THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

A Great Philosopher explains to you why you need all that pain. A Great Philosopher explains to you why you should forget this world and talk about the Next.

A Great Philosopher will tell you to forget what you Want. The Great Philosopher tells you what you Need. This is very convenient, since no Great Civilization ever produced what people wanted.

Great Civilizations melt like thin ice when the West shows up. India can talk itself blue about what great Philosophers it used to have , but there is no way they are going to go back to their loin cloths.

Not a single eskimo lives on the old ice fields any more. They sit around on welfare and bitch about people who forget to call them Inuits.

In all the old so-called Great Civilizations anybody who could write worked for the ruler. They sat around and tried to find ways to justify why everybody should obey the Pharaoh or the Emperor and why everybody should be grateful that were so miserable.

We have lawyers and liberals to do that.

Oops. I almost forgot to give respectable conservatives their share of the credit!

But the rest of our literate population spends its time trying to figure out a way to give people what they want. They make money by giving people what they want. They get elected by giving people what they want. That's where Coca-Cola comes from. That's where computers come from.

Those who love Great Philosophers also love huge tomes like Karl Marx's "Capital" or the Old Testament.

People like me want to take the Golden Rule and get on with the business of making things better for people.

You don't need me to justify misery. There's plenty of misery to go around already.