B. U. G. S.

(Reprinted to Blog from email list of 6/4/05)

*** Bob’s Insider’s Message ***

Con men make their livings on the fact that you can make plenty of money by selling something that doesn’t WORK. Great inventors die broke all the time.

All of the history of science may be deduced from one fact:

A product can either be saleable or it can WORK.

Millions of people died because the old Humor Theory of Galen was so saleable. First of all, it was written in ancient Rome in Latin, so universities stood by it to the death. Only the intellectuals could understand it.

As early as the 1500’s the germ theory of disease was in circulation. But, as I explain in my book, it was rejected because it struck at the very basis of the Galen theory of the intellectuals. Galen wrote, in Latin, that human health was a balance of “humors”. To cure disease, you bled people so that these non-existent “humors” were balanced.

It didn’t work, but it was written in ancient Rome, in Latin.

I have exactly the same problem. I teach a history where the good guys don’t always win.

If someone tries to bring some reality into history, he gets questions like, “But doesn’t that mean that men are not equal?” Or “But doesn’t that mean the conversion to Christianity was a step backwards instead of a step forward?”

My version is Christianity depends entirely on its being TRUE, not on its being a social step forward. But the average church-goer demands that the church be more than just the saving of an individual soul. It must be everything else, too.

What good is God if He just saves souls. He had to invent the world in six days, too or He’s no fun.

In my version of history, facts are simply true.

But history has to be saleable, history has to be fun, and history has to come out right. The people who do all the good things have to be kind, pretty, and well-intentioned. That is history you can sell.

But it isn’t true.

You can sell a giant conspiracy theory. A giant conspiracy theory, on the left where it is the rich people getting together to exploit everyone else, or on the right where Communists sit at a table and plan everything, is exciting.

A giant conspiracy theory has another great advantage. If you believe in it, it takes all the responsibility off of you. It’s THEIR fault, not yours, and there is nothing you can do about it.

You can have a theory where democracy, free enterprise and goodness will make a new world.

My stuff brings you down from all that with a disappointing thump. It just sees people as people, and it concentrates on what WORKS for human beings as they are.

But I attack problems one at a time. I do not offer a giant ultimate solution.

Right now I am attacking the academic bureaucracy. It would solve a lot of very serious problems if people joined me. But they want to join something that takes on all the problems at once, something that sounds exciting.

University professors are not geniuses in on a giant conspiracy. They are hothouse bureaucrats gone wild just like every other group of hothouse bureaucrats gone wild. Meanwhile, the guys who get the attention are those like Bill O’Reilly, who sit around and wonder how those great minds have gone wrong.

The truth is a very hard sell.