THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

THREE-DIMENSIONAL THOUGHT | 2006-09-24

The difficulty and uniqueness of Dave's work is that it is three-dimenational. Revolutionary hobbyists and peopple in general have a strictly two-dimensional way of thinking: You say something, they say something, then back again.

That is how respectable conservatives make liberals look like sane leaders while nothing they propose ever WORKS. What happens is that liberals say something and a trained respectable cosnervative knows exactly what answer to give. Professional conservatives get paid professional athlete's salaries for their endless game of sit-down ping-pong.

Dave is dealing with my concepts in THREE dimensions. It is not simply filling half an hour with verbal ping-pong, it is leads on to NEW concepts. It doesn't just go back and forth, it goes UP.

But Dave is also dealing with another problem. Our concepts also go DOWN. They go DEEP, as basics do. We have here a WAY OF THINKING, a way of thinking which we cannot predict will lead where we WANT it to go. Repectable conservatives never question the basics. They never question the assumptions upon which our society is built. Their "debates" with liberals are always a "just-so" story, which ends up with their agreeing that everything that was done up to 1970 was good and true. All respectable conservatives are neoconservatives.

One problem Dave's active mind has is that everything he is dealing with interconnects. As you ponder the basics, as you look at EVERYTHING fresh, you begin to discover principles that apply to more and more areas of life. But what is terribly frustrating,what makes this HARD work, is that writing is a two-dimensional medium. You must go in one direction, from beginning to middle to end on a particular point, while your mind wants to go off into all the fascinating implications.

I am sure that exactly the same problem occupied Newton's mind when he started analyzing gravity. Adam Smith started on simple supply and demand and had to quit after he had written several hundred thousand words about it in The Wealth of Nations.

When you get to basics, you find that they all interconnect. And when you go to basics you find that everybody else has been unimaginably superficial, childish, silly, pretentious and just plain wrong.

This makes for hard work, working in three dimensions in a two-dimensional world and keeping your temper while doing it.