I WANT YOUR HELP WITH ASSUMPTIONS | 2007-01-16
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.