DickManagement.com
Title
How to Manage your what
Description
The story of DICK Management began nearly thirty years ago when I was exposed to the writings of Aristotle, Plato and Aquinas by an extraordinary teacher at the University of Dallas in Texas. Frederick Wilhelmsen was a larger than life character who drank and smoked his way through philosophical discourse with the gusto that one normally reserves for the libertine. He was a man consumed by the power of truth and lived his life as if discourse with metaphysics was dearer than blood. He passed on his love for metaphysics and his passion for the truth to many of his students. Some of these students Dr. Wilhelmsen knew well, others he knew only in passing. I was in this latter group, but unlike many of his students, I slipped into the jet stream of his energy and rode his mind like a man on a comet. DICK Management is the ultimately the story of how, as the Chinese say, a good teacher affects eternity.
A few years later, as a volunteer, I tried to pass on what I learned by teaching the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas to inmates at Lorton Federal Penitentiary. Aristotle's philosophy of self-restraint, of virtue defined as "remembering what you really want" or "management of the appetites by right reason" was completely foreign to the inmates. Instead, their lives were managed by raging testosterone storms, with violence, wild sexuality and the inability to make good choices all rolled up together. "I've done a lot of bad things in my life. I just want to know why,” said one inmate. There was a complete absence of a philosophical framework that would help to make sense of life, and more than that, to give them the tools that would lead to a better life.
Not long afterwards, I saw the same philosophical vacuum in the realm of politics. In the 1980's, I worked as a political gadfly with an Israeli activist in Washington D.C. and saw first-hand the confusion engendered by the declining common philosophical heritage of the West. Israelis, Palestinians and Americans seemed to speak an Alice in Wonderland political language that served only special interest groups at the expense of the larger good of the people.
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