- Mamet, David.
The Secret Knowledge.
New York: Sentinel, 2011.
ISBN 978-1-59523-097-3.
-
From time to time I am asked to recommend a book for those who,
immersed in the consensus culture and mass media, have
imbibed the collectivist nostrums of those around them without
thinking about them very much, have, confronted with personal
experiences of the consequences of these policies,
begun to doubt their wisdom. I have usually recommended the
classics: Bastiat, Hayek, and Rothbard, but these works can
be challenging to those marinated in the statist paradigm
and unfamiliar with history before the age of the omnipresent
state. Further, these works, while they speak to eternal
truths, do not address the “wedge issues” of modern
discourse, which are championed by
soi-disant “progressives”
and “liberals”, distancing themselves from “traditional
values”.
Well, now I have just the book to recommend. This book will not persuade
committed ideologues of the left, who will not be satisfied until
all individualism has been hammered into a uniform terrain of equality on
the North Korean model (see Agenda 21
[November 2012]), but rather the much larger portion of the population
who vote for the
enemies
of prosperity and freedom because they've
been indoctrinated in government schools and infiltrated higher education,
then fed propaganda by occupied legacy media. In Western societies which
are on the razor edge between liberty and enslavement, shifting just
10% of the unengaged electorate who vote unknowingly for serfdom can
tip the balance toward an entirely different future.
It is difficult to imagine an author better qualified to write such a
work. David Mamet
was born into the Jewish intellectual community in Chicago and educated
in a progressive school and college. Embarking upon a career in literature,
theatre, and film, he won a Pulitzer prize, two Tony nominations,
and two Oscar nominations. He has written and directed numerous films, and
written screenplays for others. For most of his life he was immersed in the
liberal consensus of the intellectual/media milieu he inhabited and no
more aware of it than a fish is of water. Then, after reaching the big
six-zero milestone in his life, he increasingly became aware that all
of the things that he and his colleagues accepted at face value without
critical evaluation just didn't make any sense. As one with the
rare talent of seeing things as they are, unfiltered by an inherited
ideology, he wrote a 2008 essay titled
“Why
I Am No Longer a ‘Brain-Dead Liberal’ ”,
of which this book is a much extended elaboration. (Read the comments on this
article to see just how “liberal” those with whom he has
come to dissent actually are.)
Mamet surveys culture, economics, and politics with a wide-angle perspective,
taking a ruthlessly empirical approach born of his life experience.
To those who came early to these views, there's a temptation to say,
“Well, finally you've got it”, but at the same time Mamet's
enlightenment provides hope that confrontation with reality may awake
others swimming in the collectivist consensus to the common sense and
heritage of humankind so readily accessible by reading a book like this.
In the Kindle edition the end-notes are properly
bi-directionally linked to the text, but the index is just a useless list
of terms, without links to references in the text.
September 2013 