Reïnventing the Wheel

by Helmut Stuka

EVERY TIMELESS truth seems obvious in retrospect. It is the mark of supreme genius to first discover or synthesize a truth which is beyond the ken of they who know it not, yet obvious to all who know it already. This principle holds true in abstract mathematics, in the natural sciences, in philosophy, and also in the applied philosophy of politics.

The first man on Earth to roll up multiple additions of the same quantity into a multiplication was possessed of inestimable genius — no doubt, Aryan genius — although today, such a feat was until recently learned well and easily by all healthy children before they reached the age of six. So too as for the inversion of multiplication into division, and the rolling-up of multiple multiplications into exponentiation: The touch of the gods was required to first discover fundaments later taught to schoolchildren. The basic laws of algebraic substitution and factoring are also obvious to they who know them, and yet are of a nature which, if theretofore unknown, could be revealed to Man on Earth by but one man in a century, if that.

Plato’s idea of forms seems retrospectively obvious in its barest essentials, as does Aristotle’s law of identity; and yet Plato and Aristotle are immortal for reason of having originated these ideas. And in the realm of human affairs, but once in a millennium is born a singular mind capable of synthesizing pre-existing abstract philosophic, scientific, and historical insights into a political system built on personal responsibility, individual personality, and the explicit ideal of the organic State as a living vessel for a racial family within its homeland. To those who subscribe to such an ideal, at the least those stated essential concepts, when taken in the abstract, suddenly seem so obvious as to admit no alternatives.

Turning to the realm of technics, no idea is so commonly deemed obvious as the wheel. The wheel is such an old invention, so unappreciated and taken for granted, that its status as a timeless truth is unacknowledged; thus do people speak so glibly of “reïnventing the wheel”. They who so speak thereby demonstrate that, if the wheel and all knowledge of it were to suddenly disappear from existence, they themselves would be incapable of reïnventing it. For the wheel is a timeless truth. It is obvious in retrospect, and only in retrospect.

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Edited from my diary, following is a observation I made when contemplating African Negroes who, as late as the mid-twentieth century and perhaps up to to-day, had neither invented the wheel, nor acquired its use despite having been directly exposed to use of wheels by White colonists:

The difficulty of “inventing the wheel” lies in not the wheel itself, but rather the axle.

It is trivial to observe that round things roll. I rather suspect that even a baboon could be observed e.g. rolling an inconvenient log out of his way; and I have personally seen how readily dogs take to nosing around balls and other round objects. I seem to recall reading that some ancient peoples are alleged to have placed heavy objects on rows of logs, in the manner of certain conveyor devices nowadays found in factories, except that of course, without axles, the logs themselves moved not in synchrony with the load. As the load rolled, it would roll off its non-wheel round carriers; perpetually would the log at the back of the row need to be lifted and brought to the front.

The wheel per se is not a round thing which rolls on the ground, but rather two round things which together form axial rotation. In the Platonic sense, the Wheel cannot exist without fixing the ordered motion of the Axis on which it turns, or which it turns. Yet unlike the wheel, which can be prototyped by cutting a flat cross-section from a round log, the axle, and the bearings which affix it freely-spinning to either the wheel or a vehicle, are nontrivial to conceive and not easy to construct.

Most difficult of all is to conceive all these parts in unity, as must occur for the wheel to be developed. A working wheel requires the inspiration for a working axle plus bearings from the same mind, in the same moment of inventiveness. The initial crude prototype may thereafter be improved incrementally; but the wheel-axle set can in the first instance neither be invented incrementally, nor synthesized from the adaptation of disparate inventions. That set is constituted by a single train of thought — which must thus be born within a single individual mind — and is thus necessarily the product of a singular individual genius.

“Nothing can take the place of the individual.” Wise words come to mind, describing the creative pivot on which the world of Man must turn; and the power of such individual creativeness “can never be mechanically acquired, because it is an innate product of divine grace.” Only men who are themselves possessed of such a divine spark can understand its nature, reliably recognize it in others, and fully understand the biological, social, and political conditions necessary to the blossoming of individual creativity. Unfortunately within the affairs of men, this limitation of Nature is the cause of unspeakable tragedy.

Genius can no more breathe without freedom than it can thrive without food. It is frustrated and futile without a community to receive its product — ultimately, to whom to bequeath its product such that, rather than dying with its author, product and thus author become immortal. And as a precondition to its Earthly success, genius needs a bodily vessel capable of bearing the fiery touch of the gods. Truly, men of genius who are “not robust of health or stature, or even of a sickly constitution… are only exceptions which, as everywhere else, prove the rule”; and “when the bulk of a nation is composed of physical degenerates it is rare for a great spirit to arise from such a miserable motley.”

Certainly the original inventor of the wheel could not have so done if crushed beneath the fist of tyranny, if cowering beneath the lash as a slave. The inventor of the wheel may not himself be remembered by name; but his invention would have been forgotten entirely, had he lacked a posterity unto whom to bequeath it. And though a frail and sickly genius may mentally comprehend the invention of the wheel, he would be frustrated from its prototypical implementation by the physical incapacity to make tools, cut cross sections from logs, fix together wheel with axle with bearing, and otherwise do all the handiwork necessary ab initio to make a round thing spin about a fixed axis. Trapped in the prison of his own body, unable to put his insights to practical effect, he would left with the tormented yearning of holding within himself a conception never to be born.

Ungrateful modern Man owes the wheels he uses daily to some long-forgotten ancestor who, (a) free in his every thought and action, had each and all of (b) the creativity to conceive the wheel-axle set, (c) the musculature to build such a contraption, and (d) the offspring to whom to teach his invention.

Returning to the wheel itself, the most difficult conceptual leap for the genius capable of wheel-invention must be to comprehend the ratio of different velocities of the wheels and their axle, respectively. The man of to-day may deem it “obvious” that for a given velocity of the outer surface of the wheel, the axle’s velocity is quite different, and so is that of the other wheel on any course other than a straight line. The man of today need not think too much about the ratio; for unless his education is faulty, he acquired sufficient mathematics in elementary school. Thus he is unable to imagine the ingenuity needed for the wheel’s first singular inventor to not only understand these ratios, but also to overcome the practical difficulties thereby caused when the wheel-axle combination negotiates a curve.

Experience suggests that amongst Aryans, perhaps one in ten thousand (that is, one per cent of one per cent) has latent within him the innate spark which, if awakened by conditions urging invention of a wheel, would blaze forth to conceive in a single thought the wheel-axle set plus even the crudest concept of its rotational ratio — and then adduce some means to actually construct such a device as a working product which would neither crack apart nor catch fire.

As such, the problem of the wheel-axle rotational ratio leads me to meander through the discovery of fire. Without any evidentiary basis of which I am aware, fire is widely presumed to have first sprung to life in the hands of Man with the rubbing-together of sticks; and some Amerasian tribes are known to have traditionally used wound leather straps to spin sticks with extreme rapidity, so as to create a fire-starting heat. Perhaps instead, artificial firemaking was discovered with unfortunate serendipity the first time somebody tried to build a chariot, and failed to at least slather the axle’s bearings with animal fat or some other primitive lubricant. I but only half-jest in so saying. Mechanical failure from heat stress seems a more likely result than open flames, but it is impossible to disprove the latter for every possible circumstance.

As wheel requires axle, and a practical axle requires in turn the invention of various methods for assuaging the effects of friction, such things altogether need also much finer craftsmanship within tighter tolerances than a simple “round thing which rolls.” Tighter tolerances presuppose better tools, either pre-existing within the wheel-inventor’s society or invented by the same individual. Lubricants, metal collars (in turn requiring metalworking skills), relatively advanced tools, and so forth require much more conscious thought and creativity than the bare making of a rolling thing.

It is this ingenious rolling contraption and its prerequisites which were inconceivable to the referenced Negroes, but found ubiquitous throughout Eurasia well before the start of historical records available today. Whether the invention was achieved independently by Asiatics, or brought to them by roving Aryans, is a question for which we have no direct evidence. The consistent evidence of other inventions is that Aryans create, and Asiatics copy; whereafter the latter can be sometimes quite adept at incrementally improving, or at least conserving the acquired inventions. If all East Asia had never before seen a wheel, then the first time an Aryan chariot or wagon were to move through the region, the locals would likely be quick to acquire and proliferate the invention.

So having considered in turn various human species, it would be untoward of me to exclude the Self-Chosen People.

Every Jew I have ever met, seen, heard of, or examined the works of had a tendency to focus on inessentials — to dissimulate parts outside the whole — in common idiom, to fail to see the forest for the trees; or more apropos hereto, to fail to see the axle for the wheel. And in my observation, the Jew’s widely acclaimed intellect is purely derivative, never creative; worse, it is at its finest when deriving fantasy from unreality. Amongst themselves, Jews pile rabbinical arguments atop Talmudic edicts (or case upon case law), never stopping to notice that their entire “law” is a tower of fantasies built on a foundation of delusion. I would be incredulous at the supposition that any Jew could have invented the axle, if never having seen such a thing before. Nevertheless, there is one feat at which the Jews are not only talented, but born past masters: Memorizing, copying, and then perverting and claiming as their own the inventions of others.

From Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews to Jews to whom I have personally spoken, the Jews allege that they taught mathematics and engineering to the Egyptians, who in turn taught it to the Greeks. When once I pointed out the existence of ancient Chinese technologies to a Jew, he immediately responded without a second thought that some ancient Jews must have travelled to China, and taught the Chinese such miraculous marvels. Only years later would the day come when, whilst meditating over a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, I suddenly realized how thoroughly the Jew has sought to claim as his own not only the product, but the deeds and even the identity of the Aryan.

If the wheel were explained to him as the work of genius which it was, the Jew would surely claim that a Jew invented the wheel also. Yet for reasons aforestated, the Jew, the Jewish mentality, and a Judaized society are each and all not only incapable of inventing the wheel, but also inimical to its invention by others.

At that, it is a mark of today’s stupid and stupefied lack of creativity that, in an anticultural orgy of hubris, materialism, technophilia, and neophilic disdain for anything older than circa 1950, the wheel and its inventor are not even unsung heroes, but much-derided ones. The invention of the wheel is spoken of as if, being a primitive invention done long ago, it required less creativity in the first instance than inventions which are in themselves incomparably more complex than a wheel-axle set, but were also built upon the advancements of millennia in mathematics and the physical sciences. None realizes that the original inventor of the wheel exercised no less creative genius upon the pre-existing foundation available to him than the inventors of high technology do upon that availed to them. None has the vision to see that what heights he reached standing not on the shoulders of the giants who came before him, but only on his own two feet.

No recognition is made that the oft-supposed caveman who originated the first wheel on Earth would, by any objective standard, be worthy of a Nobel Prize, if wheels had never been known on Earth and he invented one to-day. Instead he is instead just a caveman, anonymous and long-forgotten — and surely much less intelligent than people who have i-Devices and fractional reserve banking and the progress of “Enlightenment” egalitarianism. Worse, the phrase “reïnventing the wheel” is in some quarters used to denote wasted effort in the implementation of things already existing. This glib insult belies absence of any understanding of magnitude, and also of invention versus implementation. The day a man fully invents his own computer ab initio, including the independent rediscovery of Boolean logic, he may rightly be accused of more than “reïnventing the wheel.”

I take all such as proof that today’s people would by and large be incapable of “reïnventing the wheel”: Nobody stops to consider that the original invention or independent reïnvention of the wheel ought be regarded as a sacred act, a noble deed, the symbolic archetype of inventive genius.

For my own part, having divers days been accused in equal measure of pride and of self-hatred, I will claim as my own what others mistake to be the humblest and most obvious of creations. On the principle that in a world gone wrong, a man is measured not only by his friends but also his enemies, may I always stand also accused of “reïnventing the wheel” by those who say it derisively. From a purely creative standpoint, indeed, I consider my identification of the import of the axle to be one of my single greatest intellectual achievements. If I die today, let the epitaph on my tombstone identify me as the “Reïnventor of the Wheel”! For on the principle that it takes one to know one, my recognition of the original wheel-inventor’s inner nature implies a bare chance that, had I never seen a wheel before, I may perhaps have within me the Aryan creativity to reïnvent the wheel myself; and by my admiration of that underappreciated creative hero, I am united with him just as “all those who feel such admiration become thereby united under one covenant.”

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The author hereof considers his work to be in principle the common property of all people who are both biologically and spiritually Aryan, and therefore releases the foregoing to the public domain. He dedicates his reïnvention of the wheel to the source of the quoted “wise words”: Adolf Hitler.