A NEW WORLD COMING INTO BEING

Richard Koenigsberg
  • Beginning approximately nine weeks ago, I began reducing the number of LSS Newsletter Essays I send out each day. This has been my vehicle for conveying ideas to the world. It was extremely gratifying knowing that prominent scholars throughout the world were reading my work and becoming familiar with my theories on Hitler, warfare, genocide—and the psychological meanings of culture and history.
  • There are approximately 14,500 people on my mailing list, which I've developed during the last fifteen years. People on this list include some of the most prominent and accomplished thinkers and writers in the world. My topic is the psychology of culture and history. The focus of my research during the past thirty years has been warfare: the First World War, Hitler’s war against the Soviet Union, and the war between the United States and Iraq; the psychological and culture sources of ideology; and nationalism (the relationship between the human body and the body politic).
  • My target market has been historians, political scientists, anthropologists and sociologists. Recently, however, I’ve focused my writing to reach the substantial number of psychologists and psychoanalysts who are on my list. I'm luring them into the public domain: encouraging them to use their insight to interpret cultural and historical issues; to focus on the “external world” as well as the inner world. Suddenly. this project is taking off. Thanks to Donald Trump, we now are able to imagine a world in which psychopathology becomes normative.
  • Approximately 2000 people "open" each issue of the LSS Newsletter, many scholars opening a particular issue ten, fifteen, even twenty-five times. This means more people read an article published in the LSS Newsletter in a single day than most journal articles are read in their lifetime.
  • Those scholars intent upon having a "voice" are the most enthusiastic supporters of the LSS Newsletter, although I do understand that the job of academics is to get "points to facilitate promotion. The articles of one scholar whose work I've published and promoted has been read over 10,000 times in the last few years. Her most recent monograph, I understand, has sold twenty-five copies. The last article I published in a "refereed" journal was in 2009. I doubt if 10 people read it. 
  • My focus is the pursuit of truth--and inviting others to share this pursuit. I dropped my academic position many years ago after having been promoted to Assistant Professor in Behavioral Science. My objective is to explore and convey ideas and to have an impact upon transforming thought.
  • A partial archive of LSS Newsletters that have been distributed appears here. These include my own publications, as well as papers, articles, essays and lectures by specially selected authors. An archive of authors' essays and papers is here. In addition, our IDEOLOGIES OF WAR, GENOCIDE AND TERROR WEBSITE presents essential documents, papers, and videos.
  • LSS has published papers and essays by some of the finest scholars in the world. I'm particularly grateful for contributions by Daniele Conversi, Brian Crim, Kelly Denton-Borhaug, Yael Feldman, Michael Geyer, David Gornowski, Liah Greenfield, Nicoletta Gullace, Michael McKinley, Adam Henry Hughes, Myra Mendible, Gerald V. O’Brien, Michael Roberts, Murray Schwartz, Tuomas Tepora, David Walker, and David Weddle (among others), and especially to the authors listed directly below, each of whom contributed a number of publications, many authored especially for LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE:
     
  • ALEXANDER CHIRILA
  • ROGER GRIFFIN
  • JEFFREY HERF
  • PAUL KAHN
  • WALTER SKYA
  • IVAN STRENSKI
  • MICHAEL VLAHOS
     
  • I am especially indebted to SCOTT ATRAN for his support and contributions to the Newsletter. We’ve published a substantial number of his groundbreaking papers on the dynamics of terrorism.
  • I’m now shifting my direction: to make my ideas available to a wider audience. I'm in the process of creating a series of lectures that will be presented through YouTube, Podcasts, and radio broadcasts.
  • I didn't want to my ideas to become public too quickly--until scholars had begun to understand and support my efforts. I notice one important thinker got spit on several of times at a Universities because people disagreed with his ideas. One of my colleagues told me he was hesitant to present "facts" in his classroom—because he was afraid he might hurt the feelings students or contradict what they thought they already knew. This came as a shock to me: imagine an academic world in which scholars are afraid to present facts!  My early days were spent at a wonderful Liberal Arts college, Wesleyan University, sustained by the ideal of a "community of scholars." This remains an ideal that cannot be shattered.
  • Recently, in preparation for my YouTube videos, podcasts, lectures, and radio broadcasts--I've been meeting one-on-one with selected individuals to do ZOOM sessions.
  • These sessions have turned out to be a fantastic way of communicating: interacting and sharing ideas in real time. I'm going to have more of these conversations. I look forward to dialoguing with some of you and receiving your thoughts and insights.
  • A new world is being born. Due to the Internet, ideas are being presented directly to an audience. There no longer needs to be a vast space between the creation of ideas and their presentation, e. g., writing a paper for a journal and then waiting one year or more before the paper is read (by a few people).
  •  This does not mean embracing the ideology of TWITTER: instant gratification without serious scholarship for the sake of a few "thumbs up." What is in the process of coming into being is a closer relationship between the presentation or uttering of ideas and their reception. This speeding up of change has created chaos and a great deal of nonsense. But also opens a space for growth and transformation that hitherto had not existed.
  • Richard Koenigsberg