I am pleased to announce my planned publications:

My Plans:
By William E. Steinman:
February 10, 2007:

Recently, I have taken time to develop my plan for expressing my ideas and thoughts about our culture. I believe America is in a downward spiral not unlike the last days of the Roman Empire. I also believe it does not have to be that way. In fact, I have developed a comprehensive plan for turning America around. For that, I have outlined five books that will spell out what I believe is wrong and what we need to do.

Now I am not completely daft yet. I do not expect the people in power to take my effort seriously at all. Quite the opposite. No politician would have the courage to support a plan like this. They would label it too radical and dismiss it with that ever-ready inflammatory word. It’s the safe thing to do. So, I don't expect to make any powerful friends with this series of books. In fact, if anything, I expect to pique the establishment. I intend to rock the boat. My biggest hope is to wake up enough thoughtful people to cause something of a groundswell that will sweep the established power mongers from power.

As I said, I have outlined five books that I intend to produce over the next five years. If I keep that schedule, I will be 80 years old when the last one is completed. So, I really do not have any time to waste. I am already living on what could be called bonus time. That as it may be, I will continue as long as I can.

When I started thinking about which of these books to publish first, it came down to two possibilities. I first thought I should cover spirituality and ethics first. Without ethics, we are no better than animals. However, after further though I finally chose child welfare because if we do not solve that problem, nothing else we do will matter. The next great civilization will arise in China. I have no brief against China, but I would much rather see America become a great civilization again. For that to happen, we must produce a generation of people much better than we are. We must produce a generation of geniuses. We must truly nurture our children as never before. Our children are our most valuable resource. It’s time we started treating them as though we really believed that.

This first book is entitled, Will-Yam in the Land of Giants. It is now complete. You may read about it and the rest of our publications. Click here to go to our publications page.

The second book is entitled, A Place to Stand. It is also complete about a year late. You may read about it and the rest of our publications. Click here to go to our publications page.

 

The third book I have planned will be on the evolution of democracy. That will be a rewriting of my website essay series, which I now call History and Evolution. In that, I trace as best I can the historical events and tendency toward democracy, which lead to the creation of the United States of America. I look at history from a slightly different perspective. Most commonly, human history is recorded as a history of warfare. That is just one way of seeing it. Another way is to see it as an evolutionary process. From that perspective, we can look at some of the individual contributors to human evolution and progress.

I am most interested in the political, spiritual, and philosophical developments of mankind. In particular, I want to examine the various forms of government and their associated philosophies. I want to try to understand how communities develop. My focus will be on our social evolution. This, I believe is the true reflection of the growth of human consciousness. Through this I hope to reveal our future path. I want to answer the questions, where are we going and where should we be going?

There have always been two apparently conflicting needs or drives in the human being. First, to be sure, is the need for stability and safety. This is most compelling for those who do not have these basic things. Without them, nothing else is possible. This is why men create communities and government. The other drive, which seems to conflict with the need for security is the inherent drive toward freedom. Man yearns to be free to be who he is, to be his own person.

It is only through the mechanism of representative democracy that these two drives can meld and become complementary. Only representative democracy provides the kind of stability and safety, which enables the human being to seek his true excellence and genius. Every other form of government man has tried has eventually turned oppressive and/or collapsed into anarchy. Only representative democracy holds out the promise of satisfying both needs.

In the fourth book I will outline what I call the decline of America. The title will most probably be simply The Decline. It will begin with a look at the founders of this republic Then I will look at the progressions of presidents and their administrations along with any other social phenomena that occurred along the way. This should expose any changes in our basic philosophies that occurred over time. The book presents my own theory of how we gradually drifted away from the concepts spelled out in our constitution. This drift away from the rule of law is tightly coupled, I believe, to the gradual loss of our spiritual base and the resultant loss of ethics, which I address in the second book. That will bring me up to our current administration and the total lack of ethics, which confront us at every turn. The ideas for this book are firmly fixed in my mind, but it is currently the least developed on my series. I will continue working on it as time permits.

In my fifth book, I will return to the ideas I present in the first two books. For now, Recovery seems to be a reasonable title. In this, I plan to lay out a procedure for recovery of those values we claim, but no longer actually have. Those are the values, which are best expressed in our Declaration Of Independence. Much of this has simply to do with recovering our ethics and nurturing our children. We must draw out and develop the genius of every child in our culture if we are to be great again. There are a number of essays in The Gaffer's Philosophy series and on the Forum that will be borrowed for this book.

This series is my passion and goal. It is how I expect to spend much of the rest of my life. To survive I believe America must become a blend of the best of Athens and Sparta. If we do not we will be pushed aside by history just as was Greece.