DOES IT MATTER? HEROES
When I was quite young Pinocchio was my favorite book and my mother would read it to me over and over again. I have very clear memories at maybe, age four or five, of her reading that big blue book sitting on my bedside.
The sword and the stone came out, and mom took me to see it. It was, well… it was like that feeling of seeing the opening sequence of Star Wars.
The next ‘biography’ that grabbed my attention was the novel Johnny Tremain. Must have been third or fourth grade. And from that book I became pretty evangelical constitutionalist. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I understood that just perhaps, the British were right, and the colonists were trying to skate on paying Britain’s war debt for defending the colonies.
I read the biography of Samuel Colt, a good ten times, every few months or so, through about seventh grade. It was sort of a life-recipe for me. Not intentionally. I just found the inventiveness and persistence fascinating. And the fact that stuff went bang made it even better. I had no one else to imitate.
Like a lot of nerds I read encyclopedias. Over and over again. I wish I could say why but it think it was boredom? The info-vore problem. Its probably also that encyclopedias use the Neutral Point of View and it’s less challenging for me than trying to understand all the emotions in literature, or all the loading in intra-disciplinary language – most of which is obscurant.
Out of encyclopedias I got the unconscious philosophy of aristocracy. I didn’t know what it meant. I didn’t know that NPV was an attempt at scientific speech. I just sort of developed this idea that there was a sort of superior way to think about the world. But what affected me most was that I became aware of just HOW LITTLE most people know about the world. And that became a source of power for me. I was pretty consistent in the choice of my ‘three wishes’ if I ever were to get them: (1) to know the contents of every book in the library (2) to drive a little red sports car. (3) To have personal freedom to explore the world. (Although that last one I had a hard time articulating)
And then, science fiction, or at least hard science fiction became a natural obsession. Science fiction was, and its classics remain, a libertarian mythology. The best mythology I’d found. The fact that aristocracy and technology are interdependent wasn’t that clear to me at the time. Small numbers of people need technology to compete with bigger numbers. That’s one of the west’s great incentives – sitting out on the periphery of the land mass.
Later, I was fascinated by Alexander the great, like a lot of young men. He and his mother struggling for power and survival. Taught by Aristotle. And the idea of such a vast world to explore. It was awe inspiring. The closest to a religious experience I can ever recall.
When I was in college I studied the Mongols. Read about everything that there was. It’s not hard to be fully educated about them. There isn’t that much to read really. The life of Temujin fascinated me. Because I saw him as struggling to protect his mother, and his family. Trying to add order to a bitter and painful world.
I read quite a bit about Napoleon, because to some degree I work by similar methods: bury myself in information until I have a model of everyone’s incentives. From that point on, it’s pretty easy to use indirection, misdirection and inception to reduce the costs of achieving your objectives. I ended up disliking him tremendously for his principle role in undermining western civilization in practice just as the french philosophers had done in theory. But what I empathized with, was his ambition driven by the need to protect mother and family. It isn’t lost on me that this is probably one of Adolph Hitler’s drivers as well.
In adult life, I don’t remember many heroes. I suppose I didn’t have many. If I had the choice to have been Aristotle or Alexander, I would have chosen alexander. Although that doesn’t seem to be the wise choice. It is the most interesting one – at least for me.
At this point in my life, I kind of feel an emotional love of Hayek, who, when I read him sounds like I’m talking to myself – he was just a nicer and more reserved German man than I am as a rather unreserved, obsessively silly Anglo American. 🙂
But if I had to say who influenced me most, that’s an artificial question. I don’t have a favorite color, flavor, or hero. I’m a pagan after all. 🙂 The more the merrier. 🙂
One thing I am sure of though: subject a boy’s mother to stress and fear, and there will be very severe consequences: he will conquer the world to compensate for it. To demand restitution for it. To punish for it. To control for it. 🙂
Cheers
Source date (UTC): 2013-11-12 08:58:00 UTC