Darwin

The cult of Darwin continues to grow. by this I mean that basically there are three types of people in the world – people who think Darwin was the biggest intellectual of the 20th century, people that think Einstien had the most influence, and people who think Freud was number one.

I would guess that Einstien is the most popular – not only becuase he did change everything, but also because he looked cool & no one really understands exactly what he did.

Darwin gets a lot of votes for the whole evolutionary thing – which I am pretty sure exists in Plato (but I could be wrong – it may be Aristotle). mostly anti-christians vote for this – the whole Darwin thing is very popular. Also a vote for Darwin shows that you are bucking the convention of Einstien – you know you are a rebel outsider who is smarter then a christian. Robert Ebert, the hilarious film critic, votes for Darwin.

My cube neighbor votes for Einstien.

I vote for Freud. I can understand him. he changed everything. he is fun. but mostly I vote for him because he created what we mean by human. he validated the long standing belief that there are inalieble human rights – like the right to bristle at spelling errors – he demonstrated that what it means to be human does not disappear (no matter how horrible our actions), he clarified the importance of childhood. And most of all he had fun – and not fun at someone elses expense, but real fun in the world – figuring out stuff – determining how the mind actually works. Freud is the ultimate pragmatist – his science was a science of doing – not of observation, not of theorizing – he actually had a couch in his office and tried this stuff out on reall people, with real problems, in real time.

and it worked.