Barnett wrong about personal limits

If you've followed my other blogs - which are heavy on self-help and improving personal ability - you see that I consider personal ability to be unlimited and that a person is constantly learning and re-programming himself, even up to the "last moment" on earth.

Barnett is one of the few to get the point that only the people who think they are separate from everyone else are trying to hold the rest of us back. Only their thinking is keeping them isolated. Free commerce and entrepreneurs are trying to get their products into those countries and as well put their factories there - giving a better quality of life with steady, better paying jobs for everyone.

These minority few are creating their own bizarre worlds full of violence. It was they who launched the first salvo. It was very correct to have these wars take place on their own lands - where there is justice, the cost of it is borne by those who have to witness the crimes.

But Barnett negates his own vast abilities when he thinks he will be beyond his own curve when he gets past 60. Factually, he is just hitting his prime. As he stays connected, he'll stay relevant. And we deperately need relevance in this day and age.

Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog: "Anyway, after the talk, I realized that if the Boomers' strategic imaginative moment was historically limited, that's no different from any generation, including mine and Obama's.

I got this first from Karl Marx himself, who said that any theoretician/visionary/whatever is always limited by his generational experience (actually, Marx's argument was about stages of history relating to capitalism's emergence), the simple concept being: we all eventually lose it.

I will lose it, probably in my early sixties. I know this, and my sense of a timeline forced by events beyond my control is no better or worse than Osama bin Laden's. I know the clock is running on me, and that soon enough, I'll lose the ability to think beyond the conventional wisdom, so infused will I be in it myself.

So another good reason to get Vol. III ('release the inner grand strategist in you!') down in print at the height of my powers, before the strategic Alzheimer's kicks in."