Over the past few years, I’ve noticed a lot of full page advertisements in a variety of magazines composed mostly of text, having a small picture of an old 1950’s-style white guy named Richard W. Wetherill. Every now and then I’d try to read some of these ads, but they never seemed to say anything all that interesting. Whoever is behind these ads (the Richard Wetherill Foundation, I gather) obviously has a lot of money, and just keeps on posting them. A quick web search shows that these ads have appeared in Scientific American, Discover, Popular Science and Science Illustrated; the Foundation people are obviously aiming at scientific rationalists. But they have also hit The Smithsonian and The Atlantic at times, trying to broaden their audience a bit (but still aiming at the more educated reading population). <\/p>\n
Well, persistence pays off; after 3 or 4 years of seeing these ads, I finally took a few minutes and tried to focus on their message. I also tried to find out a bit about Mr. Wetherill himself, who died in 1989, over 20 years ago. I’d also love to know just who is behind the big push to popularize Wetherill today. But as to Wetherill, he worked for a big railroad car manufacturer in Philadelphia, the Budd Company, as a training executive back in the 1940s. That was back when unions were powerful. I gather that Mr. Wetherill was concerned with union-management and employee-management relationships, which could be rather tumultuous. Well, at some point he decided to quit his job and become a management consultant. Later, he became a prophet, a “man with a message”. (The guy came from Jersey, but must have tapped into an old Main Line family with $$$, which probably pays for all the ads you see out there today). So he wrote all these books to get his message across.<\/p>\n
Just what is that message? His ads talk about natural laws of behavior and laws of absolute right. This all has something to do with how people should get along, how political and social and business relationships should be carried out and how the systems behind them should be designed. One key tenet is that people resent being told what they can and cannot think, say and do, feeling that this is their own business. Wetherill feels that there is something wrong with this notion, as it “overlooks where the gift of life originates”. Things would supposedly be much better if everyone instead knew the “law of absolute right” (he originally called it “humanetics”) and did things in accord with this law. So, we shouldn’t make life up as we go along, we should instead consult this “law” that “was not identified until the past century by Richard W. Wetherill”. That would be the rational and honest thing to do, according to the Wetherill doctrine.<\/p>\n
I still don’t totally understand what this “law of absolute right” is, but the whole thing seems to reek of Taoism. I’d love to know whether Mr. Wetherill had studied the Tao Te Ching. The Tao, like Mr. Wetherill’s ads, can be profoundly obscure; but it is thankfully much less verbose. It basically says that there is some sort of “natural law” behind everything — The Tao. Can we know this law? Yes and no. What we can know of it should guide us and our social and political interactions. The Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu is not a detailed roadmap, but it does leave you with pearls of wisdom about being effective by not trying too hard, about governing through non-governing, about letting things take their natural course and not mucking them up too much with immediate human concerns and passions. E.g., “Tao abides in non-action, yet nothing is left undone; if rulers observed this, things would develop naturally”. “That which fails must first be strong; before receiving there must be giving; soft and weak overcome hard and strong; and a country’s weapons should not be displayed”. “Know the strength of a man, but keep a woman’s care”.<\/p>\n
I could go to Mr. Wetherill’s web site and download hundreds of pages of his writings (for free). But I think that I’ll stick with Lao Tzu’s elegant little Tao, and some occasional passages from the somewhat more verbose Chuang Tzu. You probably get the same wisdom about living in accord with natural intent, but in a more artful and poetic way, by consulting Chinese literature that is 2,500 years old. If I only had the same blue-blood bucks that Wetherill’s family does, I’d take a full page ad out right next to theirs saying — “It’s all been said before, and much more elegantly! Read the Tao!” <\/p>\n
And that would be it. The rest would be blank white space. For you to fill in the blanks. <\/p>\n