THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Those who talk about Change cannot deal with real, honest-to-God change, just as the last people who know love are those who shout Love incessantly. No one is a better hater than a person who insists he is fighting Hate.

Marxism believed it was obvious that the best economy would be a PLANNED one. Instead of all that inefficient competition everyone would just pull together in an organized fashion. The term Social Progress has been laughed out of existence. Now they call it Change, though I haven't even heard that term in a while.

But Social Progress or Change, it means that Political Correctness knows exactly where society is going, that it is going in his direction, so Change is on his side. Which is the exact set of assumptions that got Social Progress laughed off the map.

Wordists all claim to know exactly where the world is headed. Every Wordist also knows that if he could consistently predict the stock market that way, he could BUY the world in a few years. When pea brains like that actually take over an economy, anybody who should be trusted with sharp objects should know what would happen. But the experts and intellectuals declared it a success until it literally collapsed before their eyes.

The fatal weakness of Change is that it cannot deal with the slightest bit of real change. Marx assumed that what he thought were the trends of his day would continue unchanged. The proletariat would get poorer and more desperate. Even as he wrote, the first we of the city proletariat was becoming management and beginning to buy property and workers were being given the vote.

None of this concerned Marx in the least. A good Wordist never lets reality slow him down.

Everything here RELATES. To an extent a present reader finds it impossible to conceive, the Middle East was the absolute basis of ALL thinking that thought itself civilized In Marx's day. There was no real change. Every Great Civilization progressed through rigid phases. The High Culture was the pyramid-building and scribe phase Egypt had reached and we had fallen from.

You don't need a free market to tell you how to build a pyramid. In fact you don't need a market economy to do ANYTHING that twentieth century history says High Cultures did. All you need is scribes to plan and organize it.

Meanwhile out in the real world slamming an Egypt-style planned economy into the modern world was like taking the Wright Brothers' plane up against a modern jet fighter.

And that is why what I say sounds so confusing. After a lifetime of being given exact plans and specifications for building an endless number of Wordist pyramids, I am trying to get you back to a system that visibly takes Wordism apart when it goes for a test flight. I do not NEED a mass movement. I need to push certain basics to keep the movement in a rational direction.

But, as with the economy, the apparent winner is the equivalent of planning, the torchlight parade approach. Just as a Great Civilization was based on building pyramids, a great movement is based on getting millions of people out on the street. That is why someone like me spends WEEKS arranging that "spontaneous" crowd when The Candidate shows up. That's the way Harry Truman did it and, by gum, that's the way it's done NOW!

Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, mass meetings are strictly for show. The real campaign is one-on-one or the despised "campaign slogan," which is really an attempt to express the public mood, however crude. It is not "good" in the sense Marx would define a "good" economy. A campaign slogan is as hit-or-miss, when judged on its "goodness" as the latest trend in consumer spending. But have you ever LISTENED to the total, changeless crap that is shouted at mass meetings. They are mobs, with the IQ of mobs.

The age of TV moved from the mass meeting to the slogan. Has anybody noticed that we are no longer in the age where television is the Latest Thing? In our age, an idea very rapidly becomes either outdated or a challenge that must be met. This is the first time in history when the ordinary person has the POWER to DEMAND an answer. It is very, VERY hard to do so, but one of my favorite things is watching the old "professional journalists" get together and moan about this modern age when "professionals" no longer control every outlet.

Thirty years ago everyone knew who the Anchor Man on CBS was. I don't. IS there one?

People always want me to present a more "solid" set of ANSWERS. Everyone you know can present you with a solid list of what constitutes Change. Everyone but me. I deal in a world that changes from year to year. Rule One: No kind of Change can deal with real changes.