As your price of tuition for this seminar, you OWE me something on the honor system. That is to hit people wit the Mantra and to spread what I am saying. This is the HONOR system, an old-fashioned idea, but I hold you to it morally.
It is worth doing in itself, probably the most important thing any of us will ever do, but remember the MORAL dimension here.
Another thing you can give me is comments. Less than one percent of my readers comment, but if you have worked in direct mail and other areas as I have, you’ll find that’s a heavy proportion. Almost every magazine we read, we think of something we could comment on, but far less than one in a thousand, usually less than one in ten thousand, of the people who BUY a magazine send in any comments by phone or letter or even e-mail.
The general areas your comments fall into are mainly can agreement or disagreement, what I made you think of, new like Simmons just gave us, extensions on my thought of the sort Peter and Dave do. There is another area I want some help with. I thought of it when Alan Parker caused me to think about the assumption I always had that non-whites have white “selves.”
Yes, Virginia, even I did realize how stuck I was on that aspect of “We are the same under the skin” thinking!
One of the things I do that is most useful to you is to pull out the ASSUMPTIONS no one even thinks about and laying them naked before you. The worship of the World War II Generation has been something NOBODY but me dared to take on. But you will regularly see me thinking over things like Edison’s “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration” and showing how incredibly moronic they are.
It is out ASSUMPTIONS that underlie all the disasters of the twentieth century. It is the assumptions we aren’t even aware of that we must cut out like the cancers they are.
I may have hit them all, but I doubt it. In this case I am asking you to outsmart me, to pull out assumptions I haven’t already dealt with. Remember we are trying to find concepts that are so basic to our thinking that we don’t even KNOW THEY ARE ASSUMPTIONS.
#1 by Simmons on 01/16/2007 - 2:03 pm
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That hydrocarbon energy is limitless or if it reaches its limits that technology will replace good old fashioned crude and gas. This thought then chains in with other assumptions of economic growth and other nostrums of progress. You chided me on Peak Oil commentary saying it was both wrong and off topic with your “basics” approach, but what I tried to add was that cheap energy is the crux of the modern welfare empire we have.
#2 by Dave on 01/16/2007 - 3:36 pm
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Like the Mantra, this notion that nonwhites have a fundamentally different self (soul, feeling, and basic perspective) is one hell of a dangerous idea. In reality, it is just a different way of talking about race, but an extraordinarily effective one.
I measure the worth of what I read if I remember it in an enduring fashion. This is an idea I will not forget. That means it is a very powerful idea.
Ideas like this get out, watch out, because the world is likely to get transformed overnight.
The generation of ideas that stick (that are truly powerful) is the main value of this seminar. For example, I just can’t get “Mark’s Brilliant Line” out of my head. (“Those who own the present own the Future. Those who own the present NEVER have any serious relationship to what is really going to happen.”)
It is such a powerful perspective because it alludes to how people regularly assume their beliefs are determinative of outcomes, while in fact they never are.
The real chain of causality is rarely apprehended, which is why commitment to the never-ending examination of subsurface assumptions and basics is so critical.
#3 by Alan on 01/16/2007 - 3:43 pm
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Bush said after 911 that, the terrorist attacked us because they hate us for our freedom. We conqured Iraq, Bush assumed the Iraqi people would greet us with wild enthusasm, Iraq was free. Today almost every female wears a vail and secular violence is every where, the Iraqi people voted in a conservative islamic majority, “Do they hate us for their freedom?”
#4 by Peter on 01/16/2007 - 8:47 pm
Assumptions, okay, I got one for ya. You’ve stated often and I’ll paraphrase that the social scientists are ignoring genetics to promote oppression and government coercion
But isn’t it likely that once social scientists accept genetic evidence the establishment will then turn around and use that argument for more government programs. After all, EQUALITY is the thing. And unless a new Religious paradigm replaces equality, EQUALITY will remain.
#5 by Simmons on 01/17/2007 - 2:14 pm
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That all Democrats believe in Darwin’s Theory of Evolution. I seen in some Wisconsin paper some stone age Hmong gathered in some public building protesting the death of one their tribe, and it brought me to ask, “What do these people believe?” We allow white libs to dictate to us the equality of man and we allow such nonsensical assumptions to undergird liberalism. I mean can any of us imagine the Black Caucus advocating in strenous terms that man descended from apes. Can we imagine the Hmong of all people understanding scientific principle?
#6 by Alan on 01/20/2007 - 7:59 am
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Did the white race in ancient times assume they could handle just a few non whites with in their society. A few slaves to mine or plant crops. Then over time some whites wanted domestic servants and slaves to helpd defend thier terrority as our white ancestors became accustomed to being soft. Did they allow these non whites to virtually take over their society from with in. Did they assume that they could maintain their culture and society each time they allowed one more acception to the rule.