Many of the Patrick Gunkel materials I will be sharing via this newsletter over the coming months are original and have never been seen by the public before. They are based on my own archival research. I’m able to distribute this material by permission granted by Gunkel’s family. However, this material may not be copied, stored, reproduced, or disseminated without such permission. Excerpts can and should be used for scholarly research, however.
In one of Gunkel’s early lists, called “TYPES OF PERSON TO MEET,” a young Gunkel identified over 70 types of people that he wished to meet and even name-checked a few specific important people.1
Although I don’t know when this list was written—it’s undated, as with many of Gunkel’s materials—it’s reasonable to assume he drew the list up sometime in his teens or very early 20s.
The reason I know this is that one of the named individuals on the list—Herman Kahn, who Gunkel listed twice as both a “great man and genius” and an “Éminence grise”—ended up becoming Gunkel’s mentor, friend, and financial lifeline.
Kahn was a well-known futurist and a very important part of Gunkel’s story.
Kahn has also been called “the real Dr. Strangelove” given his role in kickstarting the national conversation about how to “win” a nuclear war with his 1961 book, On Thermonuclear War.2
As reported in David Stipp’s 1987 Wall Street Journal article,3 Gunkel walked into Kahn’s office and was hired as a Hudson Institute consultant after “a single rap session.” According to an unpublished article by Austin writer Jo Zarboulas, this happened in 1969, meaning the list almost certainly predates that encounter.4
What’s important to understand about this list, however, is that Gunkel wasn’t just fantasizing.
He was creating an operational plan.
For many of the types of people Gunkel listed, he did end up meeting them as a young man.
And he met them exactly the way he met Kahn—barging into their office, their workplace, simply going up to them and requesting a chat.
What Else Does the List Show?
A close reading of the list also reveals a few extremely interesting Gunkel quirks.
For example, Gunkel’s “messianic impulses” (as he called them) are on full display given that, for entry 37 (“Visionary"), he listed his own name along with the names of “visionaries” such as R. Buckminster Fuller, Mao Tse-tung, and the space colonization enthusiast Gerard K. O’Neill.
Gunkel’s wicked sense of humor is also on display, given that he made reference to himself as a potential charlatan, cultist, and pseudoscientist, including “Gunkelist” as one of the potential people in this category that he would like to meet.
(Am I a Gunkelist? I’m not sure. I never met Gunkel in person, but I do consider myself the world’s preeminent scholar of this authentic American genius. I moreover disagree with the idea that Gunkel ought to be dismissed as a charlatan or other similar deluded individual, as the young Gunkel himself was probably half-seriously suggesting.)
It’s critical not to overlook the bigger picture that Gunkel is hinting at with this list as well—by this I mean, the format of the list itself and Gunkel’s obsession with expansive categorization and taxonomy creation.
To my knowledge there’s no word for someone who obsessively makes lists, although it’s certainly a behavior associated with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD).
Note: I have the right to disseminate this material. It may not be copied, stored, reproduced, or disseminated without express written permission. However, excerpts can and should be used for scholarly purposes.
But let’s put aside the question of mental illnesses or disorders that may have afflicted Gunkel—he probably could have been diagnosed with several—and let’s spend some time thinking about lists.
Here’s the Thing About Lists
We use lists every day—shopping lists, to-do lists, lists of friends, lists of enemies.
We use them so much that we forget how powerful they are.
Lists help organize our world.
Lists can be exclusionary—limiting our options to only a select group of choices and excluding everything else—or they can be inclusive (i.e., representative of a group of things while not denying the existence of other things).
Lists are a tool for thought.
And when the order of list items matter, a list begins to take on very useful, multidimensional properties: a ranked list shows us a group of ideas in order of importance; a list of directions shows us a group of ideas in order of sequence.
There’s a deep connection between lists and knowledge.
Mnemonics, the study and development of systems for improving memory, is an ancient practice that we’ve largely forgotten today. But lists are an important part of mnemonics, and they’re an important part of ideonomy, as well.
In David Stipp’s 1987 Wall Street Journal article, Gunkel’s penchant for lists was part of the headline: "Patrick Gunkel Is An Idea Man Who Thinks In Lists.”
So how did Gunkel put these common, everyday things to use in a transformative way?
The answer is exciting.
You can try to search it out online, or you can just stick around for future newsletters, when we’ll cover the use of lists in more depth than you ever thought possible considering what ordinary, everyday things they have always seemed to be.
References:
(1) Author’s original archival research. Author has the right to disseminate this material. It may not be copied, stored, reproduced, or disseminated without express written permission. However, excerpts can and should be used for scholarly purposes.
(2) See The Worlds of Herman Kahn by Sharon Ghamari-Tabrizi.
(3) For “David Stipp’s 1987 Wall Street Journal article” see: https://ideonomy.mit.edu/gunkel.html
(4) Gunkel had the unpublished Zarboulas article added to the MIT website underneath the article by David Stipp: https://ideonomy.mit.edu/gunkel.html