Karl,
Whew!
Harvey

On Oct 29, 2006, at 2:12 PM, Karl Rogers wrote:

> Dear Alan,
>
> I just would like to briefly say that I find all this talk of  
> leadership to be most offputting. As far as I am concerned, the  
> Friends of Wisdom is a free-association of people and we do not  
> need leadership, sail boat or motor boat, but simply need to  
> collectively and democratically deliberate and decide where we want  
> to go and how best to get there.
>
> In my view, wise leadership would depend very much on someone  
> claiming to possess wisdom. It seems to me that Nick has offered a  
> minimal defintion for wisdom-inquiry, rather than claiming to be  
> wise. This is why I am interested in the FOW and have been  
> supportive of Nick's ideas. I have repeatedly appealled to the  
> angels of our better natures, at least trying to appeal to our  
> modesty and humility, by saying that we should not be so arrogant  
> as to presume that we are wise or that we have some privileged  
> knowledge to teach others about wisdom, but rather aim our efforts  
> at creating a discursive forum (or pluralistic space, so to speak)  
> where wisdom can emerge and flourish, without anyone claiming to  
> have a monopoly on truth and wisdom. We should let the goddess  
> Aletheia speak for herself.
>
> While I would not presume to answer for Nick, I do not think he has  
> put himself forward as a leader. It seems to me that all he has  
> done is challenge us, by putting forward his call for a revolution  
> in academia and has invited others to join him. He has challenged  
> us to engage with his ideas and develop them further. Nick's call  
> for aim-orientated rationality has nothing to do with the kind  
> leadership imposed on society by the likes of Bush and Blair.
>
> To use the boat metaphor. Blair and Bush have been engaging in  
> gunboat leadership.
> It is based on irrational egoism and greed. To suggest that it is  
> based on some kind rationalistic thinking is based on a  
> misunderstanding of rationality. Bush and Blair's gunboat  
> leadership is directed to obtaining access to oil and to increase  
> pofits for the arms-trade without any regard for the global  
> consequences of this policy. It is an irrational war mongering  
> policy designed to satisfy the short-term goals of a tiny minority  
> of the world's population at the expense of the vast majority.
>
> Rational people have been opposed to this war mongering policy  
> because it has quite predictably intensified the instability,  
> chaos, and an increased level of animosity towards the UK and the  
> USA. Blair and Bush are simply following the template of the  
> historical colonial policy of gunboat diplomacy, destabilisation,  
> and aggression as the means to create the conditions favourable to  
> war profitteers, while also using this as a pretext for developing  
> totalitarian police-state policies to suppress opposition, using  
> the near total control of media by multi-national corporations to  
> silence all criticism.
>
> Their policy is a product of a failure of western people to  
> rationally organise societal development since the end of the Cold  
> War. Since 1941, the economies of the USA and UK have become based  
> on the arms trade; after the collpase of the Soviet Union, the UK  
> and the USA have needed a new enemy, but they did not want to  
> confront China, given that they wish access to Chinese markets and  
> loans. Hence, using the resources from the Cold War and the "war on  
> drugs", they have created this "war on terror" and the conditions  
> for an unending war against a shadow enemy, which started in ernest  
> in the 1990s, long before the attack on the WTC. They are ignoring  
> the fact this this "war on terror" has intensifed terrorism, it is  
> undermining the peaceful development of secular governance in the  
> middle-east (in Lebanon, for example), it is supporting  
> dictatorships (such as Saudi Arabia), and the world's resources  
> simply cannot sustain it. While their cabal of sponsors and  
> supporters will gain short term profits from this policy, the long  
> term consequences will be devastating for both world security,  
> ecological integrity, and civilisation.
>
> This gunboat leadership is neither wise nor rational, given that  
> both Bush and Blair, in their arrogance, have already worsened the  
> situation, especially in relation to middle-east stability, nulcear  
> arms proliferation, global warming, poverty, organised crime, and  
> terrorism. They may well have pretensions of being "good, wise  
> leaders", but this is a consequence of their arrogant Staussist  
> presumption that those capable of gaining power are those that are  
> best qualified to exercise it. History shows that this class based  
> elitist does not produce "good, wise leaders". The support for "the  
> war on terror" has been created through higly sophisticated  
> propaganda campaigns (as well as a couple of election  
> irregularities) and the capacity for the success of these campaigns  
> is based on an irrational relation between citizens and information  
> through mass media. Anyone who studies the speeches of Bush or  
> Blair will see them full of incoherent cliches and irrationalisms,  
> forms of doublespeak that would make George Orwell say "I told you  
> so!" from his grave. In a rational society, Blair and Bush would be  
> laughed at or pitied, not elected to high public office.
>
> In my view, we do not need wise leadership. We simply need more  
> friends of wisdom to participate in the development of the Friends  
> Of Wisdom.
>
> Karl.
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