§ 7.6 Political and Business Cautions

As a final note, I wish to reinforce the reader's commonsense as regards sociopolitical and business matters.

If you hear others speak negatively of a particular individual, company or institution, I strongly suggest you not dismiss the target of the remarks based totally on negative "intelligence", but consider it as just one person's or entity's thrust. Information of all kinds is usually useful and appreciated, but countless times I have found people's perspectives and information to be biased, distorted and/or grossly incomplete. Verify information, especially before you repeat it to others. In fact, I've found a number of people with the same opinion, all based on one faulty source. Consider the biases or interests of the source(s). Sometimes a statement tells more about the source than the target.

Even from purely scientific and technical circles, with practically no political or business agenda, I've had to revise a lot of information in this book due to helpful and highly competent professionals innocently being mistaken in their technical or historical facts. There is also a lot of disagreement between professionals, but the best of them will be humble and not authoritarian or overconfident in their speech and e-mail statements on debatable issues. Sources who are not overconfident in demeanor are often the most objective and reliable.

In a generally different realm, that of political and business matters, the quantity of misinformation and extremely one-sided statements which I have gathered has been disconcerting. There are many honest and fair-hearted people in this business, but there are also quite a number of schemers. Sometimes, schemers believe their own bull, i.e., believe what they want to believe, and are egotistically defensive. I guess you can't call that dishonest, but I would call it misleading.

The vast majority of scientific researchers and business leaders I have known in the space resources field have been highly developed individuals who have rarely, if ever, exhibited these traits. The space advocacy organizations also appear to have flushed out most of the self-aggrandizing and arrogant people of the mid-1980s and replaced them with respectful and respected individuals in the 1990s and for the next millenium.

However, human nature being as it is, there are always people around who can mislead. If history is indicative of the future, there will always be activists and middle level professionals (for the most part) passing along information that is biased, incomplete, or outright false, and questionable information will often be repeated far and wide.

In the end, you have to judge and think for yourself what's right and what's not.

I'd like to end this article on a quote by Dick "Duss" Dusseldorp, the founder of one of my clients, the Australian blue chip company Lend Lease Corp.:

"There are two things in life. You can be out for the maximum amount of profit you can possibly squeeze from your efforts, or you can aim at a reasonable profit and have the feeling when you retire that you've left something behind."