On visionaries...

Indulge my sensationalist Glenn Beck side for a moment. Great visionaries are not necessarily great humans. They perform better, they pull humanity in directions, that's for sure. They are not, by default, people of high moral character.

Steve Jobs is a visionary, as is Bill Gates. Ghandi was a visionary, but so was Hitler. Alexander the Great and Ivan the Terrible, Ghengis Kahn and Simon Bolivar -- all were great visionaries we can learn about today. Many did horrible things to good people.

We have to have these these balancing forces in the universe, it is part of the ebb and flow of our existence. Knowing how to deal with them becomes a problem for society, and one for the ages. Because as Agent K says, "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." If we really knew how morally bankrupt most visionaries really are, we'd probably live in the nightmare world Kurt Vonnegut imagined in his short story "Harrison Bergeron." Granted, some would adore this notion, but I do not. We learn by pain. If only those learnings could carry on...

So it made me sad today to finally admit that Steve Jobs probably isn't a very moral guy. What he's done with Apple has been great, but the ensuing fear the company has cast (partly due to economic pressures, I grant you) is preventing the truth from coming forward. The only thing we have in this universe is the Truth: the cold, unblinking facts we can vaguely discern through our primitive recording instruments and monkey brains/eyes/ears/etc. By casting a shadow of fear so dense it is preventing the truth about a hardware defect from being reported, he's casting his lot with the despots of history who use secret police to imbue the society with so much fear it simply has no thought but TO COMPLY. That is the very heart of 1984's message, and the irony hasn't been lost on Steve's hated foe: the blogosphere.

Oh well. A network reset seems to have fixed my proximity sensor issues, so there's that.