Author Archives: Lila

Edward Bernays On Self Interest And Propaganda

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It’s a mistake to think propaganda is solely something “they” (the power elites) do to us (passive viewers). It’s just not so.

While propaganda can often be so subtle that the viewer cannot recognize he’s being manipulated, it isn’t true that the viewer is completely helpless to resist it.

The reason for this is that contemporary propaganda is rarely a direct command. Instead, it’s couched in language that appeals to viewers’ self-interests. So, anything that flatters our self-perception or claims to fulfill our desires should alert us to the fact that manipulation might be going on.

The father of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this process at length:

“The leaders who lend their authority to any propaganda campaign will do so only if it can be made to touch their own interests. There must be a disinterested aspect of the propagandist’s activities. In other words, it is one of the functions of the public relations counsel to discover at what points his client’s interests coincide with those of other individuals or groups.
In the case of the soap sculpture competition, the distinguished artists and educators who sponsored the idea were glad to lend their services and their names because the competitions really promoted an interest which they had at heart—the cultivation of the esthetic impulse among the younger generation.
Such coincidence and overlapping of interests is as infinite as the interlacing of group formations themselves. For example, a railway wishes to develop its business. The counsel on public relations makes a survey to discover at what points its interests coincide with those of its prospective customers. The company then establishes relations with chambers of commerce along its right of way and assists them in developing their communities. It helps them to secure new plants and industries for the town. It facilitates business through the dissemination of technical information. It is not merely a case of bestowing favors in the hope of receiving favors; these activities of the railroad, besides creating good will, actually promote growth on its right of way. The interests of the railroad and the communities through which it passes mutually interact and feed one another.
In the same way, a bank institutes an investment service for the benefit of its customers in order that the latter may have more money to deposit with the bank. Or a jewelry concern develops an insurance department to insure the jewels it sells, in order to make the purchaser feel greater security in buying jewels. Or a baking company establishes an information service suggesting recipes for bread to encourage new uses for bread in the home. The ideas of the new propaganda are predicated on sound psychology based on enlightened selfinterest.”

—    Edward Bernays in Propaganda (1928)

Bottoms Up! Not Your Usual Nature Cure…

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I’m always on the look out for folk-remedies, but I think I might have a few qualms about this new…er…pee-ple’s drink in North India:

“If you pick up a labeled “health drink” in India you might find some unusual ingredients. The Indian reverence for cows, which gives religious significance to the bovine, has produced a good-for-you beverage made from cow urine.

The cow is considered by Hindus as symbolic of life-giving deities. The fundamentalist Hindu group Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) launched Gauloka Peya, or “drink from the land of cow,” earlier this year.

Purushottam Toshniwal, a member of the cow protection unit of the RSS and the man who concocted the drink, says the group has already sold around 700 bottles to distributors.

RSS already sells soaps, shampoos, toothpastes, and skin-care creams made from cow urine and dung.

“Many were hesitant to try it in the beginning,” Mr. Toshniwal says. “However, once they tasted it, they liked it. You cannot taste the cow urine as it is mixed with other ingredients.” He also believes the drink will cure diseases.

The cow urine is distilled before it is mixed with traditional Indian herbs and medicinal plants such as Brahmi and basil and water in a 1-to-7 ratio. Gauloka Peya comes in four flavors – orange, khus(a fragrant Asian grass), rose, and lemon. A bottle costs about $3.

“It is like any regular sweet drink, without the harmful side effects,” Toshniwal says.”

Can’t be any worse than snails, crete d’ coque (cockscomb), bishop’s nose (chicken’s behind), prairie oysters (bulls’ testicles), Norman cheeses aged under cow-dung, chocolate-covered grasshoppers, slugs, and all the other less-than-savory savories that garnish the global plate.

The Indian cow is a one-critter industrial plant – providing its milk for drink, its hide for leather, its horn for vessels, its dung for fuel and medicinal products, and now its urine for medicinal drinks, shampoos, and soaps. (Still, I’m happy the ratio is 1 in 7 parts, not the other way round).

More here on the curious practice of curing your body with the fluids from your body:

“Through the ages there have been literally thousands of champions of this curious practice: In the early 1800s, a book titled One Thousand Notable Things describes the use of urine to cure scurvy, relieve skin itching, cleanse wounds, and many other treatments. An 18th century French dentist praised urine as a valuable mouthwash. In England during the 1860-70s, the drinking of one’s own urine was a common cure for jaundice. In more modern times, the Alaskan Eskimos have used urine as an antiseptic to treat wounds……..

…While many people are aware that Gandhi drank his urine, few know that leather-clad rocker Jim Morrison (who, like Gandhi, had an unwatchable movie made of his life) began the practice of drinking his urine while on an LSD-induced spiritual quest in the Mojave Desert. And like Gandhi, Morrison is now dead. As is John Lennon, another reputed fan of urine therapy. In fact, an entire legion of herion-addicted, long-haired rock and rollers are said to have tried Urine Therapy in the early 1970s following Keith Richards (unsuccessful) experimentations with the cure. One of the more famous modern day cases involves movie star Steve McQueen, who, it is said, in the last stages of cancer, survived solely on a diet of urine and boiled alligator skin prescribed by his Mexican doctors.”

And big pharma is not about to be left out of things:

“This summer, Enzymes of America plans to market its first major urine product called urokinase, an enzyme that dissolves blood clots and is used to treat victims of heart attacks. The company has contracts to supply the urine enzyme to Sandoz, Merrell Dow and other major pharmaceutical companies. Ironically, this enterprise evolved from Porta-John’s attempt to get rid of urine proteins-a major source of odour in portable toilets.”

Cyber Wars: Robot Traders Spoof High Frequency Trades

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Alexis Madrigal writes at The Atlantic about robot traders that spoof market orders and introduce potentially dangerous “noise” into high-frequency trading that could end up in a flash crash. The spoof trades can be used to coordinate what is effectively a denial service attack on certain nodes in the financial network. Essentially this is the same as what happens in the other DNS attacks in infrastructure critical to national security. It amounts to clogging the system with data so that it slows down and eventually seizes up.

“High-frequency traders have become a target for all kinds of people, but most of them appear to make their money being a little faster and little smarter than their competitors. And if they are playing by the rules, they improve the quality of markets by minuscule amounts trade after trade after trade.

But the algorithms we see at work here are different. They don’t serve any function in the market. University of Pennsylvania finance professor, Michael Kearns, a specialist in algorithmic trading, called the patterns “curious,” and noted that it wasn’t immediately apparent what such order placement strategies might do.

Donovan thinks that the odd algorithms are just a way of introducing noise into the works. Other firms have to deal with that noise, but the originating entity can easily filter it out because they know what they did. Perhaps that gives them an advantage of some milliseconds. In the highly competitive and fast HFT world, where even one’s physical proximity to a stock exchange matters, market players could be looking for any advantage.

“They are moving the high-frequency services as close to the exchanges as possible because even the speed of light matters,” in such a competitive market, said Stanford finance professor Peter Hansen.

Given Nanex’s data, let’s say that these algorithms are being run each and every day, just about every minute. Are they really a big deal? Donovan said that quote stuffing or market spoofing played a role in the Flash Crash, but that event appears to have had so many causes and failures that it’s nearly impossible to apportion blame. (It is worth noting that European markets are largely protected from a similar event by volatility interruption auctions.)

But already since the May event, Nanex’s monitoring turned up another potentially disastrous situation. On July 16 in a quiet hour before the market opened, suddenly they saw a huge spike in bandwidth. When they looked at the data, they found that 84,000 quotes for each of 300 stocks had been made in under 20 seconds.

“This all happened pre-market when volume is low, but if this kind of burst had come in at a time when we were getting hit hardest, I guarantee it would have caused delays in the [central quotation system],” Donovan said. That, in turn, could have become one of those dominoes that always seem to present themselves whenever there is a catastrophic failure of a complex system.

There are ways to prevent quote stuffing, of course, and at least one of the members of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission’s Technology Advisory Committee thinks it should be outlawed.

“Algorithms that might be spoofing the market are something that should be made illegal,” said John Bates, a former Cambridge professor and the CTO of Progress Software. But he didn’t want this presumably negative practice to color the more mundane competitive practices of high-frequency traders.”

Obama: Dining On Whatever The Pentagon Feeds Him

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Andrew Bacevich reports that in his latest opus, Bob Woodward, the McDonald’s of court-historians, is better at recording the trivia of Washington in-fighting that make it to the Sunday headlines than understanding the constitutional significance of a shift in decision-making at the highest level:

“Obama’s Wars also affirms what we already suspected about the decision-making process that led up to the president’s announcement at West Point in December 2009 to prolong and escalate the war.  Bluntly put, the Pentagon gamed the process to exclude any possibility of Obama rendering a decision not to its liking.

Pick your surge: 20,000 troops? Or 30,000 troops?  Or 40,000 troops?  Only the most powerful man in the world — or Goldilocks contemplating three bowls of porridge — could handle a decision like that.  Even as Obama opted for the middle course, the real decision had already been made elsewhere by others: the war in Afghanistan would expand and continue.

And then there’s this from the estimable General David Petraeus: ”I don’t think you win this war,” Woodward quotes the field commander as saying. “I think you keep fighting… This is the kind of fight we’re in for the rest of our lives and probably our kids’ lives.”

Here we confront a series of questions to which Woodward (not to mention the rest of Washington) remains steadfastly oblivious.  Why fight a war that even the general in charge says can’t be won?  What will the perpetuation of this conflict cost?  Who will it benefit?  Does the ostensibly most powerful nation in the world have no choice but to wage permanent war?  Are there no alternatives?  Can Obama shut down an unwinnable war now about to enter its tenth year?  Or is he — along with the rest of us — a prisoner of war?”

A Columnist Asks What’s Wrong With India

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Chetan Bhagat at The Times of India:

“Countless articles, books, thesis, papers and research reports have tried to answer the question, ‘what is wrong with India ?’ Global experts are startled that a country of massive potential has one of the largest populations of poor people in the world. Isn’t it baffling that despite almost everyone agreeing that things should change, they don’t? Intellectuals give intelligent suggestions – from investing in infrastructure to improving the judicial system. Yet, nothing moves. Issues dating back thirty years ago, continue to plague India today. The young are often perplexed. They ask will things ever change? How? Whose fault is it that they haven’t?

Today, i will attempt to answer these tricky questions, although from a different perspective . I will not put the blame on everyone’s favorite punching bag– inept politicians. That is too easy an argument and not entirely correct. After all, we elect the politicians. So, for every MP out there, there are a few lakh people who wanted him or her there. I won’t give ‘policy’ solutions either – make power plants, improve the roads, open up the economy . It isn’t the lack of such ideas that is stalling progress. No, blocking progress is part of the unique psyche of Indians. There are three traits of our psyche, in particular, that are not good for us and our country. Each comes from three distinct sources – our school, our environment and our home.

The first trait is servility. At school, our education system hammers out our individual voices and kills our natural creativity, turning us into servile, coursematerial slaves. Indian kids are not encouraged to raise their voices in class, particularly when they disagree with the teacher. And of course, no subject teaches us imagination, creativity or innovation. Course materials are designed for no-debate kind of teaching. For example, we ask: how many states are there in India ? 28. Correct. Next question -how is a country divided into states? What criteria should be used? Since these are never discussed , children never develop their own viewpoint or the faculty to think.

The second trait is our numbness to injustice. It comes from our environment. We see corruption from our childhood. Almost all of us have been asked to lie about our age to the train TC, claiming to be less than 5 years old to get a free ride. It creates a value system in the child’s brain that ‘anything goes’, so long as you can get away with it. A bit of lying here, a bit of cheating there is seen as acceptable. Hence, we all grow up slightly numb to corruption. Not even one high profile person in India is behind bars for corruption right now. This could be because, to a certain extent, we don’t really care.

The third trait is divisiveness. This often comes from our home, particularly our family and relatives, where we learn about the differences amongst people. Our religion, culture and language are revered and celebrated in our families. Other people are different – and often implied to be not as good as us. We’ve all known an aunt or uncle who, though is a good person, holds rigid bias against Muslims, Dalits or people from different communities. Even today, most of India votes on one criterion – caste. Dalits vote for Dalits, Thakurs for Thakurs and Yadavs for Yadavs. In such a scenario, why would a politician do any real work? When we choose a mobile network, do we check if Airtel and Vodafone belong to a particular caste? No, we simply choose the provider based on the best value or service. Then, why do we vote for somebody simply because he has the same caste as ours?

We need mass self-psychotherapy for the three traits listed above. When we talk of change, you and I alone can’t replace a politician, or order a road to be built. However, we can change one thing – our mindset. And collectively, this alone has the power to make the biggest difference. We have to unlearn whatever is holding us back, and definitely break the cycle so we don’t pass on these traits to the next generation. Our children should think creatively, have opinions and speak up in class. They should learn what is wrong is wrong – no matter how big or small. And they shouldn’t hate other people on the basis of their background. Let us also resolve to start working on our own minds, right now. A change in mindset changes the way people vote, which in turn changes politicians.

And change does happen. In the 80s, we had movies like “Gunda” and “Khoon Pi Jaaonga”. Today, our movies have better content .They have changed. How? It is because our expectations from films have changed. Hence, the filmmakers had to change.

If we resolve today that we will vote on the basis of performance alone, we will encourage the voices against injustice and we will place an honest but less wealthy person on a higher pedestal than a corrupt but rich person. By doing so, we would contribute to India’s progress. If everyone who read this newspaper did this, it would be enough to change voting patterns in the next election. And then, maybe, we will start moving towards a better India. Are you on board? “

My Comment

This is an interesting and, within its limits, accurate piece about the character traits that contribute to the rampant socio-economic problems India faces. Those problems are in sharp focus right now, thanks to the ongoing bungling involved in the hosting of the Commonwealth Games at Delhi.

To many libertarians, these sorts of  generalizations are specious, collectivist, and possibly racist.

I disagree.

Granted, cultural generalizations are just that and shouldn’t be misapplied, it’s still possible for an acute observer to identify cultural problems with a degree of objectivity.

Chetan Bhagat manages this quite succinctly.

But if Bhagat had wanted to be even more succinct, he could have summarized his entire thesis in one word: dharma.

Dharma is often incorrectly defined as “duty,” in the Kantian sense.

While it can encompass that too, it’s more accurate to define it as “the way things should be” (social order)…or “the way we’re wired” (nature).

Dharma is perhaps a unique composite of duty, social and natural order, and individual destiny.

In its essence, then, it is a concept of the highest refinement and wisdom.

But even supernal ideas lose their value as civilizations lose touch with their sources.

Dharma, for many Indians, has ended up being “the way things are,” or, alternatively,  “que sera sera.”

It ends up inducing passivity. Which leads to the first two flaws identified in the article –  servility and apathy toward injustice.

That passivity also reinforces people in their instinctive tendency to prefer kith and kin over strangers.

If I had to pick just one character flaw that holds up India’s development, this would be it – dharma,, in its negative mode,  as slavish passivity.

However, the odd thing is that if I had to pick one thing that constituted a special strength in the Indian character, it would also be dharma.

But dharma in its positive mode – noble acceptance.

Albert Pike On The Hierarchies Of Truth

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“Truth is not for those who are unworthy or unable to receive it, or would pervert it. So God Himself incapacitates many men, by color-blindness, to distinguish colors, and leads the masses away from the highest Truth, giving them the power to attain only so much of it as it is profitable to them to know. Every age has had a religion suited to its capacity.”

— Albert Pike

“Flash Crashes” Suggest Market Trouble?

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Update (Sept 29, 5:54 PM):

Just a thought. Could a DHS cyber security exercise scheduled for this week have had anything to do with these two market “accidents”?

According to this report, the following sectors (among others) were to have been targeted for several days this week:

“This year’s exercise will be the largest yet, including representatives from seven cabinet-level federal departments, intelligence agencies, 11 states, 12 international partners and 60 private sector companies in multiple critical infrastructure sectors like banking, defense, energy and transportation.”

The markets aren’t specifically mentioned, but then you’d expect that if they were the chosen target…

ORIGINAL POST

Peter Cooper at Arabian Money argues that an apparent Google “flash crash” last Friday signals a market correction in the offing:

“It also seems pretty clear that Wall Street insiders flicked the sell switch at the weekend. That would account for the ‘accidental’ Google flash crash last Friday (click here). You bet against this crowd at your peril.

On this reckoning the gold pit action is just a last burst of optimism from latecomers to the party. For the gold price will surely dip (if not to much more than $1,150) in a big sell-off in financial markets, and silver will also fall back below $20.”

Meanwhile, Rick Ackerman points to a mini flash crash that apparently took place on Tuesday night in the gold futures market…..and explains why Bob Prechter has been wrong for the last 18 months – he’s an expert in real markets, not completely rigged ones…

I’ll admit that I’m glad to see this because of my own market bias, which has left me a bit lonely waiting for some kind of correction in the gold price.

Years of making my very own patentable blunders have made me much more comfortable being wrong on my own rather than being right in a crowd…..

But there does seem to be some technical evidence that a correction might be due.

Civil Unrest In Guadalupe, February 2009

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Researching trouble spots that could predict how civil unrest might  unfold in the future, I came across this report from February 2009 ,about insurrection in the French Caribbean. It is described, literally, in black and white terms, as a class war that breaks out along racial lines. The source being The Daily Mail, this might be sensationalistic. But there’s no denying it’s plausible:

“Britons are among thousands of tourists fleeing Guadeloupe after full scale urban warfare erupted on the French Caribbean island.

Trouble broke out on the island earlier last month after protesters began rioting over high prices and low wages.

But the situation escalated this week after protesters began turning on rich white families as they demanded an end to colonial control of the economy.

The troubles come at the height of the holiday season, with thousands of mainly British, French and American tourists on the paradise tropical island.”

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1150062/Britons-flee-French-island-Guadeloupe-rioters-turn-white-families.html#ixzz10g0gHgMy

South Asia Increasingly Under Biometric Surveillance

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Wired.com has a piece on the collection of biometric data on hundreds of thousands of people in Afghanistan.

According to NATO Training Mission-Afghanistan commander Lt. Gen. William Caldwell (as reported to Wired’s Danger Room) the idea is to screen applicants for Army positions to keep out people with ties to the Taliban or criminal histories. But with biometric files are being compiled on Afghans at the rate of 20-25 per week, the process is likely to include a large number of ordinary citizens, especially as there’s now a  plan in the works that aims to have biometric ID’s for some 1.65 million Afghans by May 2011 through the “population registration division” of the Afghan Ministry of the Interior. Apparently, Caldwell is taking a leaf out of the book of General Petraeus, who used biometric monitoring to keep on top of the Iraqi resistance. It’s also modeled on monitoring during the siege of Fallujah, when the only way to get in and out of the place was with an ID card that needed an iris scan.

Right now, there are apparently two biometric projects in the country, one run by the Afghans accounting for about a quarter of a million files and the other by the Americans, which has nearly half a million, but  so far, there’s not been much integration between the two. The Afghan involvement is a change from the past, when Hamid Karzai, the Afghan president, has shut down  biometric monitoring at checkpoints by NATO as a violation of Afghan sovereignty.

Meanwhile,  neighboring India has already launched the first biometrically verified universal ID on a national scale. While not compulsory, it will be needed to access certain social and financial services, and is intended for the entire population of 1.2 billion. Biometric IDs were first used in India in 2002 to check corruption involved in accessing services and rations meant for the poor.

Earlier this year (July 2010), Afghanistan and Pakistan concluded a trade agreement that included the exchange of biometric data as part of the deal.

13 Strategies Of Mass Psychic Control

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Bill Ross at NaziSociopaths.org:

“I do not share the stated opinion (lie) of the Powers That Be (PTB´s), that mankind is inherently irrational and incapable of rational behavior. The past accomplishments of mankind, in the areas of law, international agreements and limits on organized power (which are currently being destroyed) argue otherwise. There are simple, provable causes of why people do not make rational choices and stand up for what is right, or even their own personal survival:

1. People are overly taxed, directly and indirectly by the time and energy it takes to survive and deal with pervasive government and law to achieve anything, resulting in little time or energy to consider the larger picture of their own lives or where trends are leading.

2. People have been wrongly convinced that their personal opinion is irrelevant and critical issues pertaining to survival and their own lives are therefore best left to self-proclaimed “experts”, who claim, but are unable to prove that they know best as evidenced by the results of their enforced opinions being social/economic failure and war.

3. People have been wrongly convinced that they have no control in their own lives, let alone the direction of their societies.

4. People have been wrongly convinced (manipulated and mis-educated) that “something from nothing” and therefore “causeless effects” are possible and that “shit happens” or “Gods will – predestination” is a valid explanation for what is not understood. It is believed that some things in the real world have no factual, rational explanation and it is pointless to try to understand. This was the whole point of the Renaissance (birth of western civilization), the rejection of mysticism and those who used it as a pretext for slavery. The Renaissance was social and legal acceptance of the fact that proven fact, knowledge and thus objective reality are supreme and will prevail, independent of contrary opinions. The truth is that everything that happens in the real world, including human actions, can be rationally explained in terms of causes and provable relationships to observed effects.

5. People have been mis-educated to believe that large events such as war are a indivisible thing rather than the large sum of many small, easily addressed causes. As a consequence, solving such problems is assumed to require blunt force as opposed to intelligently addressing the causes.

6. To accept and live according to fact and reason is a difficult path, resulting in conflict with those who believe you are judging them, when, in reality, you are defending yourself from others imposing their opinions on you or trying to bully, use and manipulate you.

7. Because we cannot read each others minds and life appears so complex, confusing and overwhelming, people are not sure what is right or wrong. Taking a position on issues leads to disagreement which has the potential of conflict requiring time and energy to deal with, detracting from life. To be left alone in peace (basic human need) is believed to require following the herd and conformance, since the alternative is taking a position and engaging in conflict with all who claim to disagree, including those who claim the right to exercise force in support of their position and do not acknowledge fact, reason or law.

8. If you choose to live according to fact and reason, you will inevitably be proven wrong on some points. You must possess enough humility to admit this and the ability to adapt your entire reality and belief system to accommodate the newly proven facts. In other words, you must be adaptable enough to handle life´s changes and not seek boring comfort and security, since it is an illusionary trap, leading to stagnation.

9. People are trapped in the perceptual paradigm of their functionand social class (environment) and are unable to see or acknowledge the possibility of other realities or the validity of other opinions from other environments.

10. People have been subverted into believing that the problems of the human condition are intractable and are caused by inherent flaws in humanity, requiring coercive force to be exerted by those who claim moral superiority or control the apparatus of state.

11. People have been mis-educated to believe that mankind and civilization is not a part of the natural order of things and therefore, we are special, not subject to the immutable laws of action and consequence, as enforced by the laws of nature. Neglecting the role of those who have subverted education, this requires people to be stupid enough to not question their education and the opinion of the “experts”. It also requires people to be stupid enough to continue trusting these expert opinions, despite overwhelming contrary evidence. We therefore believe we are immune to facing the consequences of our actions or that government or the law will protect us. They cannot and thus will not, for the simple reason that they are also subject to the laws of nature. Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans has shown the folly of this. Government was actually an impediment to those who tried to help.

12. As a consequence of the arbitrary exercise of force, unchecked by objective law or democratic will by states and other organized powers, the best personal survival strategy is assumed to be to keep a low profile and hope you are not noticed or targeted. This strategy may be able to delay when you are targeted, but will not change the fact you are on the target list. The more you have to take or the more you interfere with power´s whims and methodology, the higher you are on the list. Those who insist that the equality provisions of the “rule of law” be honored and manage to have an effect on social awareness, such as Martin Luther King Jr. are at the top of the list

13. Knowledge regarding mankind appears to have been destroyed (not really, just made to appear ineffective) by those who exercise power enforcing different relationships between action and consequence than natural forces and un-coerced people would choose. This results in people being unwilling to choose, since to act according to the knowledge of objective reality is invariably in conflict with what those in power demand (your servitude). If people make a firm choice, on the one hand the laws of nature will dictate consequences and on the other organized force will dictate different consequences. The obvious rational choice under these contradictory conditions is to not or appear not to make any choice, or to make choices which are consistent with both the laws of nature and the will of our self proclaimed masters. The laws of nature say you should make pro-survival choices, the will of our masters says you should make choices consistent with their short term survival agenda under penalty of non-survival should you fail to comply. The result is that people are in contradictory environments, constantly trying to balance between the contradictory demands of power and personal survival.

It is psychological warfare against the people, placing them in artificially created environments where correct choices are dangerous to immediate survival at the hands of arbitrary power. In other words, people are terrified of the fact that acknowledging and acting according to fact and reason puts them on a direct collision course with very dangerous powers who do not acknowledge any fact, knowledge or reason, only the circular logic of their claimed right to keep people in servitude and to possess and use the wealth and power of nature and civilization for purposes of their own.”