Some people used to accuse me of having pet students here, those that praised me. I explained why this seemed so, and something happened that simply is not supposed to happen in this world.
My critics read what I said, nodded, and stopped accusing me. That has not happened to me in any other forum. When I encounter reasonable people, after the life I have led, it seems like I’m either on Mars or on drugs.
What I explained was this:
I am USED to criticism. Most of the criticism I receive I have heard, literally, hundreds of times. It is simple logic that most of the people who learn from what I say also think I am a great guy for saying it.
On the other hand, if you will read over the years of my writing here, you will find that I declare that I was just plain wrong an awful lot.
In fact, this is a key to my learning process. If I believe something, fact or opinion, I STATE it. This takes a degree of moral courage that is rare in our day, because I get shot down a LOT. I have spent over half a century getting shot down to my great public embarrassment. But each time I admitted I was wrong, and after awhile I found out it really doesn’t hurt if I do it that way.
Only an Aryan mind grasps the full difference between theory and doctrine. Being wrong in any other “Great Civilization” got you killed. If you read Soviet history, it is routine that a professor who was adjudged wrong was soon arrested.
I explained that I had met a lot of Great Names and gotten more out of them than anyone else. With others they were very careful. No one who talked to them found out any more than they had written. But I did a little homework first. I would make the very comment that they hated most of all, almost right, but just wrong enough to sound like what they were debating in the journals that very moment.
To put it in Classical Latin, I passed them off, big time. The gloves came off. They started from the basics and lectured me on the whole subject; all pretense of subtlety went right out the window.
Which happens to be exactly what you want from someone whose expertise is precisely what you want to get at. I got a LOT of info others would have paid a fortune for. Ashbrook thought I was a genius at probing.
My Southern accent got very pronounced in those cases. Everybody thinks it means DUMB. Once Ashbrook gave one of his enormous grins while I was suing this technique, and I actually had to surreptitiously shake my head vigorously at my boss to get that damned grin off his face so the guy I was talking to wouldn’t see it.
Now let’s apply this to cases. The whole point of my being is that, when they finally lynch me, YOU will have the way of thinking I do.
I DO notice that on Stormfront when some anti-white makes a point against me, Lord Nelson and others of my students come right in and answer them.
You could say, “Oh, they’re just parroting Whitaker! All he’s got is bunch of sycophants!”
You’re not reading carefully. If you do, you will begin to note that I am using my students EXTENSIONS of this kind of thinking. More and more, my writing consists of comments on what my students said.
It’s called an intellectual EXCHANGE. It is unique to Western Civilization.
To a teacher, it is also called SUCCESS.
#1 by Dave on 12/25/2007 - 6:55 pm
It is all a matter of throwing light to help navigate a very confusing world.
Real knowledge endures. That is why we have Bill Gates chronically using terminology invented by Von Clausewitz. But you have to have studied Von Clausewitz to know that Bill Gates studied Von Clausewitz and finds him useful.
It is not that Von Clausewitz is the “be all or end all” for Bill Gates. It’s just that for people like Bill Gates who are confronted with having to deal with real things in a big way, Von Clausewitz is useful.
Likewise Robert Whitaker. People who study Robert Whitaker are going to come away with a “leg up” on the competition.
Now this is big irony because one can study Robert Whitaker for free or by paying small sums for his books that are easily available through Amazon.
This leads to an important lesson too few Americans understand: The value of things is often not tied to price.
Whitaker thinking will remain and grow in influence for the very reason that it does provide a “leg up” on the competition.
Competitive people will find their way to Whitaker just as they find their way to Von Clausewitz. The two-century gap doesn’t matter.
It is usefulness that matters.
And usefulness is the reason that, at the end of the day, the Internet will doom both secondary and higher education. Both cannot possibility compete in their present forms against the usefulness of the Internet as a low cost platform for the dissemination of the kinds of educational capital that give people competitive advantage.
And when business leaders decry “the disaster of education in America” by condemning the falling graduation rates at both the secondary and higher education levels, I say, “keep it coming”, the less diplomas the better.