REH: > So, my sense of all of this theory is this: Do it yourself. Instead of > selling George, Friedman, or anyone else to the country and letting people's > lives be ruined by your ideas, do the opposite. Ruin your own. Make a > community of people who believe like you and prove your success. That > would be science. Truly Empirical. Earlier I said, that these > discussions were too much like taking a beginning driver out onto the > freeway to learn how to drive. Instead, like Keith, start your own > company. Teaching should be for things that are proven and successful. > Instead of preaching your theories, or your mentor's theories, get out there > and prove them in the marketplace of ideas. If you have a holistic vision > of a society, then do it in miniature in a community. On that level you > can see where it works and doesn't work. Fund it yourself so that you > don't have to kill the kulaks or the professionals as in Russia and Cambodia > in an imitation of Procrustes because the society is too diverse for your > imagination. Milton Friedman and other economic gurus have been a > disaster for the emotional life of the country. What is even more > outrageous is that they lie about it. My students go to Denmark, where > one of the wives is from, and feel like they are in Heaven while being > visitors from Hell. Being good capitalists, they find it all very > confusing, as would anyone from Hell upon visiting Heaven.
Great idea, Ray. Let's imagine that Stalin would have done it. He would have put himself out in a slave camp in Siberia and permanently kept himself from doing harm to others. Hitler would have goose stepped and Sieg Heiled up and down the streets of Berlin, much to the amusement of six million Jews. The Premier of British Columbia would have included himself in the third of the provincial government's labour force that he is cutting, thereby increasing the intelligence of that government by leaps and bounds. And George Dubbya would be somewhere in the caves of Afghanistan looking for bin Laden. > Here's to 2002! Amen! Ed Weick
