JOE TALKS ABOUT POWER | 2006-01-22
Joe is making me jump again. He writes,
You said, in a talk you gave called "wordism," that wordism is the belief that the truth is in a book or in an opinion. I had never heard of the word "wordism." I wanted to know what it meant. You told me what it meant. In the same talk you agreed with the idea that "opinion rules the world." It's a certainty that my opinion doesn't rule the world. But I'm certainly willing to accept what you say on the matter. Nevertheless, opinion is not necessarily the truth. As Bob would say, "everybody knows that." So opinion, for a certainty, is not directly related to truth. "It is the opinion of the court....." Oh, is it? What does that have to do with the truth or truth as an objective fact? Nothing.
How much of opinion is ruling our world? Who wants my opinion and for what? They'll get it whether they want it or not but who cares? Who cares what Joe thinks? For that matter, who cares what Bob thinks? Is the world still moving in the same direction or has Bob or Joe or anyone else changed its direction? This seems to bring up the question of power. How much POWER does Bob have? How much POWER does Joe have? Together they probably do not have the power of a fart in a windstorm. These are philosophical questions posed by Joe the Philosopher. If opinion rules the world, the question for the moment is "whose opinion is ruling the world?" It's not Joe's. I'm even willing to go so far as to suggest that it's not Bob's.
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Comment by joe rorke
Of course you haven't heard of "wordism" before me. I invented the term and the concept.
You are wrong when you say I describe wordism as coming from a book of "opinion." Every Wordist book claims not only facts, but THE fact.
As I said below, it was a predictable period of time, a timing I have spent decades noticing, between when I started talking about "Wordism" and National Review started talking about "the propositional state."
There was the predictble period of time between when I started denouncing respectable cosnervatives and the word "respectable" started cropping up regularly, as a term of abuse, in national conservative columns and on cable discussions.
It was a predictable lapse of time between when I set up the Populist Forum and then left Washington, and the time that a group of self-styled populists appeared on cable television with the name of .... Guess what? The Populist Forum.
In that case, I DID threaten to sue and got them off the air. I object to people misusing terms like "populist" and "Wordism."
One of the few really losing fights libealism has fought was to try to get "Political Correctness" reinterpreted. When they came up with the term they discovered that it stated whwat people objected to about them. So they tried to say "political correctness" described waht conservatives insisted on, too.
It didn't work. And I helped it not work.
I have had a lot to do with power, and I know that a president has very little of it. He works within the parameters those who exercise real power have set down. Everrybody says they know that. If they REALYY knew that, they would also know that the people THEY think have power also have very little of it.
No, money is NOT power. "It's all money!" is great thing to say to sound macho and Realistic, but in the real world of power it is nonsense.
I do not know of anyone living who has exercised real power, as I see it, than I have. If I were to name my equivalent in this area, it would be Franz Boas, whom few people have ever heard of.
Power is not hte title of president. Power is not financing a political campaign. Power is not even sponsoring an IDEOLOGICAL campaign.
It is easy to forget that the ideological campaign came from an IDEOLOGY. That ideology was not formulated by a secret group of big business. It was formulated by a person.
Power is changing the world. It is the person who formulates these ideas who has power.
As I have exercised power, those around me have always said, "Some Unknown Powers rule the world and guide it."
They have guaranteed that they will have no power.