LIBANON | 2006-12-09
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"Now comes the critical word: PERIOD."
I think the critical word is HOW, not PERIOD. Otherwise, you and I agree on all points.
Institutions are merely tools, the means to an end. Of course! But tools don't build themselves, nor is it beneath our dignity to build them.
It's fine for you to say "My aim is to destroy all traitors within our race and to preserve our race," just as NASA once said "Our aim is to put men on the moon before 1970." But if NASA had simply followed that up with slogans like "PERIOD!" and "Screw rocketmaking tips!", they wouldn't have made it there.
Comment by LibAnon
ME:
"Our aim is to put men on the moon before 1970."
That is the PERFECT example!
The moon shot began in the 1930s and earlier with science fiction writers. Our entire satellite communications system was invented by one science fiction writer in 1947 in one story. But in 1950 no one thought much of it.
Even Goddard himself was only shooting better rockets and realizing their portential, which Germans took and made into the CONCEPT of the v-1 and V-2. I don't know if Goddard would have mentioned going to the moon -- he would have been laughed at -- but I KNOW he never mentioned a satellite system. He just shot better rockets and saw their potential while everybody else was talking about the most modern propellors.
In the Orient, Goddard's rockets would have been like their invention of the first mechanical clock. In obscure writings, Goddard's work would be traced as his rocket design floated around for two hundred years and finally disappeared.
We would be raving about how the Chinese had better rockets earlier. We would not ask, "So what?"
If you want to see how Wordist thinking of the future looks to me, watch the 1937(?) movie, Things to Come. The ultramodern plane of the late 1970s in that movie has not four but EIGHT propellors.
Please note that the goal of reaching the moon by 1970 was announced in the 1961 inaugural address. There was no mention of a rocket, much less WHICH rocket, which men, or HOW. There was no mention of anything BUT that goal. One year later we were no closer to the moon than we were then.
I am following up on the program with the Mantra. I am in a tiny, unpopular outlet like 1930s science fiction proceeding the best way I can find toward my goal. I am writing to try to entertain you as well as get some ideas across.
This is because I found out something early in my career that others never discovered: SPECIFIC complex plans for the future seldom work out. I say seldom in case it worked for somebody else because for me it was NEVER. I tried libertarianism, John Birchism and conservatism because each of these isms had a PLAN and a GROUP. But in the end they all failed because, even when they got part of their goal, the enemy, a bunch of pros, simply diverted them onto side-issues.
The problem with the future is that you cannot really work with it until you are IN it.
That is why things like the Mantra work and all those institutions you want will NOT work. We went to the moon because the ideas got planted in tiny little fun publications which were laughed at by the literary committee. In fact, science fiction only began to lose its cutting edge when it began to take literary opinion seriously. I can communicate with anybody on earth by satellite because of science fiction stories written BEFORE that time.
Once Asimov started getting the big bucks writing for Playboy, the old days were over and science fiction was mainstream.
"Mainstream" means co-opted.
Then science fiction came up with a PLAN. It went New Wave in the 1960s and science fiction got a huge boost. New Wave Science Fiction meant, as I put it, "Putting a sociologist in a space suit." That was With It. It predicted a future where everybody looked back on the Vietnam War as the height of viciousness in all history. I said then that thus was like someone in 1854 saying that you and I would think about nothing but the Crimean War today.
In fact, New Wave had waves of blacks going into space and all the rest. It was really the Wave of the Future. It is forgotten completely today. It sought to build the future out of today, which is the staple of Wordists and Modern anything. Have you noticed that all the churches that tried to "modernize" in the 1950s have half their old membership from back when the population was half as large?
But this is not just modernization. It is ANY attempt to build a rigid plan for the future, because we cannot see one hour into the future. If you could, you could go the floor of the New York Stock Exchange and be a billionaire in a week.
Nobody would look at MONEY that way, but all the amateurs look at POWER that way. If you announce you've got The Plan, the rubes will make you rich and you will lose. That's how power politics is played right now. Washington is full of people living high off the hog, and the hog belongs to the rubes who believe that, while somebody who told you he has The Plan to Make a Million is an obvious fraud; no one can play real power politics UNLESS they have The Plan for Gaining Power.
Neither money nor power works that way. Respectable conservatives are rubes who belong to the neos, who are pros.
I plant IDEAS. I have done more than a million conservatives. If you go for power OR money, you have to stop predicting disaster or organizing for the Final Victory and get in there on the ground floor and do what needs doing. The Mantra is the SORT of thing that needs doing now.
We'll get to the moon later.