In religion, there is divine revelation.
In spirituality, there is communion with the unseen.
In science fiction, there is subspace and antimatter.
In particle physics, there is quantum gravity.
In medicine, there are X-rays.
And then there is dirt: the visible, tangible, material world.
When you spend enough time with history, books, science, language, and theory – a deeper principle begins to appear.
Beneath every major advance of mankind is an invisible frame. We rarely see it directly, but it surrounds everything we call progress.
That frame is human thought.
Human thought enabled by the God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The cornerstone of all righteous and fair governments.
Every advancement that built the modern world began with two kinds of human beings: philosophers and scientists.
Yes, the splitting of the atom gave us nuclear weapons. But the atom was first split in Oppenheimers’ mind – before he made it material.
That is the singular observation of today’s short note.
The enemies of human life are not concepts, philosophies, or principles.
The real threat, common to every generation including our own, is the kind of person too lazy, too arrogant, or too spiritually dead to understand that ideas are not just what restrains brute force – ideas are the very spark of life – of creation that we began with, and that sustains us through every heartbeat and every breath.
Law is not dirt. A constitution is not dirt. A principle is not dirt. The written word – the law- is mankind’s great rebellion against the bully, the tyrant, and the kings of tyranny.
Since the Renaissance, the supremacy of the written word over brute force has held the line against the mobs of the basest instincts of man.
Earlier this week, a colleague asked me why Marxism always fails. Some scholars thinks it requires thousands of pages to explain. It does not.
My answer as to why communism always has and always will fail: Marxism is propriety inverted.
It does not lift man’s eyes toward the stars.
It does not ask what man can imagine, build, discover, or become.
It does not begin with the soul, the mind, the word, or the horizon.
It begins and ends with filthy dirt. The means of production. The factory. The food ration. The ownership structure. The material conditions.
Marxism mistakes the floor for the ceiling of human potential.
Marxism takes man’s need for food and shelter and sums us up as nothing but mammals with needs.
Marxism colonizes the mind with a false urgency. It tells us that scarcity is a fact of life, that the success of one person or one nation must always come at the expense of another, and that true equality only comes when we as citizens serve under the yoke of a brutal monarch.
But man is not merely a mouth to feed or a body to house.
The opposite of dirt is spirit and soul.
It is the ability to think about thinking.
It is the power to meta-cognize, to liquefy the facts of the world and hold them fluid, as Emerson understood. It is the capacity to see not only what is, but what might be.
The true power of the human mind is its ability to grasp the unseen and make it real.
That power is more astonishing than subspace, more mysterious than quantum gravity, more immediate than X-rays, and more dangerous to tyrants than any weapon.
So, before you reach for that protein shake, or the coffee – find some fuel for your mind. It is not just you that needs new ideas, new ways of living and new creations.
There are over eight billion people living in this world, and until we liberate every one of them from the scourge of scarcity, we cannot rest. Communism has killed hundreds of millions, and in the brief time since capitalism and democracy appeared, we have lifted billions of our fellow man out of the grasp of tyrants and hunger: not by sending food alone, but by teaching, showing and educating.
Here is to the philosophers and scientists who wake every day, not just to hit targets we can’t reach - but rather those who wake up and hit targets the rest of us cannot even see.