The door was trapezoidal in shape, too narrrow to enter without turning sideways (too narrow altogether for those of more substantial girth than Litovic or I...his assistant Grambling, for example, could not enter the room at all until years later when the chemotherapy treatments had whittled the fat away from his frame, though, by then, of course, he was bedridden and far too weak to even think of making the trek down the hall to Litovic’s room), and opened onto what, at first, appeared to be a dead end. One had to squeeze in sideways, be confronted by a literal brick wall, edge sidewise again at a 45 degree angle away from the entrance until the walls separated and opened onto a large domed amphitheatre. Someone had once called it a bipolar Taliesen.
Litovic abhorred analogies, and railed against them long before first publishing his postulates Analogies were, he felt, a useless exercise in imposing order upon disorder and led always to erroneous conclusions. His main examples were the "two sides to every coin" analogy, and the "extremes of the political spectrum will meet" analogy. Initially, he termed such analogies "fallacious analogies", but later abandoned the term as superfluous in that he felt all analogies were inherently fallacious.
In the coin analogy, Litovic would point out that if a coin should land upon its' edge, said edge, being a circle, was possessed of a mathematically infinite number of points around its' circumference. Thus, he argued, there were not "two sides to every coin" but actually an infinite number of points.
In the political spectrum analogy, Litovic said that severe political repression imposed upon a populace by a right wing regime was NOT the same as severe repression imposed by a left wing regime as each of them had grown out of a fundamentally different political ideology, regardless of what the end result was. Thus, the notion that political ideologies can be charted along the circumference of a circle, and that extremes occupy the same point along that circumference is incorrect. Litovic's theory was that the circle analogy was limited in that it was two dimensional. He likened the reality of it to a three dimensional model of a spiral (similar to a childs "slinky" toy). Seen edge on, the spiral only appears to be a circle. What seem to be political ideologies occupying the same point, are actually radically different positions, one occupying a point further along the edge of the spiral than the other. (For an in depth study of Litovic's rejection of linear political analogies, see R. Breckenridge's Apologia pro vita Litovic, Vol. III, pps 417 - 453.)
Originally, Litovic did not want his postulates to be put in any particular order. He felt that, even with a disclaimer, saying that no postulate was to be ranked higher or "before" another, the tendency of humans to assign importance based upon placement ("Again, order!" Litovic would shout.) would cause the first postulate to be assigned the greatest importance. In order to avoid such an occurrence, Litovic originally intended his first book of postulates to be a box of index cards: each card was to bear one postulate and be placed loosely among all the others in a box. Instructions were to be printed on the outside of the box telling the consumer to shake the box around each time before opening. Litovic hoped that this would prevent any one postulate from gaining prominence over another. Litovic's editor eventually talked him out of this. To this day, however, Litovic's original web page still operates within a shell that assigns random boolean values to each postulate by which they are then sorted into an order which itself would change in random increments of time.
Initial critical reception of Litovic's Postulates was not positive. Of the Postulates, one reviewer wrote:
A paragon of inexactitude, a charlatan, and a purveyor of muzzy thinking transmitted to the unwitting by peppering his postulates with high-minded phrases and technical jargon that are used incorrectly, out of context, and are ill defined but throw off a glow of seeming knowledge that hides the underlying paucity of knowledge and specific meaning behind the glare of a glittering stream of horse manure.
Litovic, contrary to the criticisms of his most ardent critics, was well aware of his “almost, but not quite there” use of language. It was the tension, the leap between meanings that created the true meaning.
A group of New York based, radical Jewish interpreters of Litovic (denounced by him as misguided fanatics) took him to be a reincarnation of the Besht. In an attempt to gain publicity, they once stormed a hotel where a NBA team was staying. Once there, they broke into a room and forced several black players to wear tfillin. The riot which ensued in the black community culminated in the kidnapping of several yeshiva students who were forced to wear heavy gold medallions around their necks while being paraded around the neighborhood in a 1963 Chevy Impala. Although Litovic decried the incident, and attempted to distance himself from it, it was said by those intimate with him that he was secretly pleased by the comic absurdity of it all.
