PREFACE

This novel is to open an objective rational debate based in facts and the scientific method. It arises from my desire to share the richness of objective philosophy with as many people as possible. How I would have liked to know it in my youth! What better than football to spread it to the masses?

But to spread it, first, I had to discover it, and that was the journey of my life, which I am not going to relate here, just give the context. The journey began with mysticism mixed with biology and engineering from the three professional careers that I studied at university and structural calculus due to my profession as an architect. After decades of studying in a hermetic mystical school, its pseudoscientific philosophical foundations could not withstand the weight of reality and the mystical edifice began to fall. The journey ended when I read The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins, God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens, and Breaking the Spell by Daniel Dennett. But the most important book was Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, by Ayn Rand because it exposes that first cause of human problems is of cognitive origin. Although I do not share everything with Ayn Rand, nor do I belong to any group of its followers, its work is valuable and worth studying. It is masterfully summarized by the book Objectivism, the Philosophy of Ayn Rand by Leonard Peikoff, its intellectual heir. After reading it several times, I realized that, despite being written in simple language, due to the difficulty of the topics such as metaphysics and epistemology, the masses would miss the richness contained therein. It occurred to me to write a book with the fundamentals, but written in even simpler language. How to motivate the masses to discover the richness of objective metaphysics and epistemology, that is, the richness of reality itself? Until that moment I had no intention of writing a novel, because except for Rand’s, I had read almost none, only dialogues between characters like Plato did to present Socrates’ ideas.

It was after reading the book Sophie’s World, by Jostein Gaarder, that I decided to write a similar book, but with football players. I studied the structures of the novels and discovered that it is in three parts: introduction, climax and outcome.

The recommendations of Ayn Rand and others helped me understand the importance of previously defining the theme, plot, and character characteristics. As an architect accustomed to Gantt charts, I made a graph of timelines, one for each character, to integrate their conflicts and final outcome.

My original idea was to do something similar to what Jostein Gaarder did with Sophie’s World, where he exposes the history of philosophy, in correspondence lessons within a novel plot, where the protagonist is a teenage woman. Instead, I would present objective philosophy, not in a correspondence course, but in philosophical meetings where three football player friends, in the style of Plato’s dialogues, would present objective philosophy with football metaphors, within a novel plot, where the protagonist would be an elite football player, who would play in Europe and win the 2018 Football World Cup in Russia.

I started writing it in 2016 in my apartment in the neighborhood of Las Cañitas, located on the streets of José Ortega y Gasset corner Soldado de la Independencia, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Due to my financial freedom, I was able to dedicate myself completely and I finished it at the end of 2017. I sent the summary to about thirty publishing houses in various countries who responded that they were not interested.

Although philosophical meetings were part of the plot, they were interrupted by the density of philosophical topics such as metaphysics and epistemology. I printed some physical copies and gave them to several people. They agreed that the plot was interrupted and that they had understood little or nothing about philosophy.

In 2018 I didn’t write anything, because I worked all that year as a real estate manager in Miami, but I took two physical copies to take them to two publishing houses, something I never did.

More and more the idea of separating the plot of the novel from the philosophical meetings took shape. I would have to write two books, a novel and an essay. The novel, would focus on the plot; the essay, in the content of philosophical meetings, but it had to be presented not as an essay, but as a practical reference manual.

Therefore, I would have to write two separate books. But, since the philosophical meetings were part of the plot of the novel, they could not be omitted, so what I did was reduce the technical and academic aspect to a minimum so as not to take away from the strength of the plot. So, two books came out of one book, a novel and an essay as a manual for an educational game, which is the book and game created by the characters in the novel.

In 2019 I began to dedicate myself completely to this work and I didn’t stop until I finished. First, I enriched the first part of the novel, here called act I. Then I added act II and act III plus the epilogue.

Although I have dedicated a lot of time to it, I was not able to dedicate as much time as I would have liked, since I had to work on the educational game of philosophical questions, on the essay as its answer book, in addition to creating the website and its blog, in which I made 94 journalistic posts, comparing news of global impact from each week of 2022 and 2023, with similar news during the Renaissance, in Aristotle’s Greece, and the 94 questions of the game. I finished polishing the novel in July 2024, personally, in English and Spanish.

Being my first novel, that I never intended to write, and perhaps the last, in my opinion, it is far from being perfect or being a great literary work, even poor in style. However, I believe that it meets the objective of opening a rational debate and bring objective philosophy closer to the masses, and especially to the youth, who if they discover its wealth will be able to enjoy its fruits sooner rather than later, as I would have liked at the age of fifteen.

Enjoy the reading!

Charles Kocian, July 2024