Ron Stanfield wrote: 
 
>That actors will create disturbances in order to profit from interstitial 
>maladjustment is a central theme of Veblen's THEORY OF BUSINESS 
>ENTERPRISE and of his sabotage argument generally. 
 
Also Alasdair MacIntyre, "After Virtue", has this as one of his sources of 
systematic unpredictability, e.g., "... it is a major interest of each 
actor to maximize the imperfection of the information of certain other 
actors at the same time as he improves his own." (p.97) 
 
MacIntyre then adds a new twist: "Moreover a condition of success at 
misinforming other actors is likely to be the successful production of 
false impressions in external observers too. This leads to an interesting 
inversion of Collingwood's odd thesis that we can only hope to understand 
the actions of the victorious and the successful, while those of the 
defeated must remain opaque to us. But if I am right the conditions of 
success include the ability to deceive successfully and hence it is the 
defeated whom we are more likely to be able to understand and it is those 
who are going to be defeated whose behavior we are more likely to be able 
to predict." (pp.96-97) 
 
C.N.Gomersall 
Luther College 
 
[log in to unmask] 
 
 
============ FOOTER TO HES POSTING ============ 
For information, send the message "info HES" to [log in to unmask]