The Politically Incorrect Show - 20/07/2001

[Music - Die Fledermaus]

Good afternoon, Kaya Oraaa & welcome to the Politically Incorrect Show on the free speech network, Radio Pacific, for Friday July 20, proudly sponsored by Neanderton Nicotine Ltd., the show that says bugger the politicians & bureaucrats & all the other bossyboot busybodies who try to run our lives with our money; that stands tall for free enterprise, achievement, profit, & excellence, against the state-worshippers in our midst; that stands above all for the most sacred thing in the universe, the liberty of the human individual.

[Music up, music down!]

A delightful acquaintance of mine, & writer for The Free Radical, Tim Sturm, passed on a question to me yesterday that he had been asked by a publisher - is there a book in Perigo? I say "delightful" because I can't think of Tim without belly-laughing. He is one very bright boy, who exudes a sense of good-naturedly wicked mischief of the kind I find irresistible. He also blushes easily when teased, which only encourages me. I especially can't resist teasing him about the terrible handicap with which he is afflicted - the fact that he is studying economics, where one is required to spend years trying to state the obvious in the most abstruse way possible without ever succeeding. I derive similarly perverse pleasure from teasing the Business Roundtable's Roger Kerr that he feels naked without an OECD report or some cost-benefit analysis of something-or-other tucked under his arm. But I digress. Is there a book in Perigo? Well, there already has been one, of course, Perigo! Politically Incorrect, by Deborah Coddington, published a couple of years back by Radio Pacific (of which, incidentally, there are still copies available).

Deborah interviewed me at length for that book, & did so very skilfully. She had me laughing, crying, & saying things that I didn't regret. Since then, I've built up a huge arsenal of things I'd like to add - things derived, often, from conversations on this very programme. And actually, I'm BURSTING to say them. Problem is, I haven't yet figured out a way to say them without MYSELF appearing to be abstruse. I'm conscious as I say this that even the word "abstruse" is possibly sending some of you scurrying for your dictionaries. This is not meant as a criticism, but to point up a dilemma I have been pondering more & more in the two years since Deborah's book was published. You see, I'm more convinced than ever that the world is screwed up because of bad philosophy, which has presented mankind with a bunch of phony alternatives: reason versus emotion, head versus the heart, spirit versus the flesh, soul versus the body, objectivity versus passion, information versus entertainment, love versus thought, technique versus feeling, method versus content, the abstract versus the concrete, heroism versus foibles, reverence versus humour, security versus freedom, & on & on. Equally, I'm convinced that if mankind can be alerted to these false dichotomies, the human condition will improve immeasurably. But how to do it? There's the rub!

These dichotomies, as it happens, have already been busted by one of my personal heroes, Ayn Rand - but she did so (in her non-fiction writing at least) in terms of "intrinsicism" versus "subjectivism," "rationalism" versus "empiricism," etc., which I'm sure already have your eyes glazing over. Yet no truths are more important than the truths she uncovered. And there is nothing more urgent than to get those truths "out there."

So yes, there's a book in Perigo. Not about his scandalous love life or Vesuvian confrontations, which might sell well but amount to little (there's that dichotomy at work again) - but in what he has learned about life & could impart to others. He just has to figure out how to make it it accessible. Watch this space!

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