THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Joe says he is still stuck thinking about what I said about the important things are not noticed.

I wish other people reading the blog would, well, NOTICE things that I say like that that are really basic.

What does the average person want?

He wants to be financially secure. He wants people to think he's good and that he's smart.

He also wants to do the right thing.

Do you see a pattern here?

How do know you are doing the right thing?

You quote somebody. It could be your priest or a national columnist, but it's a real SOMEBODY.

And that, boys and girls, is ALL people want.

No one notices what is right because it doesn't MATTER what is right. It matters what SOMEBODY, a REAL SOMEBODY, TELLS you is right.

You pay a stock market analyst to tell you what stocks to buy because he is SOMEBODY.

I just said that the people who actually determine mankind's long-term fate are so few that all of us and our cats could get into a matchbox with the matches still there. But there are THOUSANDS of staffers on Capitol Hill, even on the minority side.

Their whole lives are devoted to what they call "policy."

Bill Clinton found that the way to be president was to "triangulate" between liberal Democrats and conservative Republicans. In my terms, this gave him no power, but it made him president.

Twice.

Why did he have no power, in MY terms? Because he was triangulting between position people like me had put in place.

The left is dying because it no longer has anybody like me or Pat or Kevin. Everybody in their huge establishment is trying to fit in, not too liberal, not too conservative, what are the latest opinion polls?

Or they are trying to fit in the with the "real liberals." Those died out moons ago.

They are chasing their tails. Everybody thinks somebody else has "a position," and they are trying to fit in with it.

They don't.

It is fun, if you are one of the few like me, to listen in at parties. Everybody is trying to nail down what "the position" is.

Everybody knows that when a stock market expert or an ex-President, ex-Secretary of State, ex-everything, is lyingon his death bed he knows thaqt hislife was a zero sum game. If he hadn't done it, somebody else would have.

You can write a book that is important OR you can write a book that gets published. Every book I wrote was ground-breaking and a commercial failure. But it got published.

And I never wrote a book or an article that evenvaguely resembled anything anybody else would have published.

Which is what I am doing right now.

But within a year or two of each of my books, other people were writing the same thing. They watered it down and didn't follow it to its logical conclusion the way I did, but the cat was out of the bag.

I made the cat. I let it out.

That is POWER.

And nobody noticed.

Which was my secret. And it will stay my secret because no one will ever NOTICE.

Why does nobody notice?

Duid you know that many, many Indians saw the gold in California before the Gold Rush. A thousand years before. They noticed it beause it was where they were looking for food.

Why SHOULD the average person, REAL people, NOTICE what I see? What would they get out of it? All knowing what I know would get them would be the realization that THEY are helpless. They don't WANT to see it.

They want to make a good living and be told by a SOMEBODY that they are doing good. There is nothing odd about this. It is all they have, all they want, all they can do anything about.

Most of the people who know what I know are making paper dolls in nuthouses.

It reminds me of a sitcom when the parents finally realized that their son was a person without a conscience, a psychopath. They told him about conscience and his reply was,

"You mean me to feel bad when other people feel bad? WHY SHOULD I WANT TO DO THAT?"

Great question.

Unanswerable question.

Nobody becomes a junkie and an alcoholic because he has a really swell life. I notice because I can do something about it. Somehow I can inject my ideas into the stream which leads on to general acceptance.

I am also a genius and a lonely drunk.

Why should anybody want to do that?