Educational accreditation is unethical because it is government-initiated coercion to control the production and distribution of education. In the United States the control is indirect; in most other countries it is direct. Accreditation also infringes academic freedom, though that concept itself is a mixed product of government involvement in education.
Accreditation is the process of certifying a minimum level of quality in schools and colleges. A first, simple question arises. Who accredits the accreditors? Who certifies the certifiers? Or, as Ayn Rand and others have put it more generally: who protects us from our protectors? The statist assumption is that experts in the government know what is best for us because they are not motivated by the selfish profit motive. As consequence, they should have the final say on quality. This ignores that Adam Smith’s invisible hand metaphor applies equally, albeit inversely, to bureaucrats who proclaim their goals as serving the “public interest” when in fact the behavior invariably is led “as if by an invisible hand” to benefit the special interests that lobby them.
The first one hundred years of American public education were dominated by one special interest, white Anglo-Saxon Protestants, at the expense of Catholics, Jews, African-Americans, and, often, women, plus other ethnic groups and religious and philosophical persuasions. Today, public education is dominated by the special interests of political correctness. And it has always been dominated by the premise that the omnipotent government knows best.
Who determines quality in the free market? The market! That is, all the people who participate in the process of producing, buying, and selling goods and services. Ultimately, it is determined by the value judgments of consumers through their repeated buying of products they like and abstention from buying of products they do not like. Entrepreneurial competition and the pursuit of selfish profit over time leads to better and better products that better meet the needs and wants of consumers. The same would apply in a free market in education, if such existed.
Accreditation at the university level in the United States consists of seven “natural monopolies” that regulate higher education in a particular region of the country and many specialized agencies that govern specific programs, such as health or business education. Accreditation is “voluntary” (and therefore indirect) in the sense that no school or program is required to go through the approval process, but not having such approval severely restricts the availability of government money for student loans and other uses. All accrediting agencies must be approved by the US Department of Education. This is what puts them into the government-initiated coercion category. “Cartel” and “licensing monopoly” are appropriate descriptions that come to mind. That most education is provided by the government reinforces the ethical issue. Privately funded and controlled education in other countries is extremely rare, if non-existent altogether.
In contrast, the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval originated in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a market-based means of validating the quality claims of the magazine’s advertisers. Very early, however, the Seal of Approval came under the watchful eye of government oversight. Similarly, Underwriters Laboratories began as a market-based testing and certifying organization, but today its operations must be approved by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.
Academic freedom is a pretense at protecting free-speech rights. In a free-market—in education or anything else—the entrepreneur has the right to hire and fire at will anyone he or she disagrees with. The fired employee is then free to hang out his or her own shingle to start a new business. In the practice of government-owned and -controlled educational institutions, academic freedom means the freedom to speak and write within the narrow confines of what the government approves. Accreditation contributes to this narrowness by specifying the requirements of “academic qualification,” such as the possession of certain degrees or diplomas and the publication of a certain number of papers within a certain period of time. That the entire process is one of bean counting and hypocritical is readily acknowledged. That it ignores that science does not progress strictly through one flawed form of publication, such as the peer-reviewed journal article (1, 2), or in five-year cycles is shrugged off as irrelevant.
In practice accreditation is a good ol’ boy network of deans and retired professors. Universities court them, produce enormous mounds of paper every five years, and jump through hoops to win their anointments. Being accredited keeps the government money flowing. That is what accreditation is all about.
On Extrinsic Motivation, Bureaucracy, and the Stage-Mother Syndrome
Carrot and stick motivation, especially the latter, as opposed to communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values, are alive and well in today’s world. The question is, why are such extrinsic sources of motivation so common? A number of reasons can be given.
For example, in the academic world of professorial tenure, faculty can almost never be fired. As a result, some administrators and chairs resort to stick tactics such as making meetings “mandatory,” providing sign-in sheets to yield evidence that faculty attended, and reciting stories like “back when I started to work in business, I said ‘yes sir!’ when the boss requested something of me.” None of these work and they certainly do not endear the administrators or chairs to faculty. In rare cases, professors have been docked a day’s pay for not attending a meeting or returning from a conference a day late. Needless to say, this tactic is even less endearing. Why do administrators and chairs feel they must wield these sticks?
The easy answer is that people tend to do what they were taught by their parents and significant others. And extrinsic, coercive methods of motivation continue to dominate our culture. But the academic world, especially the state-run university, is bureaucratic. Its management is top-down with myriad rules and regulations to guide lower-level decision making. Bureaucracy is the means by which government bureaus are run. In contrast, business management is bottom-up with policies derived from the needs and wants of paying customers and the requirements of making a profit. Employees are often viewed metaphorically as intermediate customers who perform valued services for management. Coercing and talking down to employees can lead to unhappy customers and unpleasant bottom lines. The profit motive, an extrinsic source of motivation for entrepreneurs, ironically encourages appeals to inner values in employees.
Bureaucracy encourages a legalistic, rule-bound mentality. It says, in effect, you can only do what has been codified. This leads to the generation of hundreds of thousands of rules and laws to control behavior, coupled with the impossible-to-follow proviso that ignorance of the law is no defense. This is why the bureaucratic state has become the modern form of dictatorship, a system of excessive law. A truly free society, on the other hand, says you can do whatever has not been codified, i.e., you can do whatever you choose provided you do not violate the rights of others. Rules and laws are few and they are abstract principles. Communication, persuasion, and appeals to inner values become the primary means of relating to others. Intrinsic motivation is allowed to develop.
In addition to the external structure of bureaucracy as spur to extrinsic, especially stick motivation, an insecure psychology has to be another source. Local organizations, such as youth sports leagues, that issue edicts to parents that meetings or practices are mandatory, vacations are expected to be given up for sake of the sport, and games may be forfeited if a snack-bar work commitment is not met, are certainly pushing the limit of respectful communication among adults. Not that one should issue such edicts to children either.
The question is, why do the leaders of these organizations talk to other adults this way? The easy answer again is probably that they do not know better, as they have never learned alternative communication techniques. But for some the reason may be deeper, a psychological need to live the sport through one’s children to compensate for their own failings in the sport earlier in life. It is called achievement by proxy. As a result, such stage mothers or fathers—little league parents—push everyone hard, especially themselves and their children, and they brook no excuses for failing to make practice or the snack bar. Nothing is more important than the sport and they assume everyone else should have the same values. They become blind to the needs of others, especially the needs of their children.
The push for longer and longer seasons for younger and younger children, along with an apparent obliviousness to youth injuries, probably stems from this compulsive psychology. But then a similar psychology also probably operates in some (or many) bureaucrats who seem to need to prove something about themselves by issuing new edicts—new rules or laws. The more rules or laws with their names on them, the better they feel. And stick motivation seems to be all they know.
Extrinsic motivation can have its place in appropriate situations, but an excessive use of it, especially the stick part, often becomes a power trip. Appeal to inner values is the better way to go.
The Epistemology of Ethics, Salesmanship, and Basket Weaving
In a previous post I said that teachers are peddlers of ideas who must sell their wares as much as any other sales rep or entrepreneur. The process by which soap and ideas are sold is essentially the same. The method is persuasive communication and the purveyors of both can be honest or dishonest. There is nothing unique to the theory of salesmanship that makes sales reps more prone to dishonesty than teachers, and teaching in a free market is salesmanship.
In this post I would like to make a similarly iconoclastic statement about three apparently disparate fields, namely that ethics, salesmanship, and basket weaving are all applied sciences. The first anomaly, according to many hard core philosophers and scientists, is that I would dare to call any of these fields a science. The second is that I would dare to lump them together with equal epistemological standing. Let me take these one at a time.
In its broadest sense, science studies reality—not just the physical, but also the mental—and aims to describe it accurately and provide guidelines for human choices and actions. In this sense philosophy is the science of all sciences, because it identifies the broadest abstractions about reality and provides the broadest guidelines for the rest of the special sciences. The special sciences, whether physics, engineering, medicine, or basket weaving, must be consistent with the more general sciences, but they in turn describe their own areas of reality and provide guidelines for choice and action to achieve specific goals in those realms.
To explain and predict are said today to be the two aims of science. Explanation, however, implies prediction. If a ball is described as round, for example, the description predicts that the ball will roll. This positivist view of science as explanation and prediction leaves values out completely. Values are guides to action. If a ball is to be thrown accurately to a target, then it is valuable for the hand, arm, and rest of the body to move in a certain way. A scientist of ball throwing prescribes which actions have to be made in order to achieve the goal of hitting a target. To live a healthy and moral life, scientists of nutrition and ethics also prescribe certain actions that must be taken to achieve the respective goals. There are two aims of science, but they are to explain and guide. Guidance specifies a goal and the actions necessary to reach the goal. All value theories are sciences of guidance. This applies equally to ethics, salesmanship, and basket weaving. (For doubters about basket weaving as a science, a Google search generates millions of hits and refers the searcher to an enormous literature describing the principles of basket weaving.)
Value theories are applied “how to” sciences and are just as factual as any so-called hard or descriptive physical science. Value theories describe how to get things done. Ethics describes how to live the good life, salesmanship describes how to sell products, and basket weaving how to make baskets. Nothing could be more factual than that, which makes all of these fields as scientific as physics, chemistry, or biology.
For that matter, epistemology is also a how-to discipline, since its aim is to describe how we know what we know and then, on the basis of that knowledge, to prescribe how to improve our ways of knowing. As a result, there is no difference in essential methodology used by epistemology and ethics, or ethics and salesmanship, or salesmanship and basket weaving. They all use the same approach to identifying the concepts and principles that constitute their particular subjects of study. The only relevant difference among all of these disciplines is level of abstraction. The concepts and principles of epistemology and ethics are far more abstract than those of salesmanship and basket weaving.
Putting on an air of superiority simply because one works in an area of greater abstraction smacks of what Robert Fuller would call rankism (1, 2). Science is science and applied science is applied science. As much can be learned from blue-collar workers who love their jobs and approach them with attention to subtle detail as one can learn from college professors who work in the stratosphere of theoretical concepts and principles. In many cases one can learn more from blue-collar workers than from professors, because the latter are too often caught up in their own jargon to be able to relate it to the lay person. And some professors all too often have no desire to relate their work to the lay person. But everyone today in our knowledge economy holds, or should hold, equal epistemological standing in the generation and application of knowledge.
One does not pay plumbers so much for what they do as for what they know. That makes plumbers, basket weavers, sales reps, and ethicists all fellow professionals.
This post is a paean to the arts, especially music, and especially the three-quarter time signature. In music, three-quarter time means that the rhythm of the music is played in a pattern of three beats to the bar, instead of the more common four, and usually with emphasis on the first. It is the rhythm of the waltz and carries with it a lilting, cheerful disposition. It is the seemingly silky smoothness of two dancers masterfully floating and turning across the floor to a Viennese waltz. To the listener and viewer, it is the expression and symbol of effortless joy.
In contrast, work, or labor, is not effortless, though it may be enjoyable. To be sure, the dancers and musicians who portray this effortless joy have spent hours and years perfecting their craft. The end result of their efforts is the effect the craft has on the consumers of music and dance. That effect is pure emotion, a child-like not-a-care-in-the-world fun. The effect of art is to enable us to experience this carefree joy and thereby to rest and refuel in order to carry on with life’s labors. The three-quarter time signature in music does this to me par excellence.
In a larger perspective, life in three-quarter time represents the ability to perform the tasks of one’s daily life, in both family and career, in a manner that expresses effortless joy. Not that the tasks are effortless, but that the enjoyment in performing the tasks is uninhibited by what to some appear to be enormous obstacles. These obstacles are usually mental rather than physical, such as feelings of drudgery when going to work every day or hassles and conflicts of dealing with family, bills, and chores, etc. Everyone experiences these barriers to some degree and at some times. The person who lives in three-quarter time, however, is inspired by the prospect of daily obstacles and views the challenges as opportunities with which to have more fun in life.
The impetus for this post was a recent experience my wife, daughter, and I had that enabled us to witness fifteen or so twenty-something singers, actors, and dancers who exhibited and projected life in three-quarter time. We attended a regional production of a Broadway musical and were allowed to tag along with a high school class that interviewed the performers afterward. The exhilaration and relaxed confidence of these young performers, especially right after a two-and-a-half hour staging, were obvious. Despite the fact that a show business life can be grueling with audition after audition (and rejection after rejection), every one of these performers exhibited what I call the spirit of three-quarter time. To observe it on stage and in person was a treat; it enabled us to live in three-quarter time for those few hours. That the music and memories of the performance keep playing in our minds two weeks later only adds to the experience.
It is a rare person who knows what he or she wants to do in life at an early age. It is equally rare to find someone who feels about his or her job, “I have so much fun in what I do—I’m amazed they pay me to do it!” Yet, this is precisely what these young performers exhibited and, in some cases, admitted. It is this early and untainted, anxiety-less certainty of what one wants to do in life that enables a person to overcome barriers as if they were not even there and to work tirelessly and without any evidence of labor in the many hours and years required to achieve a goal. Though actually working very hard, the appearance and, often, psychological feeling of such a person is that of floating and turning through life to a waltz.
While not everyone can regularly achieve or directly experience the spirit of life in three-quarter time, and the young performers my family and I observed may not be able to maintain it throughout their lives, nearly everyone can experience the general feeling vicariously through art, either as performer or consumer. For me it is most often achieved through music, especially the three-quarter time signature.
I do have other associations in music with three-quarter time, but they are a bit more technical: the quarter-note triplet and harmony in major thirds. They evoke in me the same feeling as three-quarter time, but perhaps they should be a topic for another day.
One of the unfortunate diseases of older age is the tendency to pessimism or even cynicism. Nostalgia for the good old days is rampant, with complaints about how the young don’t know what we knew at their age and how they are so ill-mannered and unworldly. When generalized to the political and cultural arenas, Armageddon is said to be imminent. For advocates of capitalism and admirers of Ayn Rand, it sometimes becomes a prediction of a new Dark Age.
I wish to take exception to these dire prophecies and venture an alternative scenario. One argument for the coming Dark Age is the analogy that is drawn between the twentieth and third centuries. The third century AD in the Roman Empire was a century of inflation (1, 2, 3); so was the twentieth century in the modern world, including the United States. In the Roman Empire, it was a century of war, chaotic leadership by ineffective emperors, and collapse of cultural institutions. Similar statements are made about the twentieth century of wars, chaos, weak leadership, and cultural collapse. The third century AD paved the way for the barbarians and ultimate collapse of ancient civilization. Obviously, the cynics conclude, we are headed in the same direction.
The decline of ancient Rome is a fascinating topic. I see the beginning of its end occurring about 150 BC, when Greek slaves were brought to Rome to educate the children of aristocrats. These Greek slaves were influenced mostly by the philosophy of Stoicism, the notion of turning away from the material world, and the Romans fell in love with the view. With Stoicism tapping into what apparently was an existing sense of life among Romans, the path was then prepared for Christianity and its turning-away view. By the fourth century AD, Paulinus of Nola, a Roman senator of great wealth and property simply renounced the material world and retreated to an austere, monastic life. In symbolic, if not actual, form ancient civilization sought refuge in the monastery. Turning away from material civilization is not a characteristic of contemporary culture or philosophy.
In the title essay of her book For the New Intellectual, Ayn Rand said that Descartes reintroduced the Witch Doctor into modern philosophy, thus setting up an opposition between the material and spiritual that exists to this day. This opposition gave rise to Kant’s subjectivism and the resurgence of mysticism, which, Rand says, will lead to new Dark Age.
I disagree with this interpretation. Based on conversations with my wife, philosopher Linda Reardan, I would say that Descartes made a valiant effort to bring consciousness down to earth—God being the metaphor of consciousness—and the entire modern and contemporary periods in philosophy have been an attempt to integrate consciousness into the material world and to naturalize it. There has not been a complete success, but this notion is at the root of my interpretation of John Dewey’s epistemology and the comment in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 70) that the rejection of intrinsicism in philosophy began “if only as a glimmer” in the late nineteenth century. Philosophy, I conclude, has been progressing, albeit not always in a straight line.
And viewing historical progress as requiring a straight line is surely a prescription for pessimism and cynicism. The Magna Carta was signed in 1215, but it was another six centuries before the Age of Enlightenment and the American Bill of Rights came into existence. In between there was the Black Death that wiped out as much as half of Europe’s population and the Hundred Years’ War, among other atrocities, yet the spirit to live and better ideas survived throughout that period to give us the world we have today. My notion of optimism derives from taking a very long view of civilization—centuries long. I do not expect life to improve much, if at all, in the next four years of the current presidential administration. I do not expect the current (or previous) administration to be the indicator of the beginning of the end of civilization as we know it. I see the twentieth and maybe even the twenty-first centuries to be a blip in the progress of civilization. My optimism in no small part is also aided by a commitment to avoid condemning someone merely for espousing ideas with which I disagree.
Good—meaning rational—ideas win out in the long run. The ancient Greeks suffered a Dark Age from about 1200 to 800 BC. When they obtained the Phoenician alphabet and learned to write, they immediately recorded their entire oral tradition, paving the way for the golden age of Greco-Roman civilization. When moveable type was invented in the fifteenth century, every extant written work that could be found was, within a hundred years, published in permanent form, making education of the masses possible. The current century is proving to be the age of digitization, the aim of which is to make every written work in existence available in electronic form. The advantages of this cannot begin to be imagined.
The twentieth century produced two enormously destructive wars, but they did not silence either Ludwig von Mises or Ayn Rand. Their ideas now flourish—not on the front pages of leading newspapers or on nightly newscasts, but they are making their way through our culture. As I frequently tell my daughter, patience is a virtue. I may not in my lifetime see any significant intellectual change in our culture, and my daughter may not see much of a change either. But barring a meteor strike that wipes out ninety-five percent of all living species—and that assumes the destruction of all paper and electronic literature—the will to live will win out and civilization will continue.
The Von Domarus Principle and the Nature of the Subconscious Mind
As I state in Montessori, Dewey, and Capitalism (p. 86), Freud was first to identify that we possess a dynamic, integrating subconscious mind, “dynamic” meaning continuously active and making connections whether we are awake or asleep. Thus, when we are asleep, our subconscious mind is constantly operating, connecting our many experiences of the previous day, week, or years, oftentimes manifesting the connections in dreams. But dreams are notoriously illogical and sometimes bizarre. What is the actual nature of the subconscious mind and what is its mode of operation?
We have a sense of how the conscious mind works. We direct attention to specific facts or events, identify and evaluate those facts or events, and as a result of the evaluation experience a favorable or unfavorable emotion. The knowledge, evaluations, and emotions then are stored in our memories, that is, in our subconscious minds for later retrieval and use. Thus, the subconscious is a valuable storehouse of all of our previous experiences. How well the storehouse is organized determines how easily or difficultly we can retrieve and use what is there. It is the conscious mind that directs this organization.
But how does the subconscious operate when it is not being controlled by the conscious mind, such as in our sleep or when we are focused elsewhere? Psychiatrist Eilhard von Domarus, in describing the thought processes of schizophrenics, posed a fascinating hypothesis about how the subconscious might operate. Because schizophrenics seem to have lost conscious control of their minds, they apparently exhibit raw, subconscious reasoning. And that reasoning is exemplified by the fallacy of undistributed middle, the error in thinking and form of overgeneralization that holds that if two subjects possess the same predicate, they are then the same. For example, dogs and cows both are four-legged animals, therefore all cows are dogs. The thinking is illogical and requires the attention and control of the conscious mind. The less educated, of course, commit the same error, but a major objective of education is to increase the child’s and adult’s conscious control over thought processes. When left uncontrolled, the implication is that the illogical processes of the subconscious take over, making less than rational connections. The illogic of this “von Domarus principle” would explain our more bizarre dreams.*
The von Domarus principle has been criticized as the result of subsequent studies (1, 2), but most of those experiments conclude only that schizophrenics do not exclusively use undistributed middle and/or that healthy people also commit the same fallacy. The more general conclusion to be drawn from the von Domarus principle is that if schizophrenics are left defenseless with no control over their behavior by the conscious mind, then their mental functioning may well represent the raw expression and operation of the subconscious. Obviously, more thought and study is needed to fully describe the subconscious mind. That the psychological profession today does not even acknowledge the existence of a subconscious mind indicates how far the science of inner reality must go to explain its subject.
Knowledge of the subconscious mind would enable us to harness its dynamic, connection-making powers by understanding not just its operation in sleep or mental illness, but also its role in aiding and influencing our everyday mental functioning. The more intelligent person, for example, is generally acknowledged to be the one who sees and understands connections among ideas before others who are slower. How does this happen? Is it a better organized subconscious mind than that of the slower thinker? Is it greater interest in the topic that drives the subconscious to look for specific connections? The more intelligent do not always possess greater knowledge about a subject than the less intelligent when hitting upon new connections. What is the role of the amount of knowledge one possesses in leading to quick links? And, of course, is there a genetic component in intelligence and how does this contribute to the efficient and effective operation of the subconscious? These are the questions that a science of the subconscious, if such existed, should be studying.
The dynamic subconscious is a powerful mental tool that can and should enable us to enjoy life by means of a well-ordered mental structure, a conscious mind interacting without obstacles or inhibitions with the subconscious to guide us smoothly to the achievement of our goals. Lack of knowledge of how this interaction takes place makes it more difficult for many of us to move forward without unnecessary extra effort to correct the organization of our minds. It is psychology that needs to give us this knowledge.
*Eilhard von Domarus, “The Specific Laws of Logic in Schizophrenia,” in J. S. Kassanin, ed., Language and Thought in Schizophrenia (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944), 104-14.
When I first came up with the title for this post, I thought I should google it to see if anyone had done anything similar. Sure enough. Phony!: How I Faked My Way Through Life, a confessional memoir, was just published. I have not read the book, but the publisher’s blurbs say it is the story of a young woman who lied about not having a college degree and rose to high positions in business. Degrees and diplomas do not impress me as qualifying anyone for anything, but I was taught that it is not nice to lie.
My interest in the subject is not so much why people fake reality in a big way like the author of this book, but why do they fake reality at all? Why do people misperceive the most obvious facts? Why do they exaggerate and embellish them? Why do they have selective memories? Why do they fake reality in the smallest of ways when, to an outside observer, a simple statement of truth would be so easy and anxiety-free to make?
As creatures of habit, we learn much of our behavior from others, especially by example from our parents and other admired adults. Sometimes, those lessons are not the best ones to learn. For instance, an attendant at the ticket booth of a tourist attraction, where children under six were admitted free, related this story. One parent said that his daughter was under six, but the daughter, proud of her recent birthday, shot back with an “I’m six!” Lesson learned and seed planted? Fake your way into paying events and, when generalized, fake your way through life, such as saying you have a college degree when in fact you do not. Why would the father say such a thing? Affordability aside (the ticket price was trivial), he presumably learned it at an earlier time from his admired others.
This line of thought only leads to an infinite regress. At some point, someone must have decided on his or her own, absent outside influence, that something is not true or completely true and yet went on to recite the falsehood. The standard motivations offered to explain lying are fear and glory. Fear of being caught for having done something wrong and glory of enhancing one’s image in the eyes of others. And children are known to exhibit both motivations. When children become adults, however, some follow the straight and narrow of truth-telling, others do not. Among the others, some become self-aware fakers; the rest fall into that fuzzy middle ground and become BS’ers (1, 2, 3), all the while insisting that they are completely honest. Why?
The answer has to be some combination of influence from the outside and decisions made by the individual. The myriad decisions made daily, from childhood to adulthood, about the myriad influences that come into our minds from the outside ultimately determine how we go about living our lives. A commitment from early on to perceive facts as facts and to state facts as facts, without regard for the consequences of getting caught or for an unearned image in the eyes of others is the path to developing a mind that will find faking of any kind anathema to living a decent life. A lesser commitment leads to fudging, guessing, and being susceptible to the influence of fear and the siren calls of glory. A lesser commitment leads to the adult who, in a seemingly confident and oh-so-precise manner, asserts in a meeting that the vote two years ago was nine to nine to one, when in fact there was no vote at all.
The result of these decisions and commitment is what Ayn Rand called psycho-epistemology, the mental habit built up over time that determines each individual’s unique way of perceiving reality. This is not determinism in the philosophical sense that we have no genuine alternatives in life because every decision and action is causally preformed and could not have been otherwise. Our decisions and actions could have been otherwise because of the myriad decisions we have made since childhood. The cause of our behavior is the decisions we have made, and continue to make, about outside influences. We make them every minute of our waking lives. That the results of the decisions have become entrenched premises in our subconscious minds since childhood only makes changing them as an adult difficult, but not impossible. It is in this sense that our behavior is self-caused.
This means that the policy of faking one’s way through life could have been and, in the present, can be otherwise. Changing a psychology at an advanced age can be achieved, though it can be challenging—and painful—to go against the years or decades of prior decisions. Preventive medicine calls for making correct, reality-focused decisions in one’s early years. The task of parents and teachers is to be especially alert to these decisions and encourage their children and students by example and instruction to see facts as facts and then to communicate the facts as facts. Nothing more or less.
This blog comments on business, education, philosophy, psychology, and economics, among other topics, based on my understanding of Ayn Rand’s philosophy and Ludwig von Mises’ economics. Epistemology and psychology are my special interests. Your remarks are welcome, although I prefer that you sign your real name, first and last. Note: I assume that ethical egoism and laissez-faire capitalism are morally and economically unassailable. My interest is in applying, not defending, them.
