One Mind at a Time

This blog was inspired by Robert Tracinski's series What Went Right (the original website is no longer active but a copy of the first five of six articles can by found here via the Wayback Machine).  The title of the series refers to the premise from Ayn Rand and her followers that the world was set to collapse into chaos similar to the world of her novel Atlas Shrugged.  This prediction was made through the sixties and seventies when indeed the world did seem to be headed in the wrong direction.  But Tracinski points out that in the eighties, things started to turn around and by the nineties, things were looking positive indeed with the fall of communism and the spread of global capitalism.  Ayn Rand died in 1982 so she did not live to see the turn around.  But most of her followers continued to predict doom and collapse despite the changing conditions.  Tracinski digs into the turn around and comes up with some ideas on why things improved.  He believes we can take advantage of that knowledge to further improve the culture and the state of the world.

I think the What Went Right series is great, and this blog will explore many aspects of the series with both positive and negative critiques.  Tracinski's main goal is to understand how one can influence a culture and change it for the better.  My answer--almost a trivial bromide--is that it can only be done "one mind at a time."  However, my answer has many implications, one of which is that a mind can come to the right ideas by many paths, including university education, studying a special science such as economics, reading a novel or browsing a blog.  This blog is a small attempt to help spread good ideas which must be accepted one mind at a time.

The picture of the alphabet above was chosen because, to me, the most important invention in the history of mankind was the alphabet (perhaps I'll write a future post on the second most important invention).  That one invention enabled knowledge to be transmitted throughout the ages to future minds, and enabled us to rise from the agrarian society of the Egyptian Nile delta to the advanced society today with space stations, supersonic jets, nuclear power stations and smart phones that put the combined knowledge of the world literally at our fingertips at a moment's notice.

Part of what when right, in my view, is the continuing advance of technology despite the lousy ideas spouted from the university philosophy departments.