Credits: Acknowledgement of Sources
My purpose is beginning to inform you so that your willingness and knowledge keep on increasing and result in positive consequences for all. My purpose is not to make a good impression by usurping the work of others. On the contrary, I hold their work as invaluable, and part of my purpose is encouraging you to decide to find out and know much more about it. My intended result is: individuals with their heads screwed back on that do something effective to straighten things up and keep them straight.
Consistent with this is the absence of footnotes and the name of the reference section: “Heartily Recommended Readings”. Both footnotes and references provide the means to examine the subject in greater depth, but some may overlook them; on the contrary, I want you to pay due attention to this call to quest, so the heartily recommended readings here are not just a mere reference, and finding within them what’s touched on here without the shortcuts of footnotes will come as a further reward among the many rewards of sheer knowing about.
To exemplify this importance and acknowledgement, before we get into details, I chose to begin with an unusual overflight, composed with other people’s words; I chose to introduce you the matter by summing it up in these series of quotes where my contribution is selecting and putting them in a row, to hint at that overall picture I wish to wise you up to.
I also chose to cast any label aside and introduce you these people by their names alone, because individuals, circumstances and especially concepts are wider than their labelled facets, and labels are poor approximations liable to overshadow the facet as much as the whole. On the contrary, this absence of labels is aimed at being a further call to quest and to its rewards: who are these persons, where their quotes come from, what circumstances they hint at, what their presence in that point hints at, and what’s more and basically, what does this overflight as a whole hints at, or rather outlines.
Credits: Acknowledgement of Sources, 2
To achieve that, it is also vital a call to evaluate multifaceted persons, passing circumstances and abstract concepts utterly independently from one another, so that nothing is biased by anything else, as only unbiased pieces can put the puzzle together. It’s not a matter of what relationship there is between that individual, that circumstance, that concept; it’s a matter of what relationship there is between each of them, separately, and your objective observation of reality. When you look for children in the bathwater, you carefully discern each item you run across – and its reality.
So, on one hand, be far−sighted and follow hints to see how far they reach and where they lead; on the other hand, be accurate and confront every item for what it is in itself to see it through for real.
And finally, they too did not write these words just to make a good impression; they wrote them to pass on to you ideas and facts with enough precision and clarity and impact so that you realize their importance, and act accordingly. My work pales compared to theirs, and in fact it is aimed at putting theirs together, in your hands, thus joining in their common purpose: you, and I, and all of us with our heads screwed back on that do something effective to straighten things up and keep them straight.
You can skip this overflight if you want; but don’t think it’s a mere tedious preface – something else than the thing we’re here for. On the contrary, it is the very thing itself in its flesh; only, as the overall picture taking shape while flown over in a bird’s eye view before landing in its details. To verify it by yourself and further stimulate your thoughts and ability to grasp and sharpen the overall picture, come back and forth between this overflight and the rest as you go on reading, and compare them. And face them.