Sir Thomas More and William B. Williams, 49, of Lisle, share a vision of a Utopian society free of poverty and suffering.
More was an English statesman and scholar in the 16th Century whose religious convictions got him beheaded.
Bill Williams is a self-described adventurer who retired a multimillionaire in 1985 at the age of 39. He is the author of “Future Perfect: Present Empowerment–A Road Map for Success in the 21st Century” ($29.95), released in September through Patriot’s Publishing, created by Williams to publish and market the book. He estimates the cost of the project will total $500,000.
Unlike More’s Utopia, paved with good deeds and noble intentions, Williams’ paradise on Earth is grounded in the pursuit of enlightened self-interest.
Williams, a bachelor, negotiates life as a decision-making majority of one. “I’m in control of my life and my existence,” he said. “There’s no place I have to be and no time I have to be there. If I’m bored, I leave.”
Williams’ how-to manual purports to rid the world of death and abolish the need to labor for daily bread by basing laws and rules of conduct on the same emotionally detached logic that has defined his life since early childhood.
More died for his belief in God. Given the biblically authoritative tone of Williams’ book, a reader may conclude that if God dies tomorrow, Williams will give serious thought to applying for the job.
“Death is dead,” Williams writes. He estimates the research required to interrupt the body’s bio-countdown to death will cost $4.5 billion a year for an unspecified number of years. Eventually, similar large-scale research projects would disclose “all there is to know in the physical sciences . . . and all there is to know about how the real world operates.”
In time, research will give mankind energy resources sufficient to exert “the maximum amount of power over the real world that it is possible to have.” Since God is defined as “1) living forever; 2) knowing everything; and 3) being all-powerful,” Williams concludes that “we will have become as god-like in these three areas that define God as it is possible for us to be.”
Williams’ childhood was ruptured by the divorce of his parents when he was in the 3rd grade. His mother’s remarriage to W.A. Williams severed young Williams’ contact with his biological father, Henry McWhorter. As a child he “didn’t have time for grieving” the loss of his father’s companionship, Williams said: “Being emotionally involved in past events doesn’t get you anywhere.”
Williams was adopted by his stepfather, whose business dealings required frequent moves. He estimated that from the age of 8 to 13, he attended about 20 Illinois schools. Being uprooted every few months made Williams feel detached from everybody and everything, which he considers a great asset.
“You learn to remove yourself and take, in essence, a view from the outside,” he said. “It makes you very, very strong because you don’t have a support group that you can rely on.”
Williams reunited with McWhorter in 1983 in Daytona Beach, Fla., which Williams now claims as his residence of record. After nearly 27 years of being separated from his biological father, Williams phoned him. Without identifying himself, Williams asked, “Do you think the universe is open or closed?”
“I’m not qualified to answer that question,” McWhorter replied.
“Do you want to know the answer?” Williams responded.
“Is this William?” McWhorter asked.
It marked the beginning of a close 12-year friendship that included a father-son jaunt to the Sahara. McWhorter died last spring.
Williams showed up for a recent interview wearing a wide-brimmed field hat that wouldn’t look out of place on a bear hunt in Alaska or on a trek through the far corners of China–two of his many “real-life adventures.”
Williams is a thrill junkie who described his stunts as “an ongoing quest for knowledge.” A partial list of his exploits includes: spending four days living with “ex-headhunters” in Borneo and standing in a field of a dozen vicious 13- to 14-foot-long Komodo dragons on an Indonesian island in 1985. Williams couldn’t care less if people dismiss his accounts as tall tales.
“I don’t do these adventures for them,” he said. “I do them so I can learn.”
A videotape documents Williams’ $15,000 ride in a Russian MiG-25 last year. Moments before takeoff, Williams surveyed the cockpit instruments and joked that the aircraft’s missile launchers “are broken just like the (Russian) economy.” (The Russian pilot was off-camera in the rear seat.) A shot of the plane’s glowing after-burners cuts to the MiG’s landing. For Williams, climbing 80,000 feet was the ultimate detachment experience, he said. “The space shuttle wasn’t up, so that pilot and myself were probably the only two people who were outside the biosphere.”
Another confirmed adventure is a whip duel between Williams and a Mangarai tribesman in Indonesia about 10 years ago, photographed by David Hicks, professor of anthropology at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Hicks joined Williams on a visit to a local farming village. It wasn’t yet time for the annual harvest festival, so Williams paid a $20 bribe to the village chief and bought the place–lock, stock, barrel and inhabitants–for a day and declared a holiday.
The whip duel, a village festival tradition, pitted Williams against the reigning native champion who skillfully used a shield to deflect Williams’ lashes with a long bull-hide whip.
What word comes to Williams’ mind when he looks at Hicks’ photo of the duel?
“Fun,” he said.
The reason Jennifer Dickey, 25, of Lisle, assistant publisher at Patriot’s, agreed to join Williams and a friend on a safari in Kenya in August “was because I knew it would be fast, furious, fun and jam-packed with lots of sights and culture,” she said. She wasn’t disappointed, she said, offering snapshots of stampeding elephants and lions mauling a large animal carcass.
“Hair raising!” is how Williams’ half-sister, Constance Hintz of Lancaster, S.C., described her trip to Ecuador with her brother a few years ago. Williams loaded Hintz into a four-wheel-drive vehicle and went in search of a secluded mountain lake “down roads that were no longer roads,” Hintz said. “I said, `Turn around,’ and Bill said, `Don’t be silly, we have to see what’s at the top (of the mountain).’ And off we’d go.”
The line between self-confidence and hubris is sometimes blurred in Williams’ life and in the pages of his book.
Williams really didn’t want to write a book, but “like van Gogh, I was driven,” he said. When he first put pen to paper at a rented villa in Jamaica in 1989, “I thought I would have 60 pages to tell my fellow man.” But when he read his own words, it was love at first sight: “I said, `Hey, wow, I can write!’ “
Williams opens his book with a caveat: “CAUTION: The reader is about to embark on an intellectual journey of great magnitude. Due to its unusual nature, this book cannot be skimmed. To understand it, the reader must necessarily read this book word-for-word, front to back. Additionally, it should be read within a period of no more than four or five days. To do otherwise will leave the reader unenlightened.”
The thesis of the book hinges on a universe with no random events. All future events can be predicted and, more important, controlled by using cause-and-effect logic, according to Williams. To prove his point, he traces the logical sequence of events from the Big Bang, chronicles the evolution of life in the primordial soup to the rise and fall of ancient empires and throws in a summary of 219 years of American history.
In Williams’ “idealized future,” sophisticated robots replace almost all human labor and “all goods and services (are) virtually free,” he writes.
Williams made his fortune at Marsco Manufacturing Co., Chicago, an industrial glass manufacturing plant. He started as an $8,000-a-year purchasing agent in 1973, at the behest of his stepfather who was then a partner. Up to then, Williams lacked career direction. After earning a master’s degree in business at the University of Denver, “I threw myself on the business world and made tacos and pizzas (in Atlanta) for three years,” he said.
Williams bought Marsco in 1977 and used automation to shrink the work force from 300 to 18. It made him a rich man.
“When you displace 282 workers, the owner gets to place their paychecks in his pocket every week, year after year, year after year, year after year,” he said, emphasizing the perpetuity of his income. He still owns Marsco but is not actively involved in the business.
When Williams ran Marsco, he had little patience for buck passing, said Phil Gordon, vice president of sales, who has known Williams for about 25 years. Williams once handled a problem with a dissatisfied customer by rounding up managers from several departments and flying the whole bunch to the customer’s office in Kentucky. Williams gathered all the decision-makers in one room “and the problem was solved that very day,” Gordon said.
Williams has a love-hate relationship with the currency of his freedom. Money is an annoyance, he said. “It’s a bankrupt philosophy to be chasing money and possessions.” He said he keeps “less than $10 million in ready cash,” and his possessions include “five or six company cars,” a “toy” sports car, modest homes in Florida and Lisle and a 6,000-square-foot home under construction in Colorado.
Wealth affords Williams the luxury of maintaining an arm’s-length distance from working class people for whom he feels pity because, he said, “(they) must get up and go to work today at 9 o’clock and work very hard all day and do inconsequential things for their entire lives.”
Williams’ modus operandi when he wants to turn the tide in the affairs of men in his favor is to exploit their weaknesses. At the American Booksellers convention at McCormick Place in Chicago last summer, Williams leased a yacht at a nearby posh harbor club and hired a masseuse to soothe the tired muscles of convention attendees and reporters whom he transported in a fleet of rented limousines.
Williams’ contempt is palpable for those who took advantage of his freebie comforts in exchange for hyping his book on TV and in book-trade magazines and writing book orders. He was blameless, though, he insisted: “I didn’t buy them. They sold themselves to me; that’s different. I didn’t go out and corrupt someone. If you want to play this game, these are the rules.”
The one distraction in Williams’ otherwise admittedly self-focused life are his “wards,” disadvantaged youngsters he takes “under my wing” and pays for their schooling. Williams’ philanthropy is rooted in his childhood memory of feeling accepted and “intellectually without fear” at Lake Forest Academy, where he went to high school.
Williams said he has provided scholarships for 10 such wards through the years. Brian Albarran, 19, a student at Duke University, Durham, N.C., is a long-time beneficiary of Williams’ checkbook and affection.
Albarran was 2 years old when Williams met and started dating his mother. Seven years later, “they broke, up but we didn’t,” Albarran said. Williams footed the bill for his tuition at a private St. Louis boarding high school and now picks up the tab for his college expenses. When they’re together, Williams “acts like a kid,” Albarran said. “We wrestle, we make jokes. Even though he’s my father figure, when we’re together, we’re best friends.”
Asked to name his favorite book, Williams pondered a few seconds and declared, ” `Winnie the Pooh,’ because I think the stories are simplistic and I think they’re compassionate. It was a powerful book for me as a child. I loved those stories in the hundred-acre woods.”
