| | There are those who look at things the way they are, and ask why... I dream of things that never were, and ask why not? -- Robert F. Kennedy.
These kinds of sayings appeal to people who want to change the world. Like most interesting problems, it is complicated.
First, these quotes come from collectivists. They want the impossible, that which is contrary to human nature. Their plans are not really new. In fact, they are very old, going back to the first cities. In Adam Reed's recent Article about "Archimedes" I pointed out that we have an incorrect idea of the ancient Greek view of physical labor. We got that primarily from European academics who discovered in Plato their dream of being philosopher-kings. They pride themselves on being unreasonable people who dream of the impossible,
On the other hand, people who actually do create "things that never were" are called "inventors." Seldom do they seem willing to subordinate everyone else to their wills. As truly creative people, most of them have suffered to some extent from the world into which they were born. Some had bizarre theories or tastes in other areas (spiritualism, collectivism, abstract expressionism, etc.) but few of them seemed willing to impose their admitted idiosyncratic views on the world at large -- certainly not by the power of the state. Nicola Tesla would run through a dozen napkins at a sitting. I don't think he ever advocated that everyone be provided with them at public expense.
In another forum topic, I mentioned Michael Milken. There was a man who saw how the world worked and created something new to change it. He worked within the structure he found -- and he was crushed by looters who admire George Bernard Shaw and Robert Kennedy.
Another example comes from Kary B. Mullis. who won a Nobel Prize for his Polymerase
Chain Reaction. Mullis is faily explicit in calling himself a "libertarian." (I don't know that he ever used the word "objectivist" or cited Ayn Rand.) The point is that from what I have read by and about him, he enjoyed tooling around the mountain roads in northern New Mexico or sitting at his swimming pool, thinking of a simpler way to do a complicated thing. He never spoke of "dreaming of the impossible."
It might be interesting to read such "impossible" quotes from Roebling or Edison, the Brothers Wright or F. Ll. Wright or from someone who actually achieved what others thought could never be done.
The fallacy in the Shaw-Kennedy Algorithm is never understanding the nature of the people whom they dream of themselves reforming. Similarly, world-beating Objectivists dream of changing "society" and remaking "the world" and "liberating mankind" without any respect for the nature of the people they seek to remake.
|
|
The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.
