact from her lover. If he appreciates her face and body because it is hers, that is next to worthless. It is very neat: The myth contrives to make women offend men by scrutinizing honest appreciation when they give it; it can make men offend women merely by giving them honest appreciation. It can manage to contaminate the sentence “You’re beautiful,” which is next to “I love you” in expressing a bond of regard between a woman and a man. A man cannot tell a woman that he loves to look at her without risking making her unhappy. If he never tells her, she is destined to be unhappy. And the “luckiest” woman of all, told she is loved because she’s “beautiful,” is often tormented because she lacks the security of being desired because she looks like who she lovably is.

-          It is not insecurity speaking the woman’s lines but—if she does have self-respect—hostility: Why should her lover, just because he is male, be in a position to judge her against other women? Why must she need to know her position and hate needing to, and hate knowing? Why should his reply have such exaggerated power? And it does. He does not know that what he says will affect the way she feels when they next make love. She is angry for a number of good reasons that may have nothing to do with this particular man’s intentions. The exchange reminds her that, in spite of a whole fabric of carefully woven equalities, they are not equal in this way that is so crucial that its snagged thread unravels the rest.

-          “Only God, my dear,” wrote Yeats blithely, “Could love you for yourself alone/And not your yellow hair.”

-          Beauty practices are being stressed so that the relationships between men and women will continue, in spite of a social movement toward equality, to feel dictatorial. Placing female pleasure, sex or food or selfesteem, into the hands of a personal judge turns the man into a legislator of the woman’s pleasure, rather than her companion in it. “Beauty” today is what the female orgasm used to be: something given to women by men, if they submitted to their feminine role and were lucky.

-          Is the beauty myth good to men? It hurts them by teaching them how to avoid loving women. It prevents men from actually seeing women. It does not, contrary to its own professed ideology, stimulate and gratify sexual longing. In suggesting a vision in place of a woman, it has a numbing effect, reducing all senses but the visual, and impairing even that.

-          Simone de Beauvoir said that no man is truly free to love a fat woman. If that is true, how free are men?

-          There is physical attraction, and then there is the “ideal.” When a woman looks at a man, she can physically dislike the idea of his height, his coloring, his shape. But after she has liked him and loved him, she would not want him to look any other way: For many women, the body appears to grow beautiful and erotic as they grow to like the person in it. The actual body, the smell, the feel, the voice and movement, becomes charged with heat through the desirable person who animates it.

-          By the same token, a woman can admire a man as a work of art but lose sexual interest if he turns out to be an idiot. The way in which women regard men’s bodies sexually is proof that one can look at a person sexually without reducing him or her to pieces.

-          What becomes of the man who acquires a beautiful woman, with her “beauty” his sole target? He sabotages himself. He has gained no friend, no ally, no mutual trust: She knows quite well why she has been chosen. He has succeeded in buying a mutually suspicious set of insecurities. He does gain something: the esteem of other men who find such an acquisition impressive.

-          Some men do get a sexual charge from a woman’s objective “beauty,” just as some women feel sexual pleasure at the thought of a man’s money or power. But it is often a status high, a form of exhibitionism, that draws its power from the man imagining his buddies imagining him doing what he is doing while he does it.

-          Some men feel a sexual thrill upon smelling the leather interior of a new Mercedes-Benz. It is not that that thrill is not real, but that it is based on the meaning assigned by other men to that leather. It is no deep psychosexual attachment to leather itself. There is certainly a reflexive—not instinctive—male response to the cold economy of the beauty myth; but that can be completely separated from sexual attraction, the warm dialogue of desire.

-          When men are more aroused by symbols of sexuality than by the sexuality of women themselves, they are fetishists. Fetishism treats a part as if it were the whole; men who choose a lover on the basis of her “beauty” alone are treating the woman as a fetish—that is, treating a part of her, her visual image, not even her skin, as if it were her sexual self.

-          The woman’s value as a fetish lies in the way her “beauty” gives him status in the eyes of other men. So when a man has sex with a woman whom he has chosen for her impersonal beauty alone, there are many people in the room with him, but she is not among them. These relationships disappoint both because both must live in public to get that constant, recharging affirmation of the woman’s high exchange value. But sexual relationships always go back to private space, where the beauty, as tediously human as any other woman, makes the stubborn mistake of asking to be known.

-          Attraction is a dialogue or dance or high-wire balancing act that depends on the unique qualities, memories, patterns of desire, of the two people involved; “beauty” is generic. Attraction is about a sexual fit: two people imagining how they will work together. “Beauty” is only visual, more real on film or in stone than in three living dimensions.

-          One needs distance, even in the bedroom, to get a really good look; other senses are more intoxicating close up. “Beauty” leaves out smell, physical response, sounds, rhythm, chemistry, texture, fit, in favor of a portrait on a pillow.

-          The world of attraction grows blander and colder as everyone, first women and soon men, begin to look alike. People lose one another as more masks are assumed.

-          A woman who is self-conscious can’t relax to let her sensuality come into play.

-          The Big Lie is the notion that if a lie is big enough, people will believe it. The idea that adult women, with their fully developed array of sexual characteristics, are inadequate to stimulate and gratify heterosexual male desire, and that “beauty” is what will complete them, is the beauty myth’s Big Lie.

-          But female fat is the subject of public passion, and women feel guilty about female fat, because we implicitly recognize that under the myth, women’s bodies are not our own but society’s, and that thinness is not a private aesthetic, but hunger a social concession exacted by the community. A cultural fixation on female thinness is not an obsession about female beauty but an obsession about female obedience.

-          Individual men don’t “spin out fashionable images” (indeed, research keeps proving that they are warm to women’s real shapes and unmoved by the Iron Maiden); multinational corporations do that.

-          At least a third of a woman’s life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable conditions—so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be.

-          The same tacit censorship that edits images of women’s faces and body shapes also edits images of the female breast, keeping women ignorant about what breasts are actually like. Culture screens breasts with impeccable thoroughness, almost never representing those that are soft, or asymmetrical, or mature, or that have gone through the changes of pregnancy. Looking at breasts in culture, one would have little idea that real breasts come in as many shapes and variations as there are women. Since most women rarely if ever see or touch other women’s breasts, they have no idea what they feel like, or of the way they move and shift with the body, or of how they really look during lovemaking. Women of all ages have a fixation—sad in the light of how varied women’s breasts really are in texture—on “pertness” and “firmness.” Many young women suffer agonies of shame from their conviction that they alone have stretch marks. Since beauty censorship keeps women in profound darkness about other women’s real bodies, it is able to make virtually any woman feel that her breasts alone are too soft or low or sagging or small or big or weird or wrong, and to steal from her the full and exquisite eroticism of the nipple.

-          The beauty myth countered women’s new freedoms by transposing the social limits to women’s lives directly onto our faces and bodies. In response, we must now ask the questions about our place in our bodies that women a generation ago asked about their place in society.

-          We waste time in every generation debating the symptoms more passionately than the disease.

-          The problem with cosmetics exists only when women feel invisible or inadequate without them. The problem with working out exists only if women hate ourselves when we don’t. When a woman is forced to adorn herself to buy a hearing, when she needs her grooming in order to protect her identity, when she goes hungry in order to keep her job, when she must attract a lover so that she can take care of her children, that is exactly what makes “beauty” hurt. Because what hurts women about the beauty myth is not adornment, or expressed sexuality, or time spent grooming, or the desire to attract a lover. Many mammals groom, and every culture uses adornment. “Natural” and “unnatural” are not the terms in question. The actual struggle is between pain and pleasure, freedom and compulsion.

-          Advertisers have recently figured out that undermining sexual self-confidence works whatever the targeted gender. According to The Guardian, “Men are now looking at mirrors instead of at girls…. Beautiful men can now be seen selling everything.”

Naomi Woolf - The Beauty Myth Pt 1

*** Naomi Woolf – The Beauty Myth ***

-          Parallel to the increase in women’s economic and social power, the power gap between the sexes has continued to close, dislodging men from their ages-old position as arbiters, rather than providers, of sexual attractiveness and beauty.

-          Societies tell themselves necessary fictions in the same way that individuals and families do. Henrik Ibsen called them “vital lies,” and psychologist Daniel Goleman describes them working the same way on the social level that they do within families: “The collusion is maintained by directing attention away from the fearsome fact, or by repackaging its meaning in an acceptable format.” The costs of these social blind spots, he writes, are destructive communal illusions.

-          Though unconscious personal anxieties can be a powerful force in the creation of a vital lie, economic necessity practically guarantees it. An economy that depends on slavery needs to promote images of slaves that “justify” the institution of slavery.

-          There has never been such a potentially destabilizing immigrant group asking for a fair chance to compete for access to power.

-          In women’s easy familiarity with the dominant culture, in the bourgeois expectations of those who are middle class, in their Third World work habits, and in their potential to fuse the anger and loyalties of a galvanized underclass, the power structure correctly identifies a Frankenstein composite of its worst minority terrors. Beauty discrimination has become necessary, not from the perception that women will not be good enough, but that they will be, as they have been, twice as good.

-          When housework is accounted for, “women around the world end up working twice as many hours as men.”

-          Until the 1960s, the convention of referring to unpaid work at home as “not real work” helped to confound women’s knowledge of their hardworking labor tradition. Such a tactic was useless once women began to do work that men recognize as male—that is, as labor worthy of its hire.

-          The likelihood of backlash in some severe form was underestimated because the American mind-set celebrates winning and avoids noticing the corollary, that winners win only what losers lose.

-          A real meritocracy means for men “more competition at work and more housework at home.” What the aspirational message ignores is the reaction of that half of the ruling elite who hold jobs that belong by right of merit to women and who, if women were to move freely up the ladder, would inevitably lose them. With what can the power structure defend itself against this onslaught?

-          What it needed was a replacement shackle, a new material burden that would drain surplus energy and lower confidence, an ideology that would produce the women workers it needs, but only in the mold in which it wants them.

-          In a court of law, to talk about something imaginary as if it is real makes it real.

-          Beauty provokes harassment, the law says, but it looks through men’s eyes when deciding what provokes it. A woman employer may find a well-cut European herringbone twill, wantonly draped over a tautly muscled masculine flank, madly provocative, especially since it suggests male power and status, which our culture eroticizes. But the law is unlikely to see good Savile Row tailoring her way if she tells its possessor he must service her sexually or lose his job.

-          It is the powerful who dictate the terms; adults, play-wrestling a child, enjoy letting the child feel it has won.

-          When a brilliant critic and a beautiful woman (that’s my order of priorities, not necessarily those of the men who teach her) puts on black suede spike heels and a ruby mouth before asking an influential professor to be her thesis advisor, is she a slut? Or is she doing her duty to herself, in a clear-eyed appraisal of a hostile or indifferent milieu, by taking care to nourish her real gift under the protection of her incidental one?

-          The professional beauty qualification works smoothly to put back into employment relations the grounds for exploitation that recent equal opportunity laws have threatened. It gives employers what they need economically in a female work force by affecting women psychologically on several levels. The PBQ reinforces the double standard . Women have always been paid less than men for equal work, and the PBQ gives that double standard a new rationale where the old rationale is illegal.

-          This proves again that the myth is political and not sexual: Money does the work of history more efficiently than sex. Low female self-esteem may have a sexual value to some individual men, but it has a financial value to all of society. Women’s poor physical self-image today is far less a result of sexual competition than of the needs of the marketplace.

-          Women do earn more from selling their bodies than their skills. “In this context,” writes legal scholar Catharine A. MacKinnon, “it is instructive to ask: What is woman’s best economic option?”

-          How can a woman believe in merit in a reality like this? A job market that rewards her indirectly as if she were selling her body is simply perpetuating the traditional main employment options for women—compulsory marriage or prostitution—more politely and for half the pay.

-          When a woman says, “This will never be fair even if I play by their rules,” she gains insight into the real workings of the myth. No amount of labor will ever be adequately compensated; she will never, hard though she may try, really “make it”; her birth is not the birth of a beauty aristocrat, that mythic species. It isn’t fair. That’s why it exists.

-          “Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only the relations of men to women, but the relation of women to themselves.”

-          Advertisers are the West’s courteous censors. They blur the line between editorial freedom and the demands of the marketplace.

-          The advertisers who make women’s mass culture possible depend on making women feel bad enough about their faces and bodies to spend more money on worthless or pain-inducing products than they would if they felt innately beautiful.

-          In this century, most fields of thought have been transformed by the understanding that truths are relative and perceptions subjective.

-          A man’s right to confer judgment on any woman’s beauty while remaining himself unjudged is beyond scrutiny because it is thought of as God-given. That right has become so urgently important for male culture to exercise because it is the last unexamined right remaining intact from the old list of masculine privilege: those that it was universally believed that God or nature or another absolute authority bestowed upon all men to exert over all women. As such, it is daily exercised more harshly in compensation for the other rights over women, and the other ways to control them, now lost forever.

-          Of course, men don’t age any better physically. They age better only in terms of social status. We misperceive in this way since our eyes are trained to see time as a flaw on women’s faces where it is a mark of character on men’s. If men’s main function were decorative and male adolescence were seen as the peak of male value, a “distinguished” middle-aged man would look shockingly flawed.

-          A worshiper who does not feel guilty cannot be counted on to support the Church; a woman who does not feel damaged cannot be relied on to spend money for her “repair.”

-          Society really doesn’t care about women’s appearance per se. What genuinely matters is that women remain willing to let others tell them what they can and cannot have. Women are watched, in other words, not to make sure that they will “be good,” but to make sure that they will know they are being watched.

-          “There is no application, no topical application, that will get rid of grief or stress or heavy lines…. There’s nothing, but nothing, that’s going to make you look younger. Nothing.” Anthea Disney, editor of the women’s magazine Self, adds, “We all know there isn’t anything that will make you look younger.” And as “Sam” Sugiyama, codirector of Shiseido, concludes, “If you want to avoid aging, you must live in space. There is no other way to avoid getting wrinkles, once you are out of the womb.”

-          The success of a belief system depends upon how well the religious leaders understand the emotional situation of its targets.

-          Religious guilt suppresses women’s sexuality. Sex researcher Alfred Kinsey found, in the words of political analyst Debbie Taylor, that “religious beliefs had little or no effect on a man’s sexual pleasure, but could slice as powerfully as the circumcision knife into a woman’s enjoyment, undermining with guilt and shame any pleasure she might otherwise experience.”

-          Technically, the female sexual organs are what the older religions feared as “the insatiable cunt.” Capable of multiple orgasm, continual orgasm, a sharp and breathtaking clitoral orgasm, an orgasm seemingly centered in the vagina that is emotionally overwhelming, orgasm from having the breasts stroked, and of endless variations of all those responses combined, women’s capacity for genital pleasure is theoretically inexhaustible.

-          The sexual urge is shaped by society. Even animals have to learn how to be sexual. It is learning rather than instinct, anthropologists now believe, which leads to successful reproductive behavior: Lab-raised monkeys are inept at sex, and human beings must also learn from external cues how to be sexual.

-          Sexual “explicitness” is not the issue. We could use a lot more of that, if explicit meant honest and revealing; if there were a full spectrum of erotic images of uncoerced real women and real men in contexts of sexual trust, beauty pornography could theoretically hurt no one.

-          Because we see many versions of the naked Iron Maiden, we are asked to believe that our culture promotes the display of female sexuality. It actually shows almost none. It censors representations of women’s bodies, so that only the official versions are visible. Rather than seeing images of female desire or that cater to female desire, we see mock-ups of living mannequins, made to contort and grimace, immobilized and uncomfortable under hot lights, professional set-pieces that reveal little about female sexuality. In the United States and Great Britain, which have no tradition of public nakedness, women rarely—and almost never outside a competitive context—see what other women look like naked; we see only identical humanoid products based loosely on women’s bodies.

-          Rape fantasies projected into the culture are benign, we’re told, even beneficial, when commentators dismiss them through what Catharine MacKinnon has satirized as “the hydraulic model” of male sexuality (it lets off steam). Men, we are given to understand, are harmlessly interested in such fantasies; women are harmlessly interested in them (though many women may have rape fantasies for no more subtle psychological reason than that that image of sexuality is the primary one they witness).

-          The practice of displaying breasts, for example, in contexts in which the display of penises would be unthinkable, is portrayed as trivial because breasts are not “as naked” as penises or vaginas; and the idea of half exposing men in a similar way is moot because men don’t have body parts comparable to breasts. But if we think about how women’s genitals are physically concealed, unlike men’s, and how women’s breasts are physically exposed, unlike men’s, it can be seen differently: women’s breasts, then correspond to men’s penises as the vulnerable “sexual flower” on the body, so that to display the former and conceal the latter makes women’s bodies vulnerable while men’s are protected.

-          To live in a culture in which women are routinely naked where men aren’t is to learn inequality in little ways all day long. So even if we agree that sexual imagery is in fact a language, it is clearly one that is already heavily edited to protect men’s sexual—and hence social—confidence while undermining that of women.

-          Ads do not sell sex—that would be counterproductive, if it meant that heterosexual women and men turned to one another and were gratified. What they sell is sexual discontent.

-          Though the survival of the planet depends on women’s values balancing men’s, consumer culture depends on maintaining a broken line of communication between the sexes and promoting matching sexual insecurities. Harley-Davidsons and Cuisinarts stand in for maleness and femaleness. But sexual satisfaction eases the stranglehold of materialism, since status symbols no longer look sexual, but irrelevant. Product lust weakens where emotional and sexual lust intensifies. The price we pay for artificially buoying up this market is our heart’s desire. The beauty myth keeps a gap of fantasy between men and women. That gap is made with mirrors; no law of nature supports it. It keeps us spending vast sums of money and looking distractedly around us, but its smoke and reflection interfere with our freedom to be sexually ourselves.

-          Consumer culture is best supported by markets made up of sexual clones, men who want objects and women who want to be objects, and the object desired ever-changing, disposable, and dictated by the market. The beautiful object of consumer pornography has a built-in obsolescence, to ensure that as few men as possible will form a bond with one woman for years or for a lifetime, and to ensure that women’s dissatisfaction with themselves will grow rather than diminish over time.

-          The fleeting chimera of the airbrushed centerfold, always receding before him, keeps the man destabilized in pursuit, unable to focus on the beauty of the woman—known, marked, lined, familiar—who hands him the paper every morning.

-          When they discuss this subject, women lean forward, their voices lower. They tell their terrible secret. It’s my breasts, they say. My hips. It’s my thighs. I hate my stomach. This is not aesthetic distaste, but deep sexual shame. The parts of the body vary. But what each woman who describes it shares is the conviction that that is what the pornography of beauty most fetishizes. Breasts, thighs, buttocks, bellies; the most sexually central parts of women, whose “ugliness” therefore becomes an obsession.

-          “Beauty” and sexuality are both commonly misunderstood as some transcendent inevitable fact; falsely interlocking the two makes it seem doubly true that a woman must be “beautiful” to be sexual. That of course is not true at all. The definitions of both “beautiful” and “sexual” constantly change to serve the social order, and the connection between the two is a recent invention. When society needed chastity from women, virginity and fidelity endowed women with beauty

-          Only recently, now that society is best served by a population of women who are sexually available and sexually insecure, “beauty” has been redefined as sex. Why? Because, unlike female sexuality, innate to all women, “beauty” is hard work, few women are born with it, and it is not free.

-          The link between beauty pornography and sex is not natural. It is taken for granted that the desire to have visual access to an endless number of changing centerfolds is innately male, since that form of looking is taken to be a sublimation of men’s innate promiscuity. But since men are not naturally promiscuous and women are not naturally monogamous, it follows that the truism so often asserted about beauty pornography—that men need it because they are visually aroused while women aren’t—is not biologically inevitable. Men are visually aroused by women’s bodies and less sensitive to their arousal by women’s personalities because they are trained early into that response, while women are less visually aroused and more emotionally aroused because that is their training. This asymmetry in sexual education maintains men’s power in the myth: They look at women’s bodies, evaluate, move on; their own bodies are not looked at, evaluated, and taken or passed over.

-          The asymmetry of the beauty myth tells men and women lies about each other’s bodies, to keep them sexually estranged. The myth’s series of physical lies negates what a heterosexual woman knows to be true about the bodies of men. Women are supposed to be the “soft-skinned” sex, but a woman knows that the aureole around a man’s nipple is supremely soft, and that there are places on his body where the outer skin is softer than anywhere on a woman’s: the glans, the delicate covering of the shaft. Women are the “sensitive” sex; yet there is no part of a woman’s body so vulnerable as the testes. Women must keep their shirts on in every weather ostensibly because their nipples are sexual. But men’s nipples are sexual too, and that doesn’t keep them covered when the mercury breaks eighty. Women are “ugly” where they get stretch marks. Men get stretch marks, across their hips, of which they are often not aware. Women’s breasts must be perfectly symmetrical; men’s genitals sure aren’t.

-          When novelist Margaret Atwood asked women what they feared most from men, they replied, “We’re afraid they’ll kill us.” When she asked men the same question about women, they replied, “We’re afraid they’ll laugh at us.” When men control women’s sexuality, they are safe from sexual evaluation.

-          With women experimenting sexually, men risked hearing what women hear every day: that there are sexual standards against which they might be compared.

-          Critical sexual comparison is a direct an-aphrodisiac when applied to men; either we do not yet recognize that it has exactly the same effect on women, or we do not care, or we understand on some level that right now that effect is desirable and appropriate.

Nicholas Carr - The Shallows

*** Nicholas Carr - The Shallows*** - When it came to the brain, the child was indeed, as Wordsworth had written, the father to the man. - As neuroscientists have discovered, the brain—and the mind to which it gives rise—is forever a work in progress. That’s true not just for each of us as individuals. It’s true for all of us as a species. - In the most extreme expression of the determinist view, human beings become little more than “the sex organs of the machine world,” as McLuhan memorably wrote in the “Gadget Lover” chapter of Understanding Media.11 Our essential role is to produce ever more sophisticated tools—to “fecundate” machines as bees fecundate plants—until technology has developed the capacity to reproduce itself on its own. At that point, we become dispensable. - Sometimes our tools do what we tell them to. Other times, we adapt ourselves to our tools’ requirements. - The house was quiet and the world was calm. The reader became the book; and summer night Was like the conscious being of the book. The house was quiet and the world was calm. The words were spoken as if there was no book. - Wallace Stevens - Our use of the Internet involves many paradoxes, but the one that promises to have the greatest long-term influence over how we think is this one: the Net seizes our attention only to scatter it. - If the slow progression of words across printed pages dampened our craving to be inundated by mental stimulation, the Net indulges it. It returns us to our native state of bottom-up distractedness, while presenting us with far more distractions than our ancestors ever had to contend with. - breaks in our attention give our unconscious mind time to grapple with a problem, bringing to bear information and cognitive processes unavailable to conscious deliberation. We usually make better decisions if we shift our attention away from a difficult mental challenge for a time. - our unconscious thought processes don’t engage with a problem until we’ve clearly and consciously defined the problem. - Experiments indicate that as we reach the limits of our working memory, it becomes harder to distinguish relevant information from irrelevant information, signal from noise. We become mindless consumers of data. - What we’re experiencing is, in a metaphorical sense, a reversal of the early trajectory of civilization: we are evolving from being cultivators of personal knowledge to being hunters and gatherers in the electronic data forest. - Web publishers and toolmakers will continue to attract traffic and make money by encouraging and feeding our hunger for small, rapidly dispensed pieces of information. - There needs to be time for efficient data collection and time for inefficient contemplation, time to operate the machine and time to sit idly in the garden. - “Everything that human beings are doing to make it easier to operate computer networks is at the same time, but for different reasons, making it easier for computer networks to operate human beings.” So wrote George Dyson in Darwin among the Machines. - The Dutch humanist Desiderius Erasmus, in his 1512 textbook De Copia, stressed the connection between memory and reading. He urged students to annotate their books, using “an appropriate little sign” to mark “occurrences of striking words, archaic or novel diction, brilliant flashes of style, adages, examples, and pithy remarks worth memorizing.” He also suggested that every student and teacher keep a notebook, organized by subject, “so that whenever he lights on anything worth noting down, he may write it in the appropriate section.” Transcribing the excerpts in longhand, and rehearsing them regularly, would help ensure that they remained fixed in the mind. The passages were to be viewed as “kinds of flowers,” which, plucked from the pages of books, could be preserved in the pages of memory. - Memory, for Seneca as for Erasmus, was as much a crucible as a container. It was more than the sum of things remembered. It was something newly made, the essence of a unique self. - - We don’t constrain our mental powers when we store new long-term memories. We strengthen them. With each expansion of our memory comes an enlargement of our intelligence. - The key to memory consolidation is attentiveness. Storing explicit memories and, equally important, forming connections between them requires strong mental concentration, amplified by repetition or by intense intellectual or emotional engagement. The sharper the attention, the sharper the memory. - The price we pay to assume technology’s power is alienation. The tools of the mind amplify and in turn numb the most intimate, the most human, of our natural capacities—those for reason, perception, memory, emotion. - A series of psychological studies over the past twenty years has revealed that after spending time in a quiet rural setting, close to nature, people exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory, and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper. The resulting state of contemplativeness strengthens their ability to control their mind. - In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.  has slopped over its human bounds, because to be human seems like a poor, sorry, miserable affair, limited by the senses, restricted by moralities and codes, defined by platitudes and isms. - Two thousand years of it has deadened us to the idiocy of it. �� 14/12/2011 17:55:29

Joseph Nye - The Future of Power

*** Joseph Nye – The Future of Power ***

-          First, we must beware of misleading metaphors of organic decline. Nations are not like humans with predictable life spans. Indeed, for all the fashionable predictions of China, Brazil or India surpassing the United States in the next decades, the greater threats may come from modern barbarians and non-state actors.

-          A second pitfall is to confuse power with the resources that states possess and to limit our focus solely to states. Conventional wisdom has always held that the state with the largest military prevails, but in an information age it may be the states (or non-states) with the best story that wins.

-          Power is the capacity to do things, and in social situations to affect others to get the outcomes we want. Power is the ability to alter others’ behaviour to produce preferred outcomes.

-          There are three different aspects of relational power – commanding change, controlling agendas, and establishing preferences.

-          Today, power in the world is distributed in a pattern that resembles a complex three dimensional chessboard. On the top chessboard, military power is largely unipolar and the United States is likely to remain supreme for some time. But in the middle chessboard, economic power has been multipolar for more than a decade with the United States, Europe, Japan and China as the major players, and with others gaining in importance. The bottom chessboard is the realm of transnational relations that cross borders outside of government control, and it includes non-state actors as diverse as bankers electronically transferring sums larger than most national budgets at one extreme and terrorists transferring weapons or hackers threatening cyber-security at the other. This chessboard also includes new transnational challenges such as climate change and pandemics. On this bottom board, power is widely diffused and it makes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity or hegemony.

-          Smart power is the combination of the hard power of coercion and payment with the soft power of persuasion and attraction.

-          The problem for all states in the twenty first century is that there are more and more things outside the control of even the most powerful states.

-          Power is conveyed through resources, whether tangible or intangible. People notice resources. Power conversion – getting from resources to behavioural outcomes – is a crucial intervening variable. Having the resources for power does not guarantee that you will always get the outcome you want. Converting resources into realized power in the sense of obtaining desired outcomes requires well-designed strategies and skilful leadership- smart power. Yet strategies are often inadequate and leaders frequently misjudge.

-          As a first step in any game, it helps to start by figuring out who is holding the high cards and how many chips that player has. Equally important, however, is that policy-makers have the contextual intelligence to understand what game they are playing.

-          Power resources are simply the tangible and intangible raw materials or vehicles that underlie power relationships, and whether a given set of resources produces preferred outcomes or not depends upon behaviour in context. The vehicle is not the power relationship. Knowing the horsepower and mileage of a vehicle does not tell us whether it will reach the preferred destination.

-          If ideas and institutions can be used to frame the agenda for action in a way that makes others’ preferences seem irrelevant or out of bounds, then it may never be necessary to push or shove them. In other words, it may be possible to shape others’ preferences by affecting their expectations of what is legitimate or feasible.

-          Powerful actors can make sure that the less powerful are never invited to the table, or if they get there, the rules of the game have already been set by those who arrived first.

-          If you can get others to want the same outcomes that you want, it will not be necessary to override their initial desires.

-          States are caught in a zero-sum game where it is rational to fend for themselves because they cannot trust others. If an actor disarms and others do not, the actor is not likely to survive in anarchic conditions. Those who are benevolent and trusting tend to disappear over time. They are weeded out by the dynamics engendered by the structure of the system. The path to security and survival for the actor is to develop its own military resources through growth and to form alliances to balance the power of others. In this world, gains relative to others are more important than absolute gains.

-          Occupation helps to unite what under other circumstances would be disparate populations

-          In general, threats are costly when they fail, not only in encouraging resistance in the target, but also in negatively influencing third parties observing the outcome.

-          Being less dependent can be a source of power. If two parties are interdependent but one is less so than the other, the less dependent party has a source of power as long as both value the interdependent relationship. Manipulating the asymmetries of interdependence is an important dimension of economic power. Perfect symmetry is quite rare, so most cases of economic interdependence also involve a potential power relationship.

-          We live in an interdependent world, in which we will probably harm ourselves if we take unilateral action aimed at harming another side.

-          States struggle to shape the structure of markets to their advantage by manipulating market access with tariffs, quotas and licenses; diversifying supply chains; pursuing equity shares in companies; and using aid to gain special concessions. P62

-          Even where natural resources are scarce within a nation’s borders, their absence is not an index of low economic power. Much depends on a country’s vulnerability, and that depends on whether substitutes are available and whether there are diverse sources of supply. P63

-          It turns out that oil is the exception, not the rule, in judgements about economic power derived from natural resources. P64

-          When a transnational corporation goes into a resource-rich country with a new investment, it can strike a bargain in which the multinational gets a large part of the joint gains. From the point of view of the poor country, having a multinational come in to develop its resources will make the country better off. At the early stages when the multinational has a monopoly on capital, technology and access to international markets, it strikes a bargain with the poor country in which the multinational gets the lion’s share. But over time, the multinational inadvertently transfers resources to the poor country and trains locals, not out of charity but out of the normal process of doing business. Eventually, the poor country wants a better division of the profits. The multinational could threaten to pull out, but now the poor country can threaten to run the operation by itself. So over time, the power of the transnational company to structure a market, particularly in raw materials, diminishes in terms of its bargaining with the host county. P65

-           Information creates power, and today a much larger part of the world’s population has access to that power. Technological advancements have led to a dramatic reduction in the costs of processing and transmitting information. The result is an explosion of information, and that has produced a paradox of plenty. Plentiful information leads to scarcity of attention. When people are overwhelmed with the volume of information confronting them, they have difficulty knowing what to focus on. Attention, rather than information, becomes the scarce resource, and those who can distinguish valuable information from the background clutter gain power. Cue-givers become more in demand, and this is a source of power for those who can tell us where to focus our attention. P103

-          Two types of power shifts are occurring in this century; power transition and power diffusion. Power transition from one dominant state to another is a familiar historical event, but power diffusion is a more novel process. The problem for all states in today’s global information age is that more things are happening outside the control of even the most powerful states. We have not so much a multi-polar world as a no-polar world. P113

-          States will remain the dominant actor on the world stage, but they will find the stage far more crowded and difficult to control. A much larger part of the population both within and among countries has access to the power that comes from information. P114

-          In principle, as costs and barriers of entry into markets diminish, the Information Revolution should reduce the power of large states and enhance the power of small sates and non-state actors. But in practise, international relations are more complex than such technological determinism implies. Some aspects of the information revolution help the small, but some help the already large and powerful. Size still matters. Economies of scale still remain in some of the aspects of power that are related to information. P117

-          No matter how power is measured, an equal distribution of power among states is relatively rare. More often the processes of uneven growth means that some states will be rising and others declining. P153

-          British columnist Martin Wolf calls India a ‘premature superpower’, meaning a country with low living standards but a huge economy. P173

-          China is another of Wolf’s premature superpowers. China’s current reputation for power benefits from projections about the future. P178

-          China does have impressive power resources, but we should be sceptical about projections based primarily on current growth rates and political rhetoric. P179

-          Moreover, linear projections of economic growth trends can be misleading. Countries tend to pick the low-hanging fruit as they benefit from imported technologies sin the early stages of economic take-off, and growth rates generally slow as economies reach higher levels of development. P181

-          The power paradox – The fact that power is given to those individuals, groups, or states that advance the interests of the greater good in a socially intelligent fashion, but what people want from leaders – social intelligence – is what is damaged by the possession of power. P207

-          Noble causes can have terrible consequences if they are accompanied by excessive optimism or wilful blindness about the probabilities of success. P209

-          Empires are easier to rule when they rest on the soft power of attraction as well as the hard power of coercion. P212

-          The world is neither uni-polar, nor multi-polar, nor chaotic – it is all three at the same time. Thus a smart grand strategy must be able to handle very different distributions of power in different domains and understand the trade-offs among them. It makes no more sense to see the world through a purely realist lens that focuses only on the top chess-board or a liberal institutional lens that looks primarily at the other boards. Contextual intelligence today requires a new synthesis of ‘liberal realism’ that looks at all three boards at the same time. After all, in a three-level game, a player who focuses on only one board is bound to lose in the long run. P213

-          Global government is unlikely in the twenty-first century, but degrees of global governance already exist. The world has hundreds of treaties, institutions, and regimes for governing areas of interstate behaviour ranging from telecommunications, civil aviation, ocean dumping, trade and even the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But such institutions are rarely self-sufficient. They still benefit from the leadership of great powers. And it remains to be seen whether the largest countries in the twenty-first century will live up to this role. P215

-          One of the dilemmas of multilateral diplomacy is how to get everyone into the act and still get action. The answer is likely to lie in what Europeans have dubbed ‘variable geometry’. There will be many multilateralisms that will vary with the distribution of power resources in different issues. P216

-           Centrality in networks can be a source of power, but the power that flows from this kind of connectivity is not the power to impose outcomes. Networks are not directed and controlled as much as they are managed and orchestrated. Multiple players are integrated into a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts – in other words, the network provides power to achieve preferred outcomes with other players rather than over them. P217

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