After Word: Personal Statement

I have completed a significant theoretical work entitled Natural Systems. I have enclosed copies of this work herein as well as copies of my work The Great Wall for your perusal as "burnt offerings" and counterpoint. Working through this book has had profound resonances in my thinking about things big and small of the world, not all of which has settled down or precipitated fully yet in my consciousness.

Please understand that the book Natural Systems is basically a proof still in need of editing and proof reading. Subsequent editions of it will be produced. One can go too fast in publishing.

As an outcome of the book, I have decided to undertake a new work that I will entitle "The Blue Book for Alternative Development" and that is like a sketchbook that covers basic areas of alternative development in a creative manner. I think this work can be annually revised and republished. I think it will be complementary to other works I have been planning or intending to do.

There is a hidden power in publishing. The kind of conventional selection processes in academic forums, based largely on principles of correctness that amount to a form of paradigmatic censorship, can be effectively circumvented. Of course, there is then a very strong need to negatively sanction and deny all fringe literature produced outside these forums as at least implicitly illegitimate. This is how the system maintains the status quo of its authority structure.

But in a free society, once a work has been broadcast out to the world, there is no calling it back or controlling its fate. In the long run, the law of averages determines that such work is bound to catch on somewhere and some how. The Robidoux book I self-published in 1998, is in demand and can probably fetch over $100 per copy.

In other words, no single institutional entity has final control over what is legitimate or not in a free and open society--the most such institutions can do is to deny or restrict knowledge and control its dissemination, if they do not actually serve to promote new knowledge and communication. The history of English literature teaches us unequivocally that authorial legitimacy is defined not by academic standards but by what Paul Ricoeur called the trans-substantiation of surplus meaning that is accreted to a text through time and by cultural diffusion.

I have tried to honestly and realistically asked myself what might one individual do within a very limited framework of a brief remaining lifetime to have a lasting impact on the future direction of change in the world. I have tried to frame this within a prospective life-world of extreme limitations of basic resources, based on previous experiences most marked by restriction and deprivation.

I have devised as a result of the work on natural systems theory a working model for an experimental program that I believe to be comprehensive and that provides for the integration of reality upon multiple levels. I have set this down in the proposal attached to this letter.

The framework proposed therein does not have to be a very large one to be effective. I believe its size can be optimized in time for its maximum effect in the world. A large part of this model is of course about power. Power is a reality of the world that is related to the control of change. Unfortunately, positive changes in the world are usually blocked due to some form of corruption. If we are to effectively change the world in alternative directions than what it might otherwise become, then some degree of power must be cultivated from within as well as beyond the parameters of the predominant system.

I have no real pretensions or presumptions about power. Beyond the power of my mind and my pen, I have no real power in the world at all. I myself do not seek personal power or prestige. I believe though that we have a choice to either wrest power for our own control, or by default allow others probably less knowledgeable and inherently, by definition, less responsible, to assume some measure of control over our own fate and the fate of our posterity. Assuming power over our own lives, individually and collectively, is therefore our fundamental responsibility to ourselves and our kind as living beings. We must therefore realistically consider the possibilities and priorities of the management of power in the world if we are to talk about a program that is realistically effective in inducing positive changes in the world.

In hindsight, I believe the consequence of the work I undertook in China from 1998-99 was significant for several reasons. It provided me the sufficient empirical evidence to develop a worldview with a clear sense of the future prospects of humanity in an over-crowded world. It also simultaneously provided me with such a vision in a context of a fundamentally totalitarian society. This one profoundly sobering consideration puts everything else into a clear linear order.

In China, I could not help but notice the fractured and disjunctive view of the world that my students daily contended with, and which appeared to be the source of a lot of cognitive and neurotic dissonance on a very basic level. Their worldview was fundamentally disintegrated, patchy, disjunctive and unconnected. Thus it was freely manipulated and deceived by people in power even on very petty levels. This was the consequence of a deliberate policy by the central government to rigidly control and restrict the dissemination of information at all levels. It is truly George Orwell's dark utopia. I considered it inherently evil by design, with a tremendously painful human consequence. Even a small bandaid like a student library run on an open basis was a central palliative remedy for students in this condition. It gave them something to choose for themselves, to think about independently, to hope for in life, to work for beyond themselves or a corrupt system, even to fight for to preserve if need be.

In thinking deeply about issues, I have decided that reality is ultimately relative. An upshot of this is I cannot alone judge the realism of my own endeavors or thinking. Because I am marginal at this moment in basically any system, I lack credibility and legitimacy in virtually all systems. But as a cross-cultural anthropologist, it also provides me an unusually advantageous position of insight and objectivity about the human system in general.

I will not harp any longer on my ir-relation with my own parent society. In my lifetime, the imbalance between the rich and the poor has grown only more marked, and to preserve this status quo, the authorities would rather bring in many new people into the system, virtually swamping every social service institution beyond our society's fundamental carrying capacity, than to readjust the balance in favor of the poor.

Medical care is a wonderful example of this. The issue of socialized medicine is totally taboo in this society, such that if a politician runs under this kind of ticket, their fate at the polls will be foredoomed automatically. The disparities of the medical system in the early eighties had grown so glaringly obvious, when people were being refused service in emergency rooms for lack of insurance, that our society was faced with a challenge of reinventing its medical system to be kindler and gentler to the poorer Americans.

At that time, early Reaganomics, I would read in Scientific American, a notoriously conservative magazine, of all the advantages of a new system of HMO that was supposed to be the capitalist's brilliant answer to socialization of medical care. Give medicine to big business, and do not hold them accountable as they are miracle workers. Senior friends of my family just recently lost all services to their provider, a local HMO, that suddenly closed its doors totally without an prior warning. One friend who suffers a chronic heart condition has not found a substitute doctor for over a month, and once finding one, the records are locked up somewhere inaccessible. There is another case we heard of about a man who has cancer, and is in a similar position of not being able to obtain his medical records. In any other society, this would be fundamentally unacceptable. The medical establishment has lost control of its own standards of practice. At the bottom line is pure greed.

Health is a human right--physical illness is not a condition analogous to a broken down automobile that needs to be repaired by some shady mechanic bent on a fast buck. It should not be the basis for profiteering, but this is exactly what it has become in the U.S. The HMO's are fundamentally untouchable when laws exist that prevent their being sued by citizens. I myself, and my family, have been without medical care or attention for over twenty years, knock on wood, since I left the Marines. It has always been a choice of paying extremely high and unaffordable medical insurance bills, or buying food and going back to school to have some sense of a future. My daughter's first dental care was this year, at ten years of age. It was fortunately not an expensive visit, as she has nearly perfect teeth and no dental caries. If we've needed physical examinations or care, we pay out of our own pocket. I paid a bill to a hospital in Missouri of $165 for having a doctor just look at my daughter for an injury to her lip, without any treatment being rendered at all.

If I take this one example, and multiply it across almost every sector of our society, especially in traditionally public sectors like education, law and health, then one can have a very good idea of how our country has transformed itself to make a few richer at the expense of an increasing number of poor people. One's advancement in such a system is not based on one's commitment to the people, but on one's collusion of authority. And this is but a domestic analogy to a larger international profile of resource distribution in the world. Reagan's gloriously irresponsible "trickle down" effect is structurally insufficient to support the massive bottom from absolute poverty. The lesson that has been clearly demonstrated in the last twenty years is that laissez faire capitalism, the silent hand of power economics, does not work, because capitalist interests cannot be counted upon to police themselves or to be responsible socially to the public. If a government fails to police big business, and, even more, if the government yields a great deal of its own control over to big business, then the result is what America has become today.

How shall we interpret the recent debacle of the Presidential election? I would interpret it as another sign of failure of democracy in American public life, undermined as this has been by capitalist interests. Nepotism and party cronyism are supposed to be separate from neutral election machinery, but obviously it no longer is, nor can it ever be assured of being neutral again. Democracy depends upon implicit sanctions and indirect constraints embedded in the cultural life of the people--when this changes, farewell John Q. Public.

I will not harp on this issue any longer. My blood boils when I think of men I knew in the Marines who died in service to their country, sometimes within arms length of me. They were good men, young men, honest men. I can name some of them. Sgt. Daryl Livering, my tank commander, Corporal Alexander Hamilton, a friend, Private Jeff Greenly, my loader and another friend. All crushed down by tanks. My own life flashed before me on more than one occasion before I was 20 years old, whether it was myself being crushed by a tank in Okinawa, or running through a burning building, half-crazed, looking for people, or watching our own jets blow up our tanks, almost within arm's reach, in the desert. And then the 37 guys in the weapon's platoon, Lima company, 9th Marine Regiment, that we shared bunks with on the U.S. Alamo, all chopped up by the blades of their helicopter as it crashed in the Philippines. Or the Marines at Camp Fuji, Japan, who perished in both the blizzard and the fire. They had their own families, wives and children. I cannot honestly say I know what they died for anymore. I guess it was only to help the rich get richer back home in the debauchery of their own private kingdoms.

Since leaving the Marines, my own life lesson has been that my service to my country has meant nothing but a mark against me in any employment line, and my citizenship has no value whatsoever except perhaps for the right to keep a weapon and to borrow more government money in order to be a life-long student. Even the right to vote now seems more than a little specious. I realized quite clearly even before the election that my vote probably wouldn't really count. And alas, in deed, it didn't.

I will not go on with this tirade. I will eventually write more than one book about it all, especially when my publishing framework is more secure and developed. I now take great pleasure in exercising my freedom of thought and speech.

My conclusion about my own relationship to my society is that people have an implicit social contract that gets signed by their parents the day they are born. It is a life-contract. It grants basic rights, freedoms and responsibilities as a citizen and as a human being. In turn, it promises some kind of equal protection under the law and demands certain commitments. But what happens if our government, supposedly for the people, by the people, and of the people, no longer clearly serves the interests of the people, so compromised as it has become by private interest? Is private interest the equivalent of public interest? It becomes so when everyone pursues private interest first and public interest last--even by necessity of success and survival within such a stilted system. What happens when the government deliberately pursues policies that begin to hurt the interests of its people?

For myself at least, and probably for a broad class of Americans not unlike myself, this seems to be exactly what has happened. Not just once, but numerous times over the past two decades. The tragic part of it is that the majority of Americans seem to be willing to sacrifice and increasingly compromise their own basic freedoms for an ambivalent and intrinsically insecure and false sense of security within the system. It is naive and short-sighted, to say the lest, based on empty-handed and selfish promises, though probably to be expected if we are to believe scholars like Eric Fromm. I believe that there has been a fundamental breach of trust by our government to its people. I voted for Clinton in the hope that he would make good on his false campaign promises and restore the shattered faith of the American people. After the OJ Simpson trial I wrote him a letter in no uncertain terms. His reply, which I keep, demonstrated to me even then his fundamental insincerity to the American people. It appears that he has done worse in many ways than even Reagan in destroying and undermining our sense of trust in our own government. This will be his lasting legacy to America.

Now I only have the interest of my own family and our own future at heart. I cannot afford any longer to allow our government to continue to compromise and jeopardize repeatedly our own welfare and well being in the world. At this stage, I would have to throw away almost everything I've striven for and worked for in my entire life, just in order to earn some minimum wage, probably in order to make some foreigner more wealthy. The rich foreigners, the New Americans, can have it all, as far as I am concerned, as long as I am not a part of it any longer. They did not stand in line to get it all, and they did not serve the country or sacrifice to get it all.

As far as I am concerned, the life-contract with my own country is now fundamentally broken, and I am open to new contracts in the world. If this sounds mercenary, then I guess it is in a sense, because if I were not a pacifist with some sense of scruples about humanity and ethics as an anthropologist, then I would seriously consider trading off my military expertise for a sense of well-being in the world, which I could well do.

As children, we were shown repeatedly in school a film called ôA Man without a Country. It was about a man who renounced publicly his citizenship to his country, in petty anger over one thing or another. He was tried, and sentenced to spend the rest of his life aboard ships, never allowed to see his country again. Upon his death bed, he tells the ship's captain and crew that he has but one regret and one wish, and that is to see his beloved country again before he dies. I feel very much like a man without a country at this time.

When I was last in China, when I watched the Chinese students amass in anger outside our door over the American bombing of their embassy, I felt very helpless with my family. It was clear that they wanted vengeance. At that time, for over a day, even the authorities could do nothing about it. We had to literally barricade our doors and windows, and we spent a sleepless night listening to windows breaking outside. The next day our rooms were cordoned off by a whole riot squad of police in riot-gear, as the students marched past our door shouting loudly in anger their hatred for all Americans. I could do nothing but sit in our little kitchen and correct my student's mid-term exams, with everything I had worked for and sacrificed for the previous year destroyed in a puff. Their collective shouting and haranguing was so loud that for almost an hour we could not hear ourselves speak. If voices could be weapons, the Chinese would be the most lethal voices of all. I could not blame the students for their anger, frustrated as they were with their lives. My only wish at the moment was to take my family back to the security of the U.S. I did not want us to die there, in a faraway and unfriendly land. For over a week it was unsafe to leave our rooms, even to get food, and for several weeks we were told not to leave the school grounds.

Since returning from China, things have been truly strange indeed. Almost all our previous relationships have been severed, for one reason or another, and I donÆt understand exactly why. Everything seems so empty and superficial. There has been almost nothing to replace the sense of fundamental loss with at all, nothing rewarding. There is no promise, nothing to work for, no hope, no dreams, no sense of a future, only to work to eat, and that is all. The sense of contradiction seems to surround our lives and permeate our little world like the sense of pollution that must daily accompany the lives of the harijan pariahs of India.

Strange it is, I continue applying to jobs, to receive not even a reply at least 50% of the time. In five years, with almost five hundred job applications, I've not had even one interview. I apply to jobs now with a Ph.D. that require only a Master's degree, and yet I know there is not even serious consideration of the possibility of my employment. In the meantime, I see many foreigners getting the same jobs, and almost by definition with fewer qualifications. The only job I found in the U.S. in the last five years has been one that was a fluke, the Robidoux research and design-development of my employer's business in Wyoming, that was the result of our car breaking down when we were on the road without a home and without a clear sense of direction except to escape Southern California and about a thousand dollars in our pocket. The only other jobs that have been offered to me in the past five years have been English teaching positions abroad. Korea, China, Saudi Arabia. But why teach in countries where the people hate you fundamentally and offer you no sense of security?

The paradox of this is that I have always been a hard and responsible worker. The two years I worked in Wyoming, I hardly took a few days off, even weekends. I did everything my employer asked of me, better even, without question or argument, until the very day we left, without our electricity cut off, I worked to finish my sense of obligation to him, which was more than a little stilted.

I realize that one must put one's best foot forward in any application, regardless of the outcomes, which also entails disguising one's bad side. But in doing so, it is not good to misrepresent oneself or to build oneself up unrealistically. I believe I have certain unusual creative and intellectual abilities that demonstrate themselves most clearly in research, writing and art. In spite of our circumstances, I have been prolific as a writer, an artisan and in research for more than 20 years.

In one semester, the final one before going to fieldwork in Malaysia, I believe I wrote about 5 or 6 manuscripts. In the semester upon our return, aside from the dissertation itself, I completed probably four or five more books. These are not bad books. Indeed, many of them are very good books, if I compare them to what I see and read on bookstands. Getting a publisher to even look at your work in the U.S. is just like getting an employer to read your application. It seems, based on the law of averages, virtually impossible, no matter how good one might really be. Why is this? I can only answer to myself that it is a critical sign of a closed class system.

But I also have critical limitations or inherent shortcomings that must be attended to. For instance, my brain is daily like a huge information explosion, such that there are moments when it races in numerous directions at once, and there are entire nights that it will not turn off. If this is mildly manic then I do not believe that it is so exaggerated, especially on the down side, as is stereotypically presumed to be the case.

I think the paradox and upshot of this is that, though my mind flies in many directions at once, I can only successfully tend to one thing at a time, such that any more than one thing results in destructive interference. Of course, when I am locked on one track, a great deal of depth and rate of processing can be achieved. Also, tending to things on a deeply intensive level appears to demand that few distractions interfere and prevent its occurrence.

The paradox of this seems to be that, if I am in a situation involving encounter and intuitive decision-making on the spur of the moment, I usually rise to the occasion in a very exceptional way. I can usually think "through" to the end results almost immediately, and then put a plan of action into gear that proves very effective. I think that if I had been thrown into real combat situations while in the Marine Corps, this kind of response patterning would have been exhibited clearly, especially in the last year when I designed my own night-time tank tactics that were quite "dynamic" and unconventional compared to the by the book methods.

The paradox is that if I go to play a "set piece" kind of game, like chess or even checkers, I cannot think linearly through very many steps, such that even children can sometimes easily beat me in such games.

Another example of this is in my woodworking. I've done woodworking now periodically for about 20 years. Sometimes it has been my only source of income. I've had very little formal training, but over time I've developed a unique style of working such that there is almost no project that would be beyond my reach.

In all that time, over countless projects, I've never once used a blue-print or a plan for the work with measurements. At most I might sketch a simple drawing to get a general idea of the arrangement and aesthetic design. Then I have a period, often waking up at night with the "solution," that I think through the project, and then I proceed to the construction. In spite of this, not one work has ever failed, and many of the projects have been quite sophisticated and successful in design. I have made all kinds of things. I think if I had to follow a blue-print, I would not do very well with the finished piece. On the other hand, the easiest form of business I could do now would be in woodworking, which could earn me as much as $50 or 100,000 per year, if it were done right.

In academic situations, this has come to be evident in certain kinds of classes I have taken in which there appears little room for my own spontaneous application, but everything is based on "correct" responsiveness according to some text-book game plan. Especially this has happened in classes like statistics. I've periodically taken such courses over the years, and usually only doing fair to middling in the results. I think that it is relatively difficult to glean the pattern involved in the conventional style of teaching these kinds of things, and then solving problems in a text-book manner. Paradoxically, in high school I was the highest scorer in both honors chemistry and honors biology courses, and my math teacher would give me extra projects to do to fill my time, especially in esoteric forms of geometry. By way of contrast, in my fieldwork, when I needed to employ statistics in the application and analysis of my data, I went straight back to the text book, found the best methods to apply, and then quickly thought through the problem, so much so that I can even do relatively simple procedures, like chi square, in my head. As a result of their application, I have even developed my own form of inter-corelational statistics based on what a call a cardinal data-type.

This has been evident in areas like artificial intelligence, when competing with computer science whiz kids in an AI class on classical puzzle-type problems, like designing a tic-tac-toe game, I do quite poorly. But from that one class, I learned a great deal, and went on to successfully apply what I learned to complex problem sets in fieldwork and other areas of anthropology. That textbook, that I left behind in China, was probably one of the most used books I ever had. The design of novel AI programs and architectures are not that far-off in this divergent line of development.

I think one consequence of this is that I tend to use conventional things in sometimes very unconventional ways. I am therefore quite creative. I doubt I could be a very good engineer in a conventional sense, if I had to work on something like the B-2 bomber, for instance, but I think I can do engineering in very unusual ways that can yield outstanding results.

I do not think that I am bragging up anything, because so far this issue seems to have been to my net disadvantage in society rather than to my net gain, especially as this seems to entail that I sorely fit any conventional definitions of the prevailing status quo based as it is upon strict and intolerant conformism. On the other hand, this is not entirely a bad thing either, as under the right circumstances it can yield extremely successful and interesting results.

I do not believe anything is too late, because in a sense I am just beginning to get my act together. It perhaps has taken me this long to realize the name of the game and to deliberately begin organizing things so that all of it will for once be to my advantage rather than my net disadvantage in life. I do not know where the ceiling is in this creative development either, and as far as I can tell, the only limitations to its application and applicability seems to be due to basic minimal determining factors like time, money, energy, etc.

This being evident to myself at least, I've tried to structure my life and intended business and other relationships in a manner that promotes maximum productivity in this way and inhibits destructive interference from outside occurring as much as possible. This is almost necessarily unconventional and unfortunately many people do not seem to be able to understand this or to understand the reasons why. It has led to a result that we have almost no social relations with anyone at all at this time, though I've had many friends from around the world, and I believe, couldn't have in this prevailing context even if I tried. The sad part is that along the entire way, I've been an extremely hard and responsible worker. I almost never take a day off. In fact, my mind never takes a day off.

The reason I mention these things to you is to give you an honest sense of who I am, without pretense. Also, I believe, it has bearing on how I need to lay things out in the future.

I have decided that the concentration of my intellectual efforts should occur primarily in the main areas of activity (i.e., writing, research, art and design development). Any academic context, especially with a good library, is bound to be highly supportive and conducive to such development as long as the context is not too authoritarian or restrictive in its structure, or overly conventional in its manner of teaching to the text.

This central or core area is part of a professional-personal system that I have worked out for myself and that is finally beginning to yield significant results.

Around this, I have constructed partially a secondary system of primary production, that includes a web-system, and publishing, at this time, and should eventually include a more developed front-end marketing system, a more diversified primitive production system, a human development system I call the bridge, as well sufficient laboratory facilities for design development work in the main areas. Except for the web-system and first publishing efforts, this system has mostly been on paper so far.

There are two considerations in its successful development. The first is that of having a suitable context for its implementation, which we lack at this time, and which appears to require some form of academic relationship, and the second is the lack of sufficient capital, which is the primary limiting factor at this time.

If the second level of production can be successfully achieved, it should entail the employment of a small number of individuals who can manage and develop individually and as a group various facets of the system.

I can envision an extended and more elaborated tertiary and even subsequent systems, but these are systems that can only be done in a corporate institutional framework and therefore they must first depend upon success achieved upon the first two levels.

The reason that I mention this, is that within the framework of the first two levels of this system there are certain critical areas requiring attention and development. These are particularly the areas of the Bridge and design development. Writing and art, and other aspects of marketing and production I believe are fairly straight-forward and mainly dependent on limiting factors like time, money and energy. I believe that the Bridge and Design Development aspects are pivotal perhaps to the success of the secondary level of this system, and can serve to define the character and outcome of the entire system. I propose a radical suggestion that these two things can essentially be combined into a single system that serves multiple purposes simultaneously.

I therefore submit a single proposal, that I do not want you to consider to be in lieu or instead of the previous five proposals I have already submitted to you, but to some extent represents a synthesis of the previous proposals, and as something synergistically a little more than this. I submit it as a suggestion that might define more clearly my possible relationship within your system on some level or another. Hopefully, this will allow you to make clearer decisions regarding my case.

What benefit does it have to have a burnt-out 43 year old male sitting in classes? I do not know the answer to this. An old sea dog can be taught a few new tricks, but its salty character is not likely to be substantially altered. I like to keep a fairly open mind about almost everything. In this sense I am unusually liberal and compromising. On the other hand, there are many things about which my mind has been made up, and these are not likely to change substantially unless someone can convince me in clear terms why I should change my mind.

I will continue to strive for the objectives I believe in. Any academic context is bound to be better than none at all. The question is its relative degree of openness. I would suggest at this point, almost any interaction on an intellectual level is bound to result in an explosion of creativity activity. A library alone would be like a match to a box of fire-wood. I do not think it needs to be strictly channeled, as I believe that it will find its own way around, and create its own channels.

Obviously, what I propose within these pages is radical and unprecedented. It is revolutionary from the standpoint that it turns traditional academic structure of knowledge and information on its side. I believe this is consonant with a kind of grand strategic maze-way reformulation that is a possible result of the information revolution. Traditional academic structures as they are conventionally delineated are becoming increasingly moribund and out of synch with the pace of change and the advancement of information pattern and knowledge in the world.

It is experimental both from a social standpoint and from a scientific standpoint. It cannot be without its own contradictions or faults, but these can be excoriated and extricated from the intrinsic design of the system I propose. I would be willing to commit the bulk of my very limited but not inconsiderable resources to the design and implementation of such a program. Obviously as well, such a program requires the action and initiative of many other people besides myself, as it is in design a corporate framework that is global in scope.

My agenda in this framework would be of the following:

1. Establish my primary & secondary system in a working way, and lay the foundation for the entire system

2. Conduct basic research focused on theoretical work and applied work in core areas that might be related to this system.

Of course, the bulk of my training is in Anthropology, and I believe from a strict research standpoint that my best contribution can probably be in the area of symbolic framing and its systematic extensions, as well as possibly in areas of human engineering that this leads to. I believe, within the framework of the proposal, that the area of human development is probably the most important one to resolve, as the other areas appear to me less problematic in the sense of being less of an inherent dilemma and more like complex puzzle-solutions.

On the other hand, I do not see a need to unduly restrict intensive intellectual involvement in any direction that might lead to significant results.

The qualities that I can bring to bear in any academic context are an intrinsic love of learning and knowledge which I've always had, and a deep respect for individuals and life. I am quite sober in my approach to the world. I am a harsh judge of others, but not critical, intolerant or unforgiving of people's faults.