Ideas...

I was just perusing Time Magazine's readers' poll of influential people and ideas...

http://www.time.com/time/2006/time100/walkup/

And I'm becoming clearer and clearer that I plan on writing over the course of my life for the sake of sharing thoughts and reflections and ideas...not for influence...

It's funny...I've lamented, at times, that stronger thinkers aren't consulted about important matters of policy...Francis Fukuyama rightly shows up on the list of those who pollsters consider for their influence...but Joe Nye and Benjamin Barber and Amartya Sen and a whole slew of others don't...

And I'm just clearer, now, that it really doesn't mean anything since most people, generally, have no clue who has better ideas to offer...though the inclusion of Fukuyama is hopeful (if not temporal, since Fukuyama came out with a book more recently than any of those other folks I cited)...

The whole thing...watching the spectacle of Washington and international politics...watching the spectacle of the national and international media...and even having a more inside look at scholarly ambitions for career success and influence...

It's all led me to want to write and teach with very little thought given to profile, at all...

I want to write the way I hoped that folks like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, John Stuart Mill, Jacques Rousseau, John Dewey, Friedrich Hayek, Charles Darwin, and even Joe Nye and Amartya Sen and Francis Fukuyama and Benjamin Barber wrote...it's probably just a hope...but I always hoped that these folks would write with some detachment from the insanity and popular passions of their day...

And just write from their hearts...and minds...

I don't know what I'm going to do with this book...

I just know that I have no interest in a high or any other kind of profile...I want to write...I want to teach...I want to have a family and raise my kids...and I want to have a grounded, down-to-earth life where I write and share my ideas...and live my life in peace, as much as possible...

And I want to write about what's on my mind and heart...about deeper truthes that so many ignore in their quest for short terms advantages...I want to write from conscience rather than from personal calculation...

And as much as possible...I want to live a fairly peaceful life...with people I care about and who care about me...and to myself, much of the time, since I can so rarely rely on people to be as thoughtful and decent as my own company about the things I care about...

I've got work to do, to be sure...

But I'm much more clear, now, that there is no hurry...that there is so much interference in the marketplace of ideas around what ideas really matter...that I can make this a labor of love and wait to see if others find the ideas to make as much sense and have as powerful effect as I have...

The most important ideas are the ones that influence far beyond the moment...and unfortunately that means that many serious mistakes and with sometimes tragic consequences have to occur until the most powerful ideas take root...