The Annapolization of America: A Social Epidemic©
by
Gerald L. Atkinson
1 August 2003
“The Tipping Point is that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate.” So states the cover of a new book by that name authored by Malcolm Gladwell. The context of his book is the social ‘network’ of people who comprise a population such as the American citizenry. It describes a process and the ‘actors’ required to foment a cultural revolution – such as the one which has recently been described by John J. Miller, in the 14 July 2003 issue of National Review. His title is ‘Babylon Comes to Sparta – Have our service academies gotten too modern?’ It has meaning far beyond our nation’s premiere service academies. It is a description in microcosm of what has slowly overtaken America over the past 40 years – and spread in the ‘wink of an eye’ of cosmic time during the 1990s.
At this point, I will give you the text of the article by John Miller — as reference material for this essay. The text follows:
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National Review 14 July 2003
Babylon Comes To Sparta: Have our service academies gotten too modern?
by John J. Miller
Earlier this year, the history faculty on a Maryland campus met to hear a young colleague discuss a paper he was writing. The author hoped to receive feedback and eventually publish his work in a scholarly journal. His topic was the invasion of Iwo Jima in 1945. The junior professor argued that the battle, in which nearly 7,000 Marines lost their lives, was a strategic mistake. Moreover, he said, it was predicated on racial hatred: American forces struck at the island not because it was home to an important air base, but because they wanted to kill a bunch of Nips.
This was nonsense. Iwo Jima was a necessary target whose capture served U.S. interests if only because it became a vital landing strip for B-29 bombers. The fact that a professor would make such a claim should startle nobody, however. The modern academy places a premium on revisionism and believes that much of American history should be viewed through the distorted lens of race. The surprising part is that this paper was delivered at the U.S. Naval Academy, and its author was a captain in the Marines.
The Naval Academy has endured its share of controversies, from organized cheating and crime-ring scandals among the midshipmen to, most recently, the sudden resignation of its superintendent in June. Yet one of its most significant problems has been all but ignored: the clout of civilian professors, who threaten to turn key parts of a unique institution into something not much different from an ordinary college. The situation at the Naval Academy in Annapolis has become bad enough that people closely associated with the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs worry about what they call the "Annapolization" of their schools.
In the American imagination, the service academies are mythic places that have produced a long roster of heroes, from Ulysses S. Grant to Douglas MacArthur. Yet they've had critics from the start -- or, more accurately, from before the start. In 1783, Alexander Hamilton declared that "the benefit of such institutions rarely compensates for the expense -- the military knowledge is best acquired in service." This was almost two decades before the first academy, the one at West Point, was founded in 1802.
Many of the arguments remain unchanged two centuries later. Recent assessments show that it can cost the Pentagon more than $300,000 to mint new officers at the service academies, which is far more than it takes to produce them through the Reserve Officers Training Corps (ROTC) or Officer Candidate School (OCS). The end product isn't necessarily better, either.
Most officers say that it's impossible to distinguish between those who went to the academies and those who didn't. Of the five current members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (there are usually six, but the Army chief recently resigned), only one is an academy grad.
Meanwhile, the service academies experience closer scrutiny than any other undergraduate institution in America -- partly because they fall under the jurisdiction of Congress, but also because each is near a major media market full of aggressive reporters eager to engage in ideological battle over topics such as gender integration. An allegation of sexual harassment at a service academy will earn a hundred times more attention than proof of the same thing elsewhere. As a result, there have been many calls to "civilianize" the service academies. This can be healthy -- and it has been healthy -- when done the right way. Yet some of the motivation springs from a belief that there's something wrong with military culture and that the proper corrective is to infuse it with values held by society writ large: If only 19-year-old fighter-jock wannabes attend enough sensitivity seminars, they'll accept their female peers as fellow warriors and admit them into the band of brothers. Advocates of this approach usually believe that without a draft putting ordinary Americans into uniform, citizens and soldiers risk drifting too far apart. But the current threat at the service academies is exactly the reverse. They risk looking and behaving too much like the rest of America.
One of the aims of a general education is to teach students how to think on their own. A military education, on the other hand, requires officers-in-the-making to absorb the stern discipline of accepting orders without questioning them. Which isn't to say the academies don't try to have both -- or that they take the same route getting there. One of the biggest differences among them is the role of civilian professors: At the Naval Academy, civilians make up about half of the faculty, compared to 22 percent at West Point and 26 percent at the Air Force Academy. This disparity is more than numerical. At Annapolis, the civilian professors wield far more power than their counterparts elsewhere. For one thing, they can gain tenure -- something no professor at West Point or the Air Force Academy has ever received. They also serve as deans and department heads and have much more freedom to design their courses and pick their textbooks.
Controlling new hires is a major perk as well, with civilian job candidates at the Naval Academy likely to be interviewed almost exclusively by civilians already on the faculty. The opposite is true at West Point and the Air Force Academy. "We think it's a little bit unhealthy how the Naval Academy goes about this," says Col. Hans Mueh, vice dean of faculty at the Air Force Academy. At Annapolis, the result is a civilian faculty that looks much like the faculties found on non-military campuses. "There's a striking lack of ideological diversity here," says one Naval Academy professor. "Most of the civilian professors actually opposed the war against Iraq." This, at a place devoted to teaching the next generation of war-fighters.
Although the permanent civilian professors at the Naval Academy are formally subordinate to an active-duty superintendent, they wield a tremendous amount of additional influence because they play a major role in writing the "fitness reports" that help shape futures in the military. A negative one can damage a career -- and the fear of receiving one may explain why a Marine captain in the history department would be so eager to please that he'd write a paper on how the Iwo Jima offensive was a hate crime.
There's a strong case to be made for having civilians comprise a portion of the faculty at the service academies. Almost all of them have Ph.D.'s, whereas the rotating military professors generally possess only master's degrees and sometimes have but a cursory knowledge of the subjects they're supposed to teach. (There are also permanent military professors -- known as PMPs, or "pimps" -- who have doctorates, but they are outnumbered by their temporary juniors.) In addition, seeing civilians in positions of authority prepares students for professional assignments, at the Pentagon and elsewhere, that will require them to take direction from people not in uniform.
The civilians also serve as conduits of new information. "They give us fresh exposure to the latest ideas in their fields," says Col. George B. Forsythe, the vice dean for education at West Point. When the subject is nuclear engineering, this can carry great value. But sometimes it's postmodern literary theory. "The problem is simple," says Seth Cropsey, former Navy deputy undersecretary. "The academic world is controlled by the Left, so of course you'd see it at the Naval Academy."
The question, then, is how to integrate the civilian professors without importing P.C. attitudes. "I think we've struck a good balance here," says one civilian professor at West Point. "We're a military academy with a few civilians, not a regular college with a few people hanging around in uniform." Having a large number of empowered civilian professors begins to change this. "There's a tremendous fear that Annapolis will be seen as a model for the other schools," says Stephen Knott, who taught at the Air Force Academy for seven years. It's not an invented concern: In the 1990s, Congress came close to passing mandates that would have required West Point and the Air Force Academy to have equal numbers of civilian and military faculty -- in short, to Annapolize.
The pressure continues today; many believe that officers belong not in the classroom but in the field. That sounds reasonable, except that active-duty professors are vital to the formation of future officers. They serve as both role models and instructors. "I took a class on the Korean and Vietnam Wars," says Daniel Jablonsky, a 1991 Naval Academy graduate who spent a semester at West Point on an exchange program. "There's nothing like learning that history from a guy who was a platoon leader in Korea and a battalion commander in Vietnam."
Military professors infuse the service academies with an ethos civilians simply can't. This is the culture that makes the academies different from other undergraduate institutions: "a bit of Sparta in the midst of Babylon," as Samuel Huntington has put it. As good as civilian professors can be, they are ambassadors from Babylon. They perform an important function, but it is a limited one. If their presence grows beyond proper limits, the academies will lose their very reason for being. They will be Annapolized -- and destroyed.
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End text of Miller article.
In a nutshell, Miller’s premise is that our nation’s premiere service academies are being forced to follow the lead of the U.S. Naval Academy in essentially purging the ‘warrior spirit,’ the ‘warrior ethos,’ from the training and education of our nation’s core combat leadership. Their education at Annapolis is producing a result that looks ‘too much like America.’ The numerical dominance and relative power of the civilian faculty at the Naval Academy is the touchstone of Miller’s argument. But it is more than that, much more. What we have seen occur at the Academy is an example of a tiny grain of seed -- the seed of the ‘socialization’ of not only the U.S. military, but every institution in the land.
I have written extensively on this subject. Two books, numerous articles published in the FORUM section of The Sunday Washington Times and a voluminous set of essays on this Web Site provide evidence, detailed foundational evidence, that Miller has it just right. Miller’s article may be a tad late, but, finally, the subject has been exposed to a national audience. The problem, however, is much broader and deeper in America than just at the U.S. Naval Academy. The epidemic (started at a much, much higher level than the Naval Academy, indeed, much higher than the nation’s armed forces) has spread across the land – to every institution, including attempts to dissolve the family unit, the basic building block of any long-lasting civilization.
A summary rendition of the spread of this contagion and the ‘actors’ [nodes in a social network] who are responsible for this epidemic follows:
At the U.S. Naval Academy
· ADM Charles Larson, USN (Ret.), the former USNA Superintendent, implemented a New Age Leadership and Ethics program at the Academy, which was designed, directed and essentially implemented by civilian PhD academics (including Ms. Nancy Sherman, Al Pierce, Aine Donovan and others whose publicly avowed mission was to ‘change the souls of twenty-year olds’) as well as a top-level powerhouse ‘Ethics Center’ at the Academy. The latter was to be the vehicle by which a New Age ‘ethics’ would be implemented fleet-wide – directly into the operating forces. ADM Larson’s agenda was further revealed when (after retirement) he ran on the liberal-leftist ticket of Kathleen Kennedy Townsend in the 2002 Maryland gubernatorial election. VADM John Ryan, USN (Ret.) succeeded Larson as Superintendent and carried out the Academy-wide implementation of the new program. In the year-or-so since VADM Ryan retired, two more superintendents have taken the helm in the midst of allegations of rape of female Mids by their fellow dormitory mates – a recurring theme over the span of the last four superintendents. Indeed, there is something wrong with the ‘culture’ at the Academy.
· Mid-level active-duty naval officers, who were eager to carry out this New Age agenda, were recruited to administer it. Those who were resistant to the program were either silenced or banished.
· A covey of retired senior flag-rank naval officers, who were willing to ‘shill’ for the new Leadership and Ethics program were placed in positions of authority at the Academy and in the U.S. Naval Alumni Association. These very well-respected leaders (e.g. ADM Leighton ‘Snuffy’ Smith, USN (Ret.)) took a ‘strong-arm’ position on harboring no opposition from the alumni on this new program. The entire USNA alumni establishment, including the U.S. Naval Institute ‘Proceedings,’ were stocked with people who were ‘with the program.’
In the U.S. Navy at Large
· A slow-but-sure process of ‘democratization’ has crept into the traditional hierarchical command structure of the U.S. Navy. This process was started by civilian activists (on a broader scale) in the aftermath of the Korean War (as a result of the alleged poor performance of many GIs as POWs under North Korean/Chinese captors). It reached its zenith during SecNav Richard Danzig’s reign in the late 1990s. He boasted of ships, including the USS Cole (whose commanding officer was a favorite of the Secretary), leaving port under an all-enlisted bridge watch crew. Books were written by naval officers, touting civilian-inspired management practices employed by mid-level ship commanders (e.g. “It’s Your Ship: Management Techniques from the Best Damn Ship in the Navy,” by CAPT D. Michael Abrashoff, Warner Books, 2002.) Under the guise of Total Situational Awareness in combat training, dual-crewed aircraft were said to be ‘flown’ by backseaters. It is now common for these non-pilots to brag of ‘flying’ the F-14 Tomcat fighter and building up their number of ‘traps’ (carrier landings) when, in fact, they have never ever been at the controls of the aircraft either in flight or while landing on the deck of an aircraft carrier. We have now heard female naval flight crew members publicly exclaim, “Chicks rule,” as their F-14 Tomcat drops bombs (from 15,000 feet altitude) in the enemy-threat-free skies over Afghanistan. Indeed, a civilianized ‘fantasy land’ has been created within the U.S. Naval Academy, naval aviation, and the Navy at large.
· ADM Jeremy ‘Mike’ Boorda, USN, was appointed Chief of Naval Operations with a mandate (from the top through the Secretary of the Navy, John Dalton) to ‘feminize’ naval aviation and combat ships. His hasty implementation of this mandate led directly to the death of LT Kara Hultgreen and the introduction into the fleet of another flawed female F-14 pilot who was later found incompetent in operations aboard ship. The total loss of respect for ADM Boorda by the active-duty fleet ‘warriors’ and retired senior flag-rank officers (especially those of the G.I. generation), as a result of these events, the failure to promote CDR Bob Stumpf due simply to his innocent attendance at the Tailhook ’91 fiasco, and quite possibly Boorda’s role in the early declaration of LCDR Michael Scott Speicher as KIA after having been shot down on the first night of the Gulf Storm War (resulting in a violation of the ‘warrior ethos’ of ‘leave no man behind’) all may have contributed to the cause of Boorda’s suicide in 1996.
· ADM Boorda and many other senior flag-rank naval officers lied to the American people on national television regarding the cause of LT Kara Hultgren’s fatal accident. One of these respected ‘leaders,’ ADM Stan Arthur, USN even announced on ’60 Minutes’ that “we may likely never know the cause of LT Hultgren’s accident,” a bald-faced lie (known to all active duty aviators and those retired aviators who read the accident report online). This, and other indications that the flag-rank Navy cared less for its people than the careers of politicians and those wielding bureaucratic military power, led to the mass exodus of young ‘warriors’ from naval aviation during the mid-to-late 1990s.
· My 1997 book, ‘From Trust to Terror: Radical Feminism is Destroying the U.S. Navy,’ tells the true story of a Wing Commander who over-zealously carried out his mandate as affirmative action officer of the Equal Opportunity Commissariat in the Navy, terrorized his flight instructors who had the audacity to give failing grades to a flawed, unqualified female Student Pilot – even threatening one instructor with an OIG investigation. Many flight instructors, the best ‘warriors’ in the U.S. Navy, voted on his leadership with their feet, and like a host of others, Navywide, left the Navy for good.
· RADM C.A. ‘Mark’ Hill, Jr., USN (Ret.), one of the G.I. generation naval officers who won the Battle of the Pacific in WWII and served as active-duty flag-rank leaders of ‘warriors’ during the Cold War has a ‘corner’ on my Web Site. He is a member of that very close-knit group who call themselves ‘Moorer’s Boys,’ after the legendary ADM Thomas H. Moorer, USN (Ret.). RADM Hill tells me that the situation at the Naval Academy and in the Navy at large has occurred because of corruption at the top. He compares it to card dealers at a gaming casino. He and his contemporaries believed that those who ran the Navy during the past decade and who now run it – at all levels – would have been expected to be ‘honest’ dealers. But they have not been. They have become dishonest dealers. They have been corrupted by the poison of careerism, mixed with post-retirement political and business aspirations, and have not maintained the tradition and the ‘warrior spirit’ that motivated those professionals in RADM Hill’s generation. That is the essence of what Miller explains in his National Review article concerning the service academies.
In the U.S. Military at Large
· Sensitivity training was implemented across all of the armed forces to cushion the shock of the Clinton administration’s attempt to ‘feminize’ the military. Mixed-sex basic training (with its concomitant reduction of physical standards), carried out by the Army for its troops in its support ‘tail,’ introduced a vulnerability that was evidenced by the appalling lack of a ‘warrior ethos’ in its officer leader, during the ambush of the 507th Maintenance Company in which Pvt. Jessica Lynch was captured, taken prisoner, and possibly tortured.
· Naval aviation and Air Force tactical combat squadrons served as long-range artillery for ground troops during the Afghan and Iraq wars. They could be described in the same breath as combat ‘support’ -- just as were cooks, supply clerks and maintenance personnel – releasing weapons in a relatively non-hostile environment, often above 15,000 feet, and suffering zero fatalities due to enemy action – fewer than seen by Pvt. Jessica Lynch and her ‘support’ troop soldiers.
· Had the Clintons and their fellow revolutionaries maintained executive power, we would have seen this corruption spread to the real fighting combat components (the Marines, the Army infantry divisions, Rangers, and the Special Operations Forces), young men -- ‘warriors’ all – who, spectacularly and with dispatch, won the recent mini-wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Revolutionary ‘change agents’ have attempted to make our armed forces ‘look like America’ in a rush to racial, ethnic, and sexual ‘diversity’ in a utopia of their own enlightened imagination.
· All of this has been carried out in a rapid manner – akin to the exponential spread of a virus – by people and social forces that we hardly understand. It is only recently that researchers have found the key to understanding this phenomenon. It has to do with Chaos Theory and its companion, Network Theory. Simplified explanations for these two important scientific approaches are available in terms of ‘The Tipping Point’ concept – the science of surprise dressed in the cloth of epidemics.
In Other American Institutions
· The epidemic has spread over the past 40 years throughout our nation’s elite universities. Unconstitutional speech codes have been invoked, found unconstitutional, and subsequently re-invoked under administrative guidelines that champion the same speech codes.
· The epidemic has spread to our K-12 public schools where situational ethics in the form of ‘values clarification’ have led to the nonjudgmental relativism that justifies nearly any type of behavior. As a consequence of this and the move to afford juveniles the same legal rights as adults has resulted in many public schools becoming ‘blackboard jungles.’
· The epidemic spread to the U.S. Supreme court which, only recently in the University of Michigan cases, legitimized ‘hidden’ quotas in violation of the 14th Amendment to our Constitution. In arguing publicly (ABC-TV, ‘This Week with George Stephanopolus,’ 6/29/03) for the University of Michigan Law School and General Admission decisions, Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer argued that advances in ‘technology’ had required judicial ‘revision’ of the Constitution. Justice Breyer gave the example of the word ‘two’ in the constitution, which authorized two separate congressional branches of the legislature, meant ‘two’ – an unchangeable number – now and at the time of the Founding. But advances in technology – trains, trucks, air transport, etc. – made moot the notion of ‘interstate commerce.’ Consequently, ‘transitory’ provisions of our Constitution could be ‘modernized’ by judicial fiat. Of course, this is only proof that the ‘virus’ has spread even to the Supreme Court. The Constitution says absolutely nothing about technology as the guidepost for governing ourselves. Our Constitution is a document that addresses only human nature, its frailties, weaknesses, and urge to power that underlies the dark beast in each of us. We have only to go back and read John Locke’s treatise ‘On Human Understanding’ to become aware of this truth.
· Many other examples of this contagion exist in the nation’s traditional religious denominations, our foreign policy, the economy, and other fundamental components of our American civilization, including the current tendency toward Empire. They can be explained in terms of ‘The Tipping Point’ concept. I am in the process of describing these examples in terms of the scientific research mentioned above. In this endeavor, I will always be guided by the cogent thought of the late Balint Vaszonyi, who reminded us of the vast difference between the French Revolution which spawned the Franco-German Way during the 20th century and the American Revolution which spawned our prized Anglo-American Way.
· If we Americans are not aware of the difference in these two ‘Ways,’ the people and forces at work spreading this ‘contagion,’ and the mechanism of its spread as described in the context of ‘The Tipping Point,’ then American civilization, a complex, non-linear iterative feedback system (a system which can be expected to exhibit chaotic behavior), will decay into dissolution, despair and ruin. The ‘contagion,’ if not checked and reversed will result in our civilization resting in the dust bin of history, as have all those which have traveled that route before us.
This web site has reached the stage that it is regularly being visited by Google.com, the nation’s leading Internet search engine. Consequently, Google has direct links, not only to this Web Site, but to specific essays on it. As a result, this web site gets over 2,000 ‘hits’ (accessors) each week. These people download the essays, read them, and send them to others in their network of E-mail ‘nodes.’ Consequently, each week tens of thousands of Americans are reading my essays. Each day, about ten-or-so new viewers place this Web Site on their ‘favorites’ list in their Internet browser. The word is getting out. This Web Site is acting as a Connector to those near and far.
In the sense that ‘The Tipping Point’ describes the process by which little things (and little people) can make a big difference, my Web Site and its companion, the Eternal Vigilance journal have played some small part in effecting change. Whether or not it grows into a counter to the contagion described above depends on you. How so?
For example, RADM ‘Mark’ Hill and I publicly exposed the sophomoric and poorly led Character Development Seminars at the Academy, designed by civilian faculty and led by under-qualified senior midshipmen and naval officers – very few of whom had any background in ‘ethics,’ philosophy, or history. In articles in the FORUM section of the Sunday Washington Times, I exposed the dark nature of the New Age ‘ethics’ program in terms of the historical record and the often pointless and wrongheaded ‘lessons learned’ from such films as “Into Thin Air,” (a personal account of the Mt. Everest disaster) on which the Character Development Seminars were centered. RADM Hill, an experienced submarine officer during the Battle of the Pacific in WWII, publicly exposed a film, ‘Das Boot,’ in the same seminar series, especially in its central feature – the primary point of the movie – regarding the quality of personal leadership displayed by the courageous captain of the ship and his men. The civilian seminar leaders (and the young naval officers involved) got it all wrong. The inmates were running the asylum. Civilian influence had essentially corrupted the central core of the curriculum. Only by the PUBLIC exposure of this calumny did the Academy remove such films from the seminar curriculum.
Another example. John Howland – the former President of the Greater Chicago area USNA Alumni Association – invited me to speak before his group several years ago. As a result of information I dug up on Peter Singer and published on my Web Site, John was able to convince ADM Chiles, the current holder of the Distinguished Chair for Leadership at the Academy, to remove Singer’s text from the required reading list in the Ethics Curriculum at the Academy. In addition, Victor Davis Hanson, the distinguished scholar of Greek Classics, was added as a visiting professor of History at the Academy – in part, at the urging of John Howland. This was accomplished because John is a Maven (one who seeks knowledge) and he is a Connector in the sense of ‘The Tipping Point’ context of describing epidemics. The author of that book points out that Paul Revere was successful in spreading the word, ‘The British are coming!’ to a large number of militia because he was both a Maven and a Connector. William Dawes, who carried the same message at the same time as Paul Revere’s ride, was not successful in spreading the word. Why? Because Dawes was a Maven but he was not a Connector. To understand the different results for the two ‘midnight rides,’ you may wish to read the book, ‘The Tipping Point.’
There are other Mavens and Connectors among you who have great potential to start reform movements on your own. Two graduates of the 1953 Class at the U.S. Naval Academy, Tom Schaaf and George Jatras, are starting a counter to the contagion of lies that covered up the cause of the Israeli attack on the USS Liberty which resulted in the death of 34 sailors and wounded 171 others. The issue of ‘Friendless Fire’ was raised in the June 2003 issue of the U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. Letters to the editor graced the pages of the July issue. A thunderstorm of discussion arose in the Internet, regarding the ‘coverup’ of the cause of the attack, its brutal and purposeful nature, and its reverberations through the community of naval personnel who were connected to the event. Tom Schaaf’s letter, concerning this saga, may be published in the August 2003 issue of the ‘Proceedings.’ The truth concerning the attack on the USS Liberty may just get out to the American people as a result of this discussion.
RADM Bill Smedberg, USN (Ret.), a 1951 graduate of the Naval Academy, is working very hard to get the truth out on the wrong-headed rush of our nation’s leaders to place women in combat positions in our armed forces. He is a leader of a small group of alumni who oppose the steps being taken by the Alumni Association which amount to the ‘socialization’ of the U.S. Navy – and in the larger landscape, the ‘socialization’ of the entire U.S. military. RADM Smedberg had the courage to overrule his board of directors for the Jacksonville Area chapter of the USNA Alumni Association in March 2001 and invited me to speak to the members on the subject of ‘Women-in-Combat.’ Members of classes from the early 1930s to the 1991 class attended. It was well received by a full house at a dinner attended by over 78 members and their wives. A lively and informative discussion was held on the subject. The word was being spread.
These Mavens, Connectors, and others may just be the core of a counter-epidemic of reform that will save the U.S. Navy from itself. Others of you may just be the people who contribute to saving American civilization from itself. We are almost to the point where we think we understand what is happening to our constitutional republic and what must be done to preserve it. In so doing, it may be essential to learn something of the ‘science of surprise’ and how such movements form, grow, and produce a positive result. But we are way behind the opposition and have a long road to travel to catch up.
All of us could learn from the fundamental points of Chaos Theory and Network Theory, which work in conjunction to show that large results can flow from relatively small starting points using the metaphor of epidemics. And it can happen in the ‘flick of an eye,’ just as epidemics spread. Any one of you, or a small group of you, can make a big difference. You simply have to know of and understand a few simple principles: the three rules of epidemics (The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and the Power of Context) and the role of Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen. You can find a detailed description of the nature of these participants in Gladwell’s book. For those of you who may wish a deeper understanding of the subject, please refer to the linked sciences of Network Theory and Chaos Theory. They are described in detail on this Web Site.
In the meantime, I will be building on ‘The Tipping Point’ explanations of how social epidemics (as described above) start and rapidly spread through a population and how counters to these epidemics can be constructed. I will address all of the topics (as I did in my first book, ‘The New Totalitarians) delineated above. I will build on the connection of Gladwell’s fine book to the sciences of Chaos Theory and Network theory in attempts to explain, in terms of the ‘science of surprise,’ what is happening to our American civilization in this New Age brand of totalitarianism. These explanations appear on this Web Site at the links underlined in blue above.
This stuff is NOT conspiracy theory. It is evidential, based on empirical evidence and objective history. It is real. It has a scientific foundation. It is important today. It can serve as guide to those of us who wish to preserve the Anglo-American Way.
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