I object to your phrase "worthy individuals". Noone is worthy or unworthy - what they choose to do with their time and talents are either worthy or unworthy.
I am not an ABSOLUTE apologist for capitalism, but I will say that the vast majority of useful tasks have some money in them. Sure, in some places, it's hard to capture the value that you create, but in most areas of inquiry, you can capture the value you create.
Thus, 99% of the time, your expected pay out accurately reflects your expected contribution to society (yes, I am simplifying somewhat).
The wonderful thing about a free market is that it channels people's talents and labor into those areas that are ACTUALLY useful to other people.
I am not convinced that you noodling around, thinking about ID, is of much use at all to society (this is entirely orthogonal to my thoughts on ID - I am commenting specifically on your desire to noodle around). Your other wide-ranging interests also, without more detail, do not immediately sound like they are of much use to anyone.
Now, there may be ways to convert your desire to noodle around into something that is of worth to other people (which means that other people would be interested in paying you for it).
A lot of people look at business plans as an arcane exercise, especially because the plan itself is often deviated from quite quickly. In fact, business plans are tremendously useful as a self-discipling tool: they force you to confront not just what you want to do, but what value people might find in what you want to do, and they force you to tweak your plan until you deliver a noticeably amount of value to others.
Your problem here is that you are concentrating JUST on what you want to do. You have to spend some time thinking about how this creates value for others. Until you have done that, I do not believe that you would do anything useful with the money, if it were to be handed to you.
Funding an intellectual to stare at his navel for 5 years is of not use to anyone (and is barely of any use to the intellectual, who - if he is honest with himself - will look back on the 5 years as wasted, and without result).
Funding an intellectual to work on something that sounds useful, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense.
Bottom line: stop focusing on yourself, and focus on the value that you're going to create. Once you do that, you'll have a real plan that might be deserving of someone else's hard earned dollars (after all,if you don't want to work for The Man to earn the benjamins, why should someone else who has ALREADY worked for The Man give you his dough, which is to say, the crystalized value of his hours?)
I am not an ABSOLUTE apologist for capitalism, but I will say that the vast majority of useful tasks have some money in them. Sure, in some places, it's hard to capture the value that you create, but in most areas of inquiry, you can capture the value you create.
Thus, 99% of the time, your expected pay out accurately reflects your expected contribution to society (yes, I am simplifying somewhat).
The wonderful thing about a free market is that it channels people's talents and labor into those areas that are ACTUALLY useful to other people.
I am not convinced that you noodling around, thinking about ID, is of much use at all to society (this is entirely orthogonal to my thoughts on ID - I am commenting specifically on your desire to noodle around). Your other wide-ranging interests also, without more detail, do not immediately sound like they are of much use to anyone.
Now, there may be ways to convert your desire to noodle around into something that is of worth to other people (which means that other people would be interested in paying you for it).
A lot of people look at business plans as an arcane exercise, especially because the plan itself is often deviated from quite quickly. In fact, business plans are tremendously useful as a self-discipling tool: they force you to confront not just what you want to do, but what value people might find in what you want to do, and they force you to tweak your plan until you deliver a noticeably amount of value to others.
Your problem here is that you are concentrating JUST on what you want to do. You have to spend some time thinking about how this creates value for others. Until you have done that, I do not believe that you would do anything useful with the money, if it were to be handed to you.
Funding an intellectual to stare at his navel for 5 years is of not use to anyone (and is barely of any use to the intellectual, who - if he is honest with himself - will look back on the 5 years as wasted, and without result).
Funding an intellectual to work on something that sounds useful, on the other hand, makes a lot of sense.
Bottom line: stop focusing on yourself, and focus on the value that you're going to create. Once you do that, you'll have a real plan that might be deserving of someone else's hard earned dollars (after all,if you don't want to work for The Man to earn the benjamins, why should someone else who has ALREADY worked for The Man give you his dough, which is to say, the crystalized value of his hours?)