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]