Authors typically provide detailed bibliographies to underpin the quotes or claims they make. I have intentionally taken the approach with the book Destiny to ignore that practice. That does not mean my sources of information are ethereal. It means too many people, in too many contexts, have provided me food for thought over more than 50 years, and I would surely fail to recognize some of them.

Some are from books, some from the classroom, and yes, some from radio, television and newspapers, and many from observing people in action and asking fair, if pointed, questions. If you must, consider Thomas and Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, Alvin Toffler, Thomas Hobbes, Aristotle, Socrates, Thomas Jefferson, Vance Packard, Henry David Thoreau, Isaac Asimov, the Bible, the Koran, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed, Gary Larson, Ayn Rand, Gene Roddenberry, Martin Luther and Martin Luther King, Jr., Mike Royko, Francis Bacon, Richard Feynman, Galileo, Leonardo Di Vinci, Karl Marx, Watson and Crick, Christian Bernard, Isaac Newton, Lawrence Peter and Raymond Hull, Allan Bloom, Howard Zinn, Lester Thurow, Albert Einstein, Nelson Mandela, Carl Sagan, etc., as all having some influence in my development and in the considered formation of my world view and my cosmic view. There are hundreds of others whose names I should include for fairness, but you get my point. I have not quoted these individuals directly, except for Marx and Thoreau, but I have used some of their thoughts and behaviors to help develop my own viewpoints and to create the challenge of Destiny. You can choose to study the writings and other forms of communication of the above people and many others to the extent of your interest to grow.

It is essential to study opposing viewpoints on all non-trivial subjects to look for threads of commonality on issues the writers don't necessarily know they address, for the real issues are often tangential to their intent and understanding. Destiny is clearly an inversion of our traditional views regarding God, and the Destiny view could not have been conceived without numerous, tangential intersections resulting from my lifelong study of humans in action throughout history. It is what we failed to acknowledge that pointed the way to what we must acknowledge, based on the repetitious failures of ourselves and our ancestors in metaphysical, epistemological and human development terms.

It is also essential to study opposing viewpoints on all non-trivial subjects to develop even the basis for objective thinking, and then to subject each tentative conclusion to raw, unbiased and telling tests in real life. If you simply follow one course of philosophy, religion, ideology or technical endeavor, or read only the opinions of individuals and organizations that agree with each other, you will not be objective. You will not gain holistic wisdom. You will miss the opportunity to improve your understanding of life, for proximate ignorance is almost the same as total ignorance, and sometimes worse, when we make wrongly informed decisions.

I hope that the references I have identified help you in your quest for knowledge. I have tried to provide the names of some key humans above who have pushed the envelope of our knowledge or explained complex processes to laymen, or helped us understand human foibles, and key books that have had numerous, well intentioned contributors as authors. All of these and many others have helped me to develop my understanding of Humanity and our experience of life.

I am obviously interested in stimulating you to reconsider aspects of life that I find too few people thinking about. That truth is evident by what I hear people actually talking about. Your own curiosity can lead you to read and to ask questions, and hopefully to act. I will respond to direct and honest questions when I see an Internet forum develop.

I do not care about fame. The value of Destiny is in the realizable concepts for the future of Humanity, in entelechy, not in the name John Wright and not in the word destiny. Recognize, as I do, that there are others superior to me in various areas in intellect and topic specific experience. I do not care that history will quickly forget me as an individual. I do care that all of you have an opportunity, as I have had, to learn and to grow and to help us advance.

The initial activities that led to me writing Destiny were somewhat unexpected. A few years ago, I found myself with some free time after the completion of a major project. That free time was much like an academic sabbatical, in that I was not compelled to do any specific work. Instead of indulging myself in hobbies, I found myself writing an early version of the Human Condition chapter. Once started, I was determined to identify sensible solutions to our age-old problems of ignorance and poor use of power. Thus, I realized that I was about to create a philosophical and ideological work, and that became a major, personal challenge in itself.

I made a conscious decision to avoid studying or reviewing the work of other philosophers, for I wanted my effort to be as original as possible. I had not read any formal philosophical texts in over thirty years, with the exception of Ayn Rand's books. I had arrived at a point in my life where I had gathered much of the experience that young people lack. I was settled and secure, and I had successfully met all of the life injunctives that had been my challenge from my youth. I also bore the scars of the battles that I lost and the pain of self-knowledge about my own limitations. In short, I sensed a demanding challenge to produce an organized statement of what I had learned about life, with the goal of advancing Humanity. I responded to that challenge, and Destiny is the result.

Since writing Destiny, I have taken the time to compare and contrast my work to that of earlier and contemporary philosophers. It is hard for me to believe that my choice of topics was so well aligned with that of other philosophers, and from that post-creative analysis I have learned, yet again, the timeless nature of our higher human concerns. I happen to be pleased with Destiny, for it turns out to represent a true distillation and synthesis of valuable thoughts from many philosophers, and many other high contributors to human advancement, as well as my own life experiences. It appears that I "cherry-picked" the best of their ideas, and to some extent my foundation learning experiences of youth did include exposure to other philosophers works, but never before did I attempt true and formal synthesis of their conflicting opinions and my own experiences.

Without a doubt, however, I am certain to hear about Destiny "errors and omissions" from readers, for Destiny reads more like an ideology than a philosophy. I spent less time fussing over the detailed conceptual proofs than our typical philosophers did, past and present, and I will be accused of nothing more substantial than "armchair" philosophy. In fact, the other philosophers already did the essential groundwork to the best of their abilities, and my task was made easier because of their work, so I concentrated on the rational, summary meaning of their efforts. I recognized even in my youth that philosophers were uniformly guilty of creating intellectual fluff when their life experiences did not support the development of the concepts they insisted on creating for "completeness." I was determined to overcome that critical limitation by honest acknowledgement of my intellectual and experiential limits, while focusing on those areas of human life that I do understand well.

As I reflect now on the result of my efforts, I am satisfied, and I am full of gratitude to others for helping me create Destiny. It seems that the germ of creativity and the challenge of originality are tempered best by the balancing thoughts of intelligent and experienced contemporaries and historical figures of widely differing backgrounds and opinions. Could it be that I unconsciously combined the best, already expressed thoughts of others, and am merely one of the many guilty of confusing original thought with wholesale plagiarism? How can that not be true? Is this not the true process of advancing human knowledge, i.e. combining the best of the past and the present with new integrating concepts?

I specifically hope you understand that Destiny and Destiny are my legacy to all of you. Let us always keep our legacy in mind as we move into our future. Our legacy to our children is our highest calling, even to all the children living and yet to be born, humanoid or beyond.

Do unto others, as you would have them do unto you.

Seek Destiny.

Peace.