Education: The Difference Between Learning How to Think and What to Think

Professor of Law Butler Shaffer at the LewRockwell.com in the following excerpt, eloquently distinguishes between independent and conformist thinking [bold mine]

Education is an ongoing confrontation between those who want to help children learn how to think, and those who want to teach them what to think. While there are numerous variations on these themes, the contrast can most clearly be found in the distinctions between child-centered Montessori systems, and teacher- and test-centered schools. Government schools usually fall into the latter category. Homeschooling, religious schools, un-schooling, and other forms tend to emphasize either the "how" or the "what" in their efforts with children.

Those who focus on learning how to think have in mind helping children develop their own methods of questioning and analyzing the world around them; to control their own inquiries and opinions; to the end of helping children become independent, self-directed persons. The role of the teacher in such a setting is to provide new learning situations (e.g., open up new subjects of inquiry when the student is ready to do so) and to facilitate the processes of questioning so as to help the students get to deeper levels of understanding.

People who have developed the capacity for epistemological independence are not easy to control for purposes that do not serve their interests. Institutions – which have purposes of their own that transcend those of individuals – require a mass-minded population that has been conditioned to accept outer-imposed definitions of "reality." Any deviation from this systemic purpose – as would derive from students questioning how the arrangement would benefit them – would be fatal to all forms of institutionalism.

The established order has, from one culture and time period to another, insisted on educational systems that train young minds into what to think. "Truth" becomes a set of beliefs that conform to an institutional imperative, and it becomes the purpose of schools to inculcate such a mindset. Whereas "how to think" learning that finds its purpose and focus within the minds of self-directed, independent students, "what to think" education derives from outside the students’ experiences and analytical skills. As Ivan Illich so perceptively expressed it, "[s]chool is the advertising agency which makes you believe that you need the society as it is."

To this end, the established order has helped generate – with eager assistance from academia – a belief that all understanding is a quality requiring phalanxes of self-styled "experts" who, by virtue of their prescribed status, enjoy monopolies to offer opinions about their respective fields of study. Plato’s designation of "philosopher kings" has been sub-franchised into categories of "experts" to be found in "history," "physics," "psychology," "economics," "law," and seemingly endless sub-groupings that negate the role once respected for those who had received a "liberal arts" education.

Read the rest here.

Mark Twain on Public Opinion: As a Rule We Do Not Think, We Only Imitate

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, a novelist popularly known with his pen name Mark Twain (1835-1910), sees public opinion to be mostly social signaling or about attaining social conformity or "corn-pone opinions", rather than independent thinking.

A longish excerpt from Mr. Twain (at the LewRockwell.com) [bold mine]

Our table manners, and company manners, and street manners change from time to time, but the changes are not reasoned out; we merely notice and conform. We are creatures of outside influences; as a rule we do not think, we only imitate. We cannot invent standards that will stick; what we mistake for standards are only fashions, and perishable. We may continue to admire them, but we drop the use of them. We notice this in literature. Shakespeare is a standard, and fifty years ago we used to write tragedies which we couldn't tell from – from somebody else's; but we don't do it any more, now. Our prose standard, three quarters of a century ago, was ornate and diffuse; some authority or other changed it in the direction of compactness and simplicity, and conformity followed, without argument. The historical novel starts up suddenly, and sweeps the land. Everybody writes one, and the nation is glad. We had historical novels before; but nobody read them, and the rest of us conformed – without reasoning it out. We are conforming in the other way, now, because it is another case of everybody.

The outside influences are always pouring in upon us, and we are always obeying their orders and accepting their verdicts. The Smiths like the new play; the Joneses go to see it, and they copy the Smith verdict. Morals, religions, politics, get their following from surrounding influences and atmospheres, almost entirely; not from study, not from thinking. A man must and will have his own approval first of all, in each and every moment and circumstance of his life – even if he must repent of a self-approved act the moment after its commission, in order to get his self-approval again: but, speaking in general terms, a man's self-approval in the large concerns of life has its source in the approval of the peoples about him, and not in a searching personal examination of the matter. Mohammedans are Mohammedans because they are born and reared among that sect, not because they have thought it out and can furnish sound reasons for being Mohammedans; we know why Catholics are Catholics; why Presbyterians are Presbyterians; why Baptists are Baptists; why Mormons are Mormons; why thieves are thieves; why monarchists are monarchists; why Republicans are Republicans and Democrats, Democrats. We know it is a matter of association and sympathy, not reasoning and examination; that hardly a man in the world has an opinion upon morals, politics, or religion which he got otherwise than through his associations and sympathies. Broadly speaking, there are none but corn-pone opinions. And broadly speaking, corn-pone stands for self-approval. Self-approval is acquired mainly from the approval of other people. The result is conformity. Sometimes conformity has a sordid business interest – the bread-and-butter interest – but not in most cases, I think. I think that in the majority of cases it is unconscious and not calculated; that it is born of the human being's natural yearning to stand well with his fellows and have their inspiring approval and praise – a yearning which is commonly so strong and so insistent that it cannot be effectually resisted, and must have its way.

Read the rest here 

Bottom line: Without independent-critical thinking, we become subject to the mind manipulation-control ruse or easily succumb to indoctrination (brainwashing) schemes employed by various vested interest groups via populism. Think collectivism, statism, nationalism, demand based economic policies, climate change, and more...

EU Proposes To Ban the Family

From the Daily Mail

Books which portray ‘traditional’ images of mothers caring for their children or fathers going out to work could be barred from schools under proposals from Brussels.

An EU report claims that ‘gender stereotyping’ in schools influences the perception of the way boys and girls should behave and damages women’s career opportunities in the future.

Critics said the proposals for ‘study materials’ to be amended so that men and women are no longer depicted in their traditional roles would mean the withdrawal of children’s classics, such as Enid Blyton’s The Famous Five series, Paddington Bear or Peter Pan.

The document, prepared by the European Parliament’s Committee on Women’s Rights and Gender Equality, also suggests EU-wide legislation is needed to tackle the way women are depicted in advertising during children’s television programmes.

It further complains about the number of women in EU parliaments, and floats the idea of fixed quotas on a minimum proportion of female MPs.

The report says: ‘Children are confronted with gender stereotypes at a very young age through television series, television advertisements, study materials and educational programmes, influencing their perception of how male and female characters should behave.

‘Special educational programmes and study materials should therefore be introduced in which men and women are no longer used in examples in their ‘traditional roles’, with the male as the breadwinner of the family and the female as the one who takes care of the children.’

The proposal to regulate the ‘traditional’ family values which have been used as justification for gender equality legislation signifies an Orwellian dystopia where the state hopes to subsume family values for state values, impose state control over the citizenry to the individual level via indoctrination or through the control of people’s thought and speech, substitute dependency on the state and the disintegration of the family and the individual, and importantly, the worship of the state. 

[This resonates with the local version of ‘I am the start of change’ being subliminally impressed upon by politically controlled mainstream media to inculcate docility and conformity to the government through the abstract virtues of supposed ‘selflessness’ and through nationalism]

Yet these are signs of desperation from EU’s political elites whom have been groping for the preservation of their privileges and entitlements amidst the rapid deterioration of the incumbent parasitical political economic institutions.

Free Online Education: 100k Signs Up for Harvard’s Offer; Minnesota’s Aborted Ban

One of the top universities of the world, Harvard University, has joined the bandwagon in offering free online education.

From Boston.com 

About 100,000 students have signed up for Harvard University’s first free online courses — computer science and an adaptation of the Harvard School of Public Health’s classes in epidemiology and biostatics. The online courses, part of a joint venture called edX, begin Monday, according to Harvard.

The university’s provost, Alan Garber, said Friday that the free courses are part of an effort to educate people worldwide and that the effort will help improve education on Harvard’s own campus.

“We really think that the first courses we offer will be great, but long term, the payoff is going to come from a better understanding about how people learn,” Garber said.

Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology established edX, a nonprofit organization, in the spring, and the University of California Berkeley joined the effort over the summer.

Courses offered through edX are branded MITx, HarvardX, and BerkeleyX. Anant Agarwal, president of edX, said interest has been equally high for the courses offered by all three schools: 155,000 students registered for a course in circuits and electronics that MIT offered through edX in the spring.

Students taking the online courses hail from around the world, but Agarwal said most of those in the spring course were in the United States, India, Britain, and Colombia.

Students can take as many courses as they wish through edX, and when they demonstrate mastery of a course they can receive a certificate of completion.

Graduates of online courses will eventually challenge those of the traditional courses on the job markets. And this will ultimately pop the current education bubble and radically alter current classroom based paradigms—which have been designed from 20^th century—as well as reduce  state indoctrination, diminish the welfare state, promote competition and lay emphasis on individualization/personalization of education (one teacher per student), expand knowledge specialization and democratize knowledge--yes, education for all willing to be educated. 

Free online education, thus, represents the diffusion and acceleration of the great F. A. Hayek’s knowledge revolution.   

The knowledge revolution will undermine justifications for government interference traditionally channeled through the politicization of the "poor" and "uneducated".

Meanwhile on a related field, politicians who pretentiously claim that they are for “education for all”, and the quack “education is a right” has shown their true colors by an attempted ban on free online education for specious reasons: legal technicalities or the enforcement of a state law that requires authorization from the state government

Notes the conservative Heritage Foundation

Lifelong learners, students wanting supplemental courses, professionals, and Americans across the country interested in enrolling in physics, history, music, and a variety of other courses can do so for free from the open-source provider Coursera. But Minnesota has just informed its residents that they are now prohibited by law from furthering their own education for free through courses offered on Coursera by the likes of Stanford, Duke, Princeton, and more than a dozen other universities.

As several reports have noted, the Chronicle of Higher Education first reported the following:

Notice for Minnesota Users:

Coursera has been informed by the Minnesota Office of Higher Education that under Minnesota Statutes (136A.61 to 136A.71), a university cannot offer online courses to Minnesota residents unless the university has received authorization from the State of Minnesota to do so. If you are a resident of Minnesota, you agree that either (1) you will not take courses on Coursera, or (2) for each class that you take, the majority of work you do for the class will be done from outside the State of Minnesota.

While students who enroll in a Coursera class cannot get college credit (although they can request that a professor send an email to a prospective employer, for instance, confirming that they took the course and reporting their success), models like Coursera are beginning to change the way Americans think about higher education and provide a huge opportunity to reduce costs and improve access.

Coursera—and others such as EdX (a Harvard/MIT online collaboration), Udacity, and Udemy—represent a shift in higher education toward credentialing content knowledge. Such a shift lays the groundwork for a revolution in higher education, allowing students to attain various credentials by demonstrating content and knowledge mastery from a variety of course providers. But that (literally) free pursuit of knowledge for their own personal edification or skill attainment is no longer available to Minnesota residents.

Politicians have obviously been feeling the heat from the internet whom threatens their longstanding privileges.

Cato’s Andrew Coulson wry but relevant commentary on the ban,

One of the classes you can take at Coursera is “Principles of Macroeconomics.” Maybe the folks who lobbied for and enacted the state’s education regulations are afraid that free learning and economic literacy would threaten their phony-baloney jobs. 

Fortunately, the snowballing forces of decentralization which has been enabled and substantially facilitated and buttressed by the internet has forced the Minnesota government to backtrack.

More signs of the deepening of the information-digital age

War on Internet: Despite Ban, Social Media Users in China Booms; Philippine Hackers Protests

As I have been pointing out, the information age, which essentially represents the snowballing forces of decentralization, particularly globalization and rapid technological advances, will dramatically change every aspect of our lives.

And governments operating from the political economic constructs of the 20th century, particularly the centralized top-down industrial age era political institutions has been fighting tooth and nail against such revolutionary changes that undermines the privileges of the incumbent the political class and their cronies.

Today’s centralization’s debt and welfare crisis have been in fact symptoms of the decadent top-down political institutions. Inflationism has thus been one of the measures of financial repressions that has been applied to achieve such an end.

Yet desperate attempts to preserve the status quo in favor of the current beneficiaries through more social controls has only transformed the internet into a major battlefront

Today’s war on the internet through serial attempts at censorship has apparently seen a backlash from civil society, whom has been waging a broad front online guerilla warfare.

Proof?

In China, banned social media websites continue to blossom.

From Bloomberg,

Facebook Inc. (FB) and Twitter Inc. have millions of users in China despite bans on the social networking services in the world’s largest Internet market, according to the results of a survey released today.

Facebook grew to 63.5 million users in China in the second quarter of this year, up from 7.9 million two years earlier, London-based researcher GlobalWebIndex said in a blog post today. Twitter users tripled to 35.5 million from 2009.

Sites blocked in China can be accessed via so-called proxy services, which connect users to servers outside the country so they can visit sites that are filtered. The workarounds have helped Facebook and Twitter compete with local sites including microblogging service Sina Weibo, said Tom Smith, founder of GlobalWebIndex.

“It only takes a little bit of desk research to discover that what is called the Great Firewall is actually much more porous than the Chinese government would like to admit,” Smith said in the blog post.

Despite their rapid growth, the two social networks are smaller than Qzone, a website operated by Tencent Holdings Ltd. (700), with 286.3 million users. Local rival Sina Weibo had 264.1 million users. Google+, the social network created by Google Inc. (GOOG) last year, had 106.9 million users. China has 513 million Internet users, according to the government-backed China Internet Network Information Center.

GlobalWebIndex asked 2,000 Chinese Internet users earlier this year which social sites they have created an account for, and which ones they used in the past month.

The quest for free market connectivity and the Hayekian knowledge revolution has been no different in the Philippines where attempts to censor social media has led to a concerted hacker attack on Philippine government offices

From another Bloomberg article, 

Hackers attacked websites of the Philippine central bank and at least two other government agencies last night to protest a law against cyber crime set to take effect next week.

The Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012 “effectively ends the freedom of expression in the Philippines,” according to a statement posted on the central bank website by a group that called itself Anonymous Philippines. Websites of Metropolitan Waterworks & Sewerage System, the Pilipinas Anti-Piracy Team and the American Chamber of Commerce were also defaced, the Philippine Daily Inquirer reported today.

President Benigno Aquino signed the law on Sept. 12, which identifies, prevents and punishes Internet-based crimes such as hacking, identity theft and spamming. Provisions on online libel and the authority of the Department of Justice to block websites without a court order have been opposed in several petitions filed with the Supreme Court.

The law will “infringe on the Constitutional-guaranteed freedom of speech and expression,” Senator Teofisto Guingona, a member of Aquino’s party, said in a statement today. Guingona asked the Supreme Court to declare unconstitutional several provisions of the law to take effect Oct. 3.

As I previously wrote, 

The internet essentially provides the platform for the unceasing struggle to attain civil and economic liberties, through the effective neutralization of political manipulations of the people’s minds.

The chief proponent and inspiration of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, the great philosopher anarchist Étienne de La Boétie once wrote,

“Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself,  cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom

Thus enslavement and freedom is a matter of people’s choice. And the state of knowledge or ignorance by every individual in a society determines that choice.

The more the diffusion of knowledge in a society, the balance of power shifts towards individual sovereignty at the expense of political entities.

And that’s why welfare warfare based governments have been averse to the internet, and that’s why political authorities will continue to wage an all out war of control of the internet.

It seems that my predictions are on a volatile path to realization.

MVP-Ateneo Rift: The Politicization of Education

In reaction to Mogul and PNoy favorite Manny Pangilinan’s severance of ties with his alma mater due to political differences somewhere I read a paraphrased comment that out of MVP's actions

Children should be spared of politics

Putting the blame on MVP alone is an example of misreading effects as the cause. The reason for the sensational split in the relationship is because the heated political divergences hasn’t just been between MVP and Ateneo, but instead this involves Ateneo official’s moral and political stand to inculcate into their professors and students.

I am NOT here to defend any political position by both camps, but to underscore the point of the vicious politicization of education, which in this case, has been through the imposition of political preferences by school authorities and church leaders on members of the academe and students. 

Essentially this controversial schism validates my views on why elite schools have been inclined towards statism.

To highlight the point of the dictatorial tendencies of the church-school cabal is the recent threat to purge by excommunication 159 Ateneo professors who sided with Philippine government’s RH Bill.

[As a side note, I am against any coercive imposition of “values” on the family: This means I am against the RH Bill and am equally against church strictures aimed at the interdiction of their moral stand on their constituents.]

Church influence on politics has had nasty social outcomes, as the great Professor Murray Rothbard wrote, (bold emphasis mine)

Historically, the union of church and state has been in many instances a mutually reinforcing coalition for tyranny. The state used the church to sanctify and preach obedience to its supposedly divinely sanctioned rule; the church used the state to gain income and privilege.

The Anabaptists collectivized and tyrannized Münster in the name of the Christian religion.

And, closer to our century, Christian socialism and the social gospel have played a major role in the drive toward statism, and the apologetic role of the Orthodox Church in Soviet Russia has been all too clear. Some Catholic bishops in Latin America have even proclaimed that the only route to the kingdom of heaven is through Marxism, and if I wished to be nasty, I could point out that the Reverend Jim Jones, in addition to being a Leninist, also proclaimed himself the reincarnation of Jesus.

Moreover, now that socialism has manifestly failed, politically and economically, socialists have fallen back on the "moral" and the "spiritual" as the final argument for their cause.

For the mainstream, coercion, as along as it is committed by the state, is seen as moral. Thus, the desperate attempts by competing interests (represented by diverse power blocs, church, schools, environmentalists, and others) to influence policymaking which thereby results to the attendant social frictions.

Yet education must be free of politics and of government interventions, as Professor Tibor Machan argues (bold emphasis mine)

When a country tries to combine freedom of thought and speech with government-administered education, there will be irresolvable conflict. In a system of private education competition among schools would take care of philosophical correctness. In some schools certain books will be featured in the library, in others they will not, and students and their parents will be able to select which they want to be exposed to. Biology will be taught as creationists wish or as Darwinians do.  No official doctrine will be imposed, period.

But when government delivers a coercive system of "education"--actually mostly indoctrination, since no alternative is available to the bulk of us who have to pay for and use such a system--any selection of books, magazines, films shown in classes and so forth will amount to censorship of the materials not chosen. They will be deemed as having been banned--whereas in a private system selection by the administrators of some schools, library officials, or teachers will not preclude exclusion by others. It is government's nearly one-size-fits-all approach to education that stands in the way of free inquiry.

Unfortunately, in many societies people want to mix elements of liberty with elements of coercion, as if that were something trouble free—health food with some poison! It isn't--the courts will struggle forever with trying to square that circle and politicians will engage in varieties of demagoguery to gain the power over the “educational” turf.

Only by getting government out of education can that matter be made consistent with the principles of a free society and fit for human beings whose minds must forever be free to think.

The MVP-Ateneo rift only confirms the symptoms of irresolvable social conflict brought upon by the politicization of education and of government interventions.

Updated to add: Because I was in a hurry and had something things to do, I was unable to edit this post at the time of the publication. Thus I made belated grammatical changes on the first three sentences about 4 hours after.
  

War on Education: ADB Disdains Tutoring, Seeks Regulation

The Asian Development Bank (ADB) detests private tutoring which they pejoratively calls the “shadow education”

From Yahoo,

Asian parents are spending billions of dollars on private tutors for their children, and the practice is growing despite doubts over its effectiveness, according to a study published Wednesday.

"Shadow education" is an expanding business not only in wealthy countries but also in some of the region's poorer nations as parents try to give their children the best start in life, the Asian Development Bank said.

Nearly nine out of 10 South Korean elementary pupils have private tutoring, while the figure for primary school children in India's West Bengal state is six out of 10.

"Proportions are lower in other countries, but throughout the region the shadow is spreading and intensifying," the study said, calling for a review of education systems to make such extra teaching less attractive.

Extra academic work is aimed at helping slow learners and supporting high achievers, and is seen by many Asian parents as a constructive way for adolescents to spend their spare time.

However, it can also reduce time for sports and other activities important for well-rounded development, as well as cause social tensions since richer families are able to pay for better-quality tutoring, the study said.

Funny, but are we not suppose to know more of our own interests or what is best for us and our family? Yet these haughty ADB people are saying otherwise...they know more about our children's welfare than us, the parents.

If a family finds that the “one-size-fits-all” educational standards implemented by incumbent institutions has not been sufficient in providing learning services for their children, would it be morally deviant to procure educational services outside of these institutions?

To consider, in the Philippines, nearly 4 out of 10 college graduates are unemployed and one in 10 of graduates go abroad. So how effective has traditional education been? Yet these are the standards which the ADB desires that our children be confined with.

I have to admit I have been a product of tutoring too, as my parents felt the need for me to learn more, when I was in grade school.

Education comes best from the self, as educator John Holt once said,

I believe that we learn best when we, not others are deciding what we are going to learn, and when we are choosing the people, materials, and experiences from which we will be learning

This has been true for me, where everyday is a learning day.

I would extend this idea to say that most of my learning came from self education or “deciding what to learn” and from indirect mentorship (Dr. Faber and the Austrian school for instance).

And I think that most of what I learned from contemporary education has been useless and merely went down the drain.

Yet here is what ADB wants to do…

The study called for state supervision and regulation of the industry, as well as a review of Asia's educational systems.

So the ADB wants to control and regulate the education of your children.

The truth of the matter is that they want our children to become worshipers of state.

Again John Holt,

Education... now seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern slave state, in which most people feel themselves to be nothing but producers, consumers, spectators, and 'fans,' driven more and more, in all parts of their lives, by greed, envy, and fear. My concern is not to improve 'education' but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves

It may NOT just be the state, which the ADB promotes.

They may have secondary objectives. They may serve as mouthpieces or shills for established educational (politically connected) institutions whom have feeling the heat from online competition and from homeschooling.

The following video are the kind of stuffs which statists (like the ADB) hates:


Indian education scientist Sugata Mitra, in a TED talk, tackles one of the greatest problems of education—the best teachers and schools don't exist where they're needed most.

Some great quotes from Sugata Mitra:

1:41 children will learn to do what they want to learn to do

16:33 Education is a self organising system where learning is an emergent phenomenon

Like John Holt, the message from Mr. Mitra is simple: education is self determined.

Quote of the Day: War Equals Presidential Greatness

Our data analysis suggests that wars in which a large percentage of the U.S. population is killed will, all other things equal, cause historians to judge as great a president on whose watch those wars occurred. Certainly, this was the perception of presidents Theodore Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. It was probably also the perception of other presidents.

This conclusion is troubling. Most presidents, after all, probably want to be thought of as great. When they spend resources on war, they are spending almost entirely other peoples money and lives. They get little credit for avoiding war. Martin Van Buren, for example, effectively avoided a war on the northern border of the United States. How many people know that today?
Indeed, how many people have even heard of Martin Van Buren?

Woodrow Wilson, by contrast, inserted the United States into World War I. That was a war that the United States could easily have avoided. Moreover, had the U.S. government avoided World War I, the treaty that ended the war would not likely have been so lopsided. The Versailles Treaty`s punitive terms on Germany, as Keynes predicted in 1919, helped set the stage for WorldWar II.

So it is reasonable to think that had the United States not entered World War I, there might not have been a World War II. Yet, despite his major blunder and more likely, because of his major blunder, which caused over 100,000 Americans to die in World War I, Wilson is often thought of as a great president.

The danger is that modern presidents understand these incentives. Those who want peace should take historians` ratings of presidents seriously. Beyond that, we should stop celebrating, and try to persuade historians to stop celebrating, presidents who made unnecessary wars. One way to do so is to remember the unseen: the war that didn`t happen, the war that was avoided, and the peace and prosperity that resulted. If we applied this standard, then presidents Martin van Buren, John Tyler, Warren G. Harding, and Calvin Coolidge, to name four, would get a substantially higher rating than they are usually given.

That’s from a paper by Professors David Henderson and Zachary Gochenour.

Seeing greatness in war or destruction is an example of the public’s misconceived glorification of the state, which has mostly been a product of indoctrination and political propaganda.

War, according to writer Randolph Bourne, is the health of the state.

Wars are the ramifications of societies that worship the state, where the gullible public are misled to exalt the illusions of the supposed virtues of nationalism by ignoring the destructive real effects of such political actions.

Wars will always be a recourse or an option of any society that depends on political redistribution of resources.

Why Socialists Hate the Internet

Writes Mary O’Grady at the Wall Street Journal, (bold emphasis mine) [hat tip Mark Perry]

'There's a reason the people in Cuba don't have access to the Internet. It is because the government [couldn't] survive it."

That was Florida Sen. Marco Rubio last week at a Washington conference titled "Cuba Needs a (Technological) Revolution: How the Internet Can Thaw an Island Frozen in Time." The event was sponsored by Google Ideas, a for-profit venture of the giant Internet search enterprise, and the nonprofit Heritage Foundation. I was asked to kick off things with a Rubio interview. So I began by asking him what he makes of the Cuban military's reference last year to technology that allows young people to exchange thoughts digitally as "the permanent battlefield."

Mr. Rubio responded that it isn't communication with the outside world that the regime fears the most, but Cuban-to-Cuban chatter. "I think Raúl Castro clearly understands that his regime cannot survive a Cuban reality where individual Cubans can communicate [with] each other in an unfettered manner." He called "unfiltered access to the Internet and social media" Cuba's "best hope" of avoiding "a stagnated dictatorship" for "the next 50 years that would survive even the death of Raul and Fidel."

The internet or the information age isn’t just about connectivity though. Rather the age of the internet is about the knowledge revolution or democratization of knowledge through “geographically noncontiguous communication” as author Jeffrey Tucker recently described.

The information age brings about unfettered opportunities to learn or to expand one’s horizon of wisdom. Say for instance anyone who wants to access literatures from libraries around the world may try openlibrary.org.

How about basic materials for self learning or home schooling? You may also try the revolutionary Khan Academy.

The political power of despots and their socialists supporters principally derives from ignorance. This is why the public has been vulnerable to fear and to mind manipulation—via indoctrination and propaganda.

People hardly realize that conventional education, for instance, has been surreptitiously designed for the worship of the state. The internet brought me to this reality and made me an apostate to the religion of the state.

The internet essentially provides the platform for the unceasing struggle to attain civil and economic liberties, through the effective neutralization of political manipulations of the people’s minds.

The chief proponent and inspiration of nonviolent resistance and civil disobedience, the great philosopher anarchist Étienne de La Boétie once wrote,

Obviously there is no need of fighting to overcome this single tyrant, for he is automatically defeated if the country refuses consent to its own enslavement: it is not necessary to deprive him of anything, but simply to give him nothing; there is no need that the country make an effort to do anything for itself provided it does nothing against itself. It is therefore the inhabitants themselves who permit, or, rather, bring about, their own subjection, since by ceasing to submit they would put an end to their servitude. A people enslaves itself,
cuts its own throat, when, having a choice between being vassals and being free men, it deserts its liberties and takes on the yoke, gives consent to its own misery, or, rather, apparently welcomes it. If it cost the people anything to recover its freedom

Thus enslavement and freedom is a matter of people’s choice. And the state of knowledge or ignorance by every individual in a society determines that choice.

The more the diffusion of knowledge in a society, the balance of power shifts towards individual sovereignty at the expense of political entities.

And that’s why welfare warfare based governments have been averse to the internet, and that’s why political authorities will continue to wage an all out war of control of the internet.

The Orwellian Approach of Mainstream Media

From Lew Rockwell.com

Today, mainstream media coverage uses programmed distortion, confusion, even outright lying when its Money Power masters order it to support the “official story” on any major political, economic or financial process. When looked at closely, however, the “official story” of things can be seen to be inaccurate, misleading, often hardly believable if not downright stupid.

Examples of this: Iraq’s inexistent WMD’s leading to the invasion and destruction of that country; global mega-banker bail-outs with taxpayer money; irrational US diplomatic, military, financial and ideological alignment to Israeli objectives; “we-killed-Osama-Bin-Laden-and-dumped-his-body-into-the-sea”; and the wide array of “whodunits” surrounding 9/11 in New York and Washington, 7/7 in London, the AMIA/Israeli Embassy attacks in Buenos Aires in 1992/1994, and – of course – that all time favorite: who shot JFK…?…

How they do it…

The Seven Step Mainstream Media Country Destruction Guide

1. First, they start by targeting a country ripe for “Regime Change”, and brand it a “rogue state”; then…

2. They arm, train, finance local terrorist groups through CIA, MI6, Mossad, Al-Qaeda (a CIA operation), drug cartels (often CIA operations) and call them “freedom fighters”; then…

3. As mock UN Security Council Resolutions are staged that rain death and destruction upon millions of civilians, they call it “UN sanctions to protect civilians”; then…

4. They spread flagrant lies through their “newsrooms” and paid journalists, and call it "the international community’s concerns expressed by prestigious spokespeople and analysts…” then…

5. They bomb, invade and begin to control the target country and call it “liberation”; then…

6 As the target country falls fully under their control, they impose “the kind of democracy that we want to see” (as Hillary Clinton before visiting Egypt and Tunisia on March 10, 2011), until finally…

7. They steal appetizing oil, mineral and agricultural reserves handing them over to Global Power Elite corporations, and impose unnecessary private banking debt and call it “foreign investment and reconstruction.”

Their keynotes are: Force and Hypocrisy, which they have used time and again to destroy entire countries, always in the name of “freedom”, “democracy”, “peace” and “human rights”. Utmost force and violence is used to achieve their ends and goals.

Read the rest here

Mainstream media has served as traditional and conventional channels for political interests to broadcast propaganda, even in the Philippines.

Here, the local theme may be different from the above, but the objective has been the same: to justify the use or expansion of political control over the populace--mostly done through abstractions.

As George Orwell wrote,

The inflated style is itself an kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink. In our age there is no such thing as "keeping out of politics." All issues are political issues, and politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.

Political Repression: Sacrificing Lives of Constituents and Mind Control

Here is another example of the myth of good government.

When political leaders are faced with the risks of losing their power, they will abandon or put to risk the lives of their constituents.

In fearing the ripple effect from the Arab Spring (wave of recent uprisings), the North Korean government has responded by refusing to repatriate her citizens stranded in the chaotic Libya.

The Foreign Policy reports, (bold emphasis mine) [pointer to Mark Perry]

In mid-February, as Libya shook to the incipient revolt against Muammar al-Qaddafi, around 200 North Korean migrant workers found themselves stranded. Like their compatriots in other parts of the Middle East, they had been brought in to work as cut-price doctors, nurses, and construction workers. But with a popular uprising unfolding, their government now refused to repatriate them.

According to reports, Pyongyang ordered the workers to remain in Libya out of fear that what they witnessed -- a full-blown popular rebellion against Qaddafi's dictatorship -- could lead to a copycat rebellion back home. "The fear was obviously that these 200 would have a kind of a viral effect, bringing news and information about what was happening in Libya," said Tim Peters, founder of Helping Hands Korea, which aids North Korean refugees.

Mass popular uprisings, so often a contagious affliction, pose problems for any dictatorship. For North Korea, the outbreak of revolts in Egypt and Libya -- two steadfast allies of the hermit regime -- has prompted swift moves to head off a similar outbreak of democracy on its own turf.

And it’s not just that, leaders will even turn to repress on their people when their political interests are at stake such as what has been happening in Libya, Yemen, Syria or elsewhere.

In the North Korean experience above, part of the crackdown against the prospect of a People Power revolt has been to seize possession of cellphones and to clamp down on access to foreign media, because...

(from the same article; bold emphasis added)

"What the authorities fear the most is in fact information," said Hyun In-ae, vice president of NKIS, which smuggles USB sticks containing entertainment and political materials into North Korea...

In recent interviews with North Korean refugees, Noland has detected what he calls a "market syndrome," suggesting a link between participation in illicit market activities, foreign news consumption, and negative views of the regime. Black markets, he said, have the potential to turn into a "semiautonomous zone of social communication" and a possible space for political organizing. "In short," Noland said, "information and markets are linked."

That’s why governments abhor free markets, because free markets are the epicenter of information that coordinates people’s actions. And such actions may include the power to neutralize the political interests of tyrannical leaders.

But one might be tempted to object:

“but that is North Korea and should not apply to the US or the Philippines.”

As the great Friedrich von Hayek reminds us, (The Road to Serfdom) [bold emphasis mine]

Collectivism means the end of truth. To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the ends selected by those in control; it is essential that the people should come to regard these ends as their own. This is brought about by propaganda and by complete control of all sources of information.

In short, control of information, which leads to mind control or indoctrination for political subjugation, is the essence of totalitarianism. And this has universal application.