Guns of the Self

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Dear Readers,

  Something on my mind of late is radical self-reliance.  I know that there is an undercurrent in your time stream that suggests detachment from the norms of society, withdrawal from the production schemes and the military-industrial complex, and a variety of different self-industry paradigms.  There are interesting, and I think that your society is at a turning point between traditional ideas and these new ideas.  I do not wish to comment much on the different possibilities that may result therefrom.  I do attempt to keep some semblance of detachment, even from a time stream as dear to my heart as your own.

  It is interesting to me, however, that this is a movement born not of policymakers, militaries, or intellectual writers.  This is a movement of people who showed up in the desert one day, who took apart televisions, who simply found each other through the great electronic social connectors that your time stream has produced.  There is Burning Man, there is the Maker Movement, there are a wide variety of new wave scientific and industrial pushes that put a neo-industrial spin on the transcendentalist views expressed by Emerson in Self-Reliance.

This current of society fascinates me, as it is in large part a founding principle of the University.  We are the children of a displaced Empire, either originally born within it or adopted to it as something like time has pressed on through its annals.  By necessity and by mission the University of Constantinople is reliant only on itself.  It produces just a little more than it consumes.  It stands on its own legs and dares the forces that swirl in time to break it down.  Perhaps they will.  But we cannot be erased, for the fleeting time that we exist.

I know a time stream that may lie in your own future where Universities will become something similar to what the University of Constantinople has become: islands of self-reliance in a sea of Hobbesian chaos.  A sample is below the jump, in the form of a primary source letter from a University President to another.

  Always,

  Dr. John Skylar
  Chairman
  Department of Anachronism
  University of Constantinople