You said: do all things "original" come from the center and remain centered?
"That’s an interesting philosophical question." Grok.com
The idea that all things "original" come from the center and remain centered can be explored philosophically, geometrically, and metaphorically, but it’s not a universal rule. Let’s break it down:
Philosophically, "original" things—whether ideas, creations, or entities—often stem from a core or essence, like a seed of inspiration or a central principle. For example, in Plato’s theory of forms, the "original" ideal forms exist in a kind of metaphysical center, with physical manifestations radiating outward but striving to reflect that core. However, these creations don’t always "remain centered."
They can diverge, evolve, or become fragmented as they interact with the world. Think of a groundbreaking idea: it starts from a central insight but often spreads, mutates, or loses its original focus as others interpret it.
Geometrically or physically, the notion of a "center" implies a point of origin, like the center of a circle from which all points radiate equally. In physics, systems like planetary orbits or ripples in water originate from or are influenced by a central point (e.g., a star or a disturbance).
But these systems don’t always stay centered—orbits can decay, ripples dissipate. In biology, a cell’s nucleus might be seen as a "center" of origin for life processes, but cells divide and differentiate, moving away from that initial state.
Metaphorically, "centered" suggests balance or alignment with an original purpose. Creative works, like art or literature, might begin with a core vision but often shift as external influences—culture, audience, or time—pull them away. For instance, a writer’s original story might be centered on a single theme, but revisions or adaptations can stretch it far from that core.
Counterexamples exist: some "original" things don’t have a clear center. The internet, for instance, emerged from decentralized networks, not a single point. Similarly, evolutionary biology suggests life’s origins are diffuse, not neatly centered. Even in human experience, original thoughts can arise from chaotic, non-central processes—like dreams or random associations.
So, while many original things can be said to come from a "center" (a core idea, point, or essence), they don’t necessarily remain centered. The tendency to diverge or decentralize seems just as natural as the pull to stay true to an origin. It depends on the context—philosophical, physical, or cultural—and how rigidly you define "center." What do you think—were you leaning toward a specific interpretation of "original" or "center"?
CHAPTER FIVE
OF THE CENTER
All things ORIGINAL come from the CENTER.
I wrote that in 2014.
At the time I was talking about conservatism, Natural Law, the Constitution and politics.
Today I think I was talking about something considerably larger.
That's one of the benefits of getting old.
You finally have enough distance from yourself to understand what the younger son of a bitch was trying to say. Sometimes.
Let's get one thing out of the way immediately.
When I say THE CENTER, I do not mean the political middle.
I don't mean splitting the difference between Left and Right.
One guy says two plus two equals four.
Another says two plus two equals six.
THE CENTER isn't five.
That's compromise.
Sometimes compromise is necessary.
Sometimes compromise is stupid.
THE CENTER I'm talking about isn't halfway between two competing positions.
THE CENTER is the point of origin.
The place from which something derives its nature.
The original principle.
The original purpose.
The original thing.
That's different.
Very different.
Think about the universe.
Think about an egg.
Think about a wheel.
Think about almost anything organized around an originating point.
I used the yolk of an egg years ago as an example.
Crude?
Sure.
Tony isn't exactly Aristotle.
But I understood what I was trying to say:
There is an origin.
And once you establish the origin, movement can be measured relative to it.
Toward.
Away.
Around.
Return.
Without a reference point, movement means almost nothing.
If I tell you:
“We've moved three miles.”
Your first question ought to be:
From where?
Exactly.
That idea began bothering me more and more as I watched politics.
Everybody talked about moving Left.
Moving Right.
Far Left.
Far Right.
Moderate.
Centrist.
But I increasingly thought the political line itself was misleading.
What if the important question wasn't:
How far are we from each other?
What if it was:
How far are we from the original principle?
Now you've changed the argument.
Completely.
Take the Constitution.
I once described it as:
The CENTER BEAM that supports the house.
That's still one of my favorite Tony metaphors.
You build a house around a structural beam.
Then generations later somebody says:
This beam is inconvenient.
It's in my way.
Move it.
Maybe you can.
Maybe the house survives.
But before moving the damn thing, wouldn't it be wise to ask:
Why did the builders put it there?
That's THE CENTER.
Not worshipping old things because they're old.
Not pretending the Founders were perfect.
They weren't.
Not pretending America perfectly lived its founding principles.
It didn't.
The question is simpler:
What was the original principle?
Then:
Does it still matter?
And finally:
If we're going to abandon it, do we understand what we're replacing it with?
Those are legitimate questions whether you're conservative, liberal, Democrat, Republican or Martian.
This is where Tony's politics sometimes got in the way of Tony's philosophy.
I wrote:
“Conservatism IS Universal Truths put into a political philosophy.”
I wrote:
“Conservatism IS NOT an Ideology.”
Tony THEN believed he was describing conservatism.
Tony NOW sees the more interesting proposition underneath it.
If a principle really is universal, it cannot belong exclusively to a political party.
Truth doesn't register Republican.
Gravity doesn't vote Democrat.
Human nature doesn't check the latest poll before deciding how to behave.
If Natural Law exists—and I believe it does—then politics doesn't create it.
Politics either recognizes it, accommodates it, fights it or attempts to redefine it.
But the thing itself precedes the politics.
Truth IS.
That was what I was trying to get at.
Now we're getting somewhere.
Because THE CENTER connects to another phrase I used repeatedly:
The Human Condition.
And its opposite:
The re-Conditioned Human.
Those capital letters weren't accidental.
I was making a distinction.
There is what human beings are.
And there is what human beings can be conditioned to believe they are.
Nature.
Culture.
Biology.
Environment.
Instinct.
Education.
Experience.
Social pressure.
Some combination of all of them.
I spent years arguing very confidently about where one stopped and another began.
Probably too confidently.
But the underlying question remains important:
How much of human behavior comes from our nature—and how much can culture rewrite?
And if culture can rewrite us:
Are there limits?
That's a CENTER question.
I saw it in myself.
Remember Anthony?
I didn't wake up one morning fifteen years deep into crime.
I moved.
Incrementally.
One compromise.
Another.
One rationalization.
Another.
Eventually behavior that once would have shocked me became ordinary.
Was Anthony's nature changed?
Or was Anthony conditioned?
Maybe both.
But here's what I know:
The abnormal can become normal through repetition.
I've lived that.
You do something once and your heart pounds.
Do it fifty times and you're thinking about lunch.
That principle fascinated me later when I began watching culture.
Things society once considered extraordinary could become ordinary.
Sometimes that's progress.
That's important to say.
Societies can be wrong.
Traditions can be wrong.
Original doesn't automatically mean virtuous.
Slavery is old.
So is murder.
Age doesn't confer morality.
That's why THE CENTER cannot merely mean:
Whatever existed first was right.
No.
The CENTER has to be the principle, not merely the chronology.
That's a distinction Tony NOW understands better.
So how do we identify an original principle?
There's the problem.
I increasingly returned to:
Natural Law.
Not law written by Congress.
Not regulations.
Not court opinions.
Something preceding government.
Human beings existed before legislatures.
Families existed before departments of family services.
Exchange existed before departments of commerce.
Property existed before zoning boards.
Right and wrong were debated before anybody printed a statute book.
The Founders themselves talked in language of rights that weren't being given by government.
Life.
Liberty.
The pursuit of Happiness.
Government wasn't supposed to manufacture those things.
Its legitimacy came partly from protecting them.
That idea grabbed me.
Because I had lost Liberty.
I knew what an unlocked door meant after living behind locked ones.
Maybe the professor understood Liberty constitutionally better than I did.
But I understood a piece of Liberty viscerally.
Again:
The professor knows things the prisoner doesn't.
The prisoner knows things the professor doesn't.
Maybe wisdom requires both.
Family became another CENTER for me.
This is an area where Tony THEN could get loud.
Very loud.
Sex.
Men.
Women.
Feminism.
Masculinity.
Marriage.
Children.
I wrote things designed to provoke.
Some I still believe.
Some I would state differently.
Some were conclusions much larger than the evidence I had for them.
But underneath all the shouting was a question:
Why has the family appeared so persistently across human civilization?
Not:
Has every family been good?
Obviously not.
Not:
Has every marriage worked?
Hell no.
Not:
Has humanity ever had only one family arrangement?
History is more complicated than that.
The question I was wrestling with was:
Is there something about the relationship between men, women and children that civilization discovered through thousands of years of trial and error?
And if there is:
How much can we alter before consequences appear?
Again:
CENTER.
Origin.
Function.
Consequence.
I wrote:
“Woman is EQUAL to MAN, but NOT the SAME.”
Whatever anybody thinks of my arguments surrounding that sentence, the distinction mattered to me.
Equality doesn't necessarily require sameness.
Two things can possess equal value without being identical.
A heart isn't a lung.
Which one would you like removed?
Exactly.
Difference doesn't automatically establish superiority.
Difference can establish complementarity.
That was the principle I was trying to articulate.
Sometimes badly.
Sometimes angrily.
But repeatedly.
Then came another framework.
The Three Lands.
I had been talking about versions of it as early as my radio years.
Eventually I gave them names.
The Land of NOT Enough.
The Land of MORE.
The Land of JUST Enough.
At first I made them political.
Of course I did.
Tony could make breakfast political if you gave him enough coffee.
The Land of Not Enough was populated by people saying:
Give me. I deserve it because I don't have enough.
The Land of More was populated by people who already had plenty but still demanded:
More.
More money.
More status.
More power.
More recognition.
More.
Always more.
Then there was:
The Land of Just Enough.
Contentment.
Not laziness.
Not lack of ambition.
Contentment.
Doing the best you can with what you have while still working toward what you want.
Years later I look at those Three Lands and wonder:
Were they ever really political lands?
Maybe they're human lands.
Maybe every one of us visits all three.
I certainly have.
The addict lives in the Land of Not Enough.
One more.
Then enough.
Except enough never arrives.
The greedy man lives in the Land of More.
One more dollar.
One more deal.
One more victory.
Then enough.
Except enough never arrives there either.
Interesting.
Different roads.
Same destination.
Never Enough.
And standing somewhere between deprivation and excess is:
JUST Enough.
Contentment.
Suddenly my Three Lands started looking suspiciously like THE CENTER.
Not because JUST ENOUGH is the arithmetic midpoint.
Remember—that's not my Center.
It is because contentment may return us to an original human question:
What do I actually need to live well?
Ma seemed to know.
She worked three jobs when she had to.
She didn't call herself oppressed.
She didn't call herself privileged.
She didn't have a philosophical theory about contentment.
She raised her kids.
Did what had to be done.
And kept going.
Maybe Ma understood THE CENTER before Tony ever invented the damn phrase.
Wouldn't surprise me.
I am my mother's son.
One of the great mistakes human beings make is confusing contentment with lack of ambition.
I don't.
I was ambitious.
Still am.
I built businesses.
Made money.
Wanted success.
Wanted recognition.
Wanted people to listen.
Hell, I'm writing a book at seventy-something years old.
Does that sound like somebody finished wanting things?
The question isn't whether you want more.
The question is whether MORE owns you.
That's different.
I once wrote:
“Privilege is a vehicle that goes nowhere fast without the fuel that ambition squared by effort produces.”
Very Tony.
But there's something in it.
Opportunity matters.
Circumstances matter.
Privilege can matter.
So can disadvantage.
But none of them automatically produces an outcome.
Something still has to move the vehicle.
Effort.
Decision.
Action.
There it is again.
I'd rather be WRONG moving forward...than RIGHT standing still.
Everything keeps connecting.
And that bothered me.
In a good way.
Because I hadn't sat down one weekend and invented a unified Tony Philosophy.
These ideas appeared years apart.
Different circumstances.
Different political fights.
Different blogs.
Different radio programs.
Different stages of my life.
Yet when I looked backward, they seemed to be pointing toward each other.
Human Condition.
Natural Law.
Family.
Liberty.
Contentment.
Responsibility.
Action.
Certainty.
THE CENTER.
Maybe I hadn't been creating separate ideas.
Maybe I'd been walking around one idea for decades, seeing it from different sides.
Then another question appeared.
If individuals can move away from their CENTER...
can civilizations?
I had.
Anthony certainly had.
One decision at a time.
One exception at a time.
One rationalization at a time.
Could a country do the same thing?
Could an institution?
Could a culture?
Could something created for one purpose gradually become something entirely different while retaining the original name?
I'd seen organizations do that.
I'd seen people do it.
I'd done it.
Why couldn't civilizations?
That became one of my central concerns about America.
Not:
Is America becoming Left?
Not even:
Is America becoming liberal?
Those are political descriptions.
The larger Tony question became:
How far has America moved from its point of origin?
And immediately another question follows:
What exactly was that origin?
Now the argument gets serious.
Because America was never perfect.
The Declaration spoke universal language while slavery existed.
Liberty was proclaimed while millions were denied it.
Women lacked political rights.
Native Americans suffered enormously.
Those facts don't disappear because they make the story inconvenient.
But here's the distinction I eventually came to:
The failure to live up to a principle doesn't necessarily invalidate the principle.
Sometimes it proves why the principle is needed.
If I proclaim:
All men are created equal
and then fail to treat men equally, the contradiction doesn't necessarily prove equality was wrong.
It may prove I was wrong.
The standard can judge the civilization that created the standard.
That's powerful.
That is CENTER.
Which means returning to THE CENTER doesn't necessarily mean returning to 1776.
I don't want eighteenth-century dentistry.
I don't want eighteenth-century medicine.
And I sure as hell don't want every eighteenth-century social arrangement.
Return doesn't mean reenactment.
It means:
Recover the original principle.
Liberty.
Individual dignity.
Responsibility.
Equal justice.
Government accountable to the governed.
Rights that don't exist merely because government feels generous enough to grant them.
Then ask:
What does that principle require NOW?
That's very different from nostalgia.
At least it should be.
And now we're approaching something I couldn't fully see in 2014.
Manifest Destiny II.
The phrase came later.
The connection came later still.
The original Manifest Destiny was outward.
Land.
Expansion.
West.
A nation physically spreading across a continent.
Whatever judgment history ultimately makes about everything done under that banner—and there is plenty to judge—it described movement outward.
My Manifest Destiny II is different.
Inward.
Not territorial.
Philosophical.
Cultural.
A nation searching for its originating principles after generations of accumulating institutions, ideologies, grievances, technologies, prosperity, failures, victories and contradictions.
Not:
Where else can America go?
But:
Can America remember where America came from?
That, to me, is Manifest Destiny II.
A return toward THE CENTER.
Not backward.
Inward.
But there's a problem.
A very big one.
People don't experience politics as philosophy.
They experience it as culture.
Stories.
Heroes.
Villains.
Music.
Television.
Movies.
Language.
Humor.
Status.
Celebrity.
What's cool.
What's embarrassing.
What's acceptable.
What's forbidden.
What's normal.
What's weird.
What everybody supposedly believes.
Culture gets inside you before most political arguments ever reach you.
I knew that because culture had gotten inside me.
Remember?
I AM the Pop Culture.
And somewhere along the way I became convinced that American politics was no longer simply shaping Pop Culture.
Pop Culture was shaping American politics.
If that was true, then returning toward THE CENTER wasn't going to happen through another white paper.
Another think tank.
Another Republican speech.
Something would have to happen inside the culture itself.
Something—or somebody—would have to reverse the current.
For years I didn't know what that would look like.
Then along came a billionaire real-estate developer, reality television star, celebrity, tabloid fixture and walking Pop Culture machine who decided he wanted to become President of the United States.
And America lost its damn mind.
His name was Donald Trump.
Tony watched.
Of course I did.
Because for the first time in my lifetime, I thought I was watching politics move downstream from a man who already understood how to dominate the culture upstream.
And whether you loved him or hated him...
something had changed.
The Trump Phenomenon had begun.
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