Nothing will have more impact on the future of the world than the future of families.

This truism is sobering as we watch the decline of the family.

As we consider the industrialized world, it is disturbing to note that even amongst those who espouse, promote and live a strong family lifestyle, some of the most basic roles have been lost.

For example, consider the following from an editorial by John Rosemond:

“A journalist recently asked me to name the number one problem facing today’s family. I think she expected me to address education, the economy, or some other “hot” topic. To her surprise, I said, ‘A confusion of roles.’

“In today’s parenting universe, married women with children think of themselves first and foremost as mothers. This is confusion. If you are married with children, you are first and foremost a wife or a husband. In your wedding vows, you did not say, “I take you to be my (husband, wife) until children do us part.” Those vows, many generations old, read the way they do for a reason.

“I’ve been telling recent audiences that parenting has become bad for the mental health of women. Today’s all-too typical mother believes that whether her child experiences success or failure in whatever realm is completely up to her. If she is sufficiently attentive to her child’s needs and sufficiently proactive in his life, he will succeed. If not, he will have problems. The natural consequence of this state of over-focus is anxiety, self-doubt, and guilt.”

Marriage is the central relationship of society, and in society, no roles are more important than husband and wife.

As I talk to young people about their plans for life, career is usually the first thing they mention.

Once in a while, a young man will mention that his main goal is to be a good father, and a little more frequently a young woman will say that she really wants to be a great mother.

But I’ve never heard the following: “I want to be a great wife,” or “my most important goal is to be a great husband.”

This is a concern. In a way, feminism has had moved society by persuading our generation to focus on parenthood even more than marriage.

I’m convinced that most people who say they want to be great parents just assume marriage as part of it. But that’s the problem. Just assuming marriage isn’t enough. It reflects a lack of emphasis on our primary roles.

The future of the world certainly depends on the quality of fathering and mothering in the twenty-first century.

The quality of marriages is even more important. The state of the world ten, twenty, even seventy years from now will be determined by the depth and quality of our marriage relationships. Parenting will largely be determined by the level of success our marriages attain.

The recent politicization of the institution of marriage raises concerns in the minds of virtually everyone, no matter where they stand on the issue.

Of most concern to me is that 64% of married women and 82% of married men responded to a survey in the early 2000′s that they had been unfaithful to their marriage vows.

I see no greater threat to the institution of marriage than the tepid level of commitment of the spouses, and the way they characterize and fulfill their roles.

Marriage is hard work, worthy work–the work of a lifetime. If there is one thing we should teach our youth, it is the value of building a great marriage.

More precisely, we need to teach—by precept and example whenever possible—that “wife” and “husband” are vital roles to society, requiring preparation, consideration, emphasis and great effort.

Once married, these must always be the primary roles of each individual—not secondary to career, social endeavors, or even parenthood.

***********************************

Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Why can’t the freedom movement seem to get any traction?

Why have we lost battle after battle for at least the past century?

It’s because we tend to make the good the enemy of the perfect, the pragmatic the enemy of the ideal.

To be clear, it’s because the most passionate among us have adopted a rigid, dogmatic, uncompromising “either-or” stance in the fight.

Rather than winning hearts and minds in the trenches inch-by-inch, we drop rhetorical nuclear bombs and make enemies of potential supporters.

There’s one critical distinction that explains this tendency and, if understood, can overcome it and make all the difference to our success:

Do we view the fight for freedom as an election-cycle battle, or as a 100-year war?

These vastly different mindsets generate completely different strategies and tactics and produce completely different results.

If we view the fight as an election-cycle battle, the battlegrounds are primarily political and governmental.

The tactics include:

• Public, energetic, and angry marches and demonstrations
• Passionate, vitriolic, and partisan commentary that preaches to the crowd and riles the base but fails to win new supporters
• Literal, logical, and personal argumentation
• Directing energy primarily at getting individual political candidates elected

But in a 100-year war, the battlegrounds are cultural and educational, and the short-term tactics above shift to the following long-term strategies:

• Personal, lifelong, classical education in the quiet of our homes
• Respectful, thoughtful, open-minded discussion with people across the whole spectrum of belief, with the intention of winning hearts and minds, rather than simply spewing passion or proving how smart and “right” we are
• Symbolic, metaphorical, and artful story-telling and persuasion
• Directing energy toward reforming education, building families and communities, and becoming successful entrepreneurs (see the three choices in FreedomShift by Oliver DeMille)

In a 100-year war, we moderate our passion and smarten our strategy.

We heal the roots of our demise, rather than hacking at the symptomatic leaves.

We work from love, rather than anger.

We reform from the outside-in and bottom-up, rather than the top-down. In other words, we focus on fixing ourselves, rather than Washington.

We understand that studying Montesquieu in our homes is far more effective than waving banners in the streets.

We spend our time and energy teaching the rising generation the depths of freedom and political philosophy, rather than debating opponents in chat rooms and on radio and TV shows.

We build successful small businesses, rather than complaining about losing jobs overseas.

In a 100-year war, idealism and pragmatism aren’t mutually exclusive. We’re more concerned with direction than destination.

In other words, we don’t reject particular policies because they’re not ultimate, black-and-white ideals.

Rather, we judge them based on whether or not they take us closer to the ideal, however slight the progress.

In a 100-year war, we learn and teach principles, rather than fight candidates.

To be perfectly clear, we don’t waste time forwarding mass emails about the status of Obama’s birth certificate.

Most importantly, in a 100-year war, independent freedom lovers create an inclusive tent, rather than an exclusive club.

For example, many conservatives denigrate environmentalists, or as they’re disdainfully labeled, “tree-huggers.”

But many of these environment-conscious, thoughtful people are also highly-conscious and passionate about local, organic food production and sustainable agriculture — which is a primary battleground for freedom.

So rather than building on common beliefs and bringing these people into the tent of freedom, many conservatives banish them with narrow-minded labels.

The Occupy Wall Street movement is also a favorite target of many conservative commentators.

But wise freedom-lovers would do well to harness their energy.

The truth is that they raise a critical point that most conservatives fail to see: Vast inequities in wealth distribution and power are, in fact, killing America — every bit as much, if not more so, than governmental wealth redistribution from rich to poor.

The government does favor those with capital over those with little or none, big businesses over small businesses, which creates these unfair and unsustainable inequities.

We don’t have to occupy Wall Street with them, but we can at least be wise enough to recognize where we agree in order to work together toward a more free, just, and sustainable society.

We can start winning more friends and creating fewer enemies. We can be pragmatic coalition-builders, rather than dogmatic clique-builders.

I’m as passionate about freedom as anyone — freedom is my mission.

But passion alone isn’t going to win the fight for freedom.

The war will be won through wisdom.

***********************************

Kevin Mogavero is a co-founder of “Six Degrees of Leadership,” a personal development company that empowers people to live their purpose and passion by building “Social Capital.”

A graduate of West Point Academy, Kevin served six years as an officer in the U.S. Army Field Artillery. He held a combat arms leadership role for his entire career, except one staff position, during which he obtained a Master’s Degree in Leadership and Management. He also served in Iraq during “Operation Iraqi Freedom.” Since the military, Kevin has worked for Honeywell as an earned-value analyst in the aerospace department, in Phoenix Arizona.

He started testing his leadership skills in the entrepreneurial world by starting several companies, to include a real estate company and a business mailing-address company. Kevin loves to serve people who have a yearning to create a better life for themselves and others. He is passionate about teaching people the importance of something that most take for granted: relationships.

Kevin lives in Phoenix with his wife and two daughters. Read and subscribe to Kevin’s Warrior Blog here.

When 28 year old Jared Massey was tasered alongside the highway by a Utah state trooper in 2007, the incident elicited a lot of strong opinions.

Comments ran the gamut from, “The motorist was a criminal who deserved it” to “The trooper is living proof that the police are out of control.”

As is the case with most incidents of this nature, the truth is most likely to be found somewhere in between the two extremes.

Contrary to the declarations of absolute guilt or innocence on the part of the motorist and the trooper, the video shows that neither side was entirely wrong or entirely right.

The trooper’s actions were upheld by his superiors and Massey received a $40,000 settlement for his troubles.

But the incident was a solid learning experience for the rest of us.

The trooper, while beginning the stop with polite professionalism, quickly became the more confrontational of the two when Massey refused to simply shut up, sign the ticket and take it.

The men were obviously on different wavelengths and it appears that the trooper, as he explained to a sheriff’s deputy later, finally decided to show Massey who “was really in charge.”

For his part, Massey fell short on a number of fronts, but his lack of cooperation was among the most minor of them.

He failed to realize that in any disagreement with a law enforcement officer, the side of the road is the absolute worst place to try to argue your case.

As at least one former police officer puts it, “You have to be willing to lose on the side of the road, in order to win the real battle; not being arrested and taken to jail.”

That advice, by the way, is not for the sake of hardened criminals, but for ill-informed people like a motorist who through his own ignorance, inadvertently provoked a frustrated trooper and escalated his traffic ticket into a tasering, his arrest and jail.

He simply didn’t understand that the deck is hopelessly stacked against any person who tries to reason, complain or argue his way out of a citation at roadside.

And if that person happens to encounter into one of those thankfully rare officers who feel the need to show their dominance, the motorist will soon be enjoying a long, lonely ride to jail.

Apologists for Massey maintain that the video proves our police are becoming increasingly brutal in enforcing the unbending will of the state.

Apologists for the trooper claim that failure to immediately bow and scrape to an officer’s authority heralds the imminent onset of anarchy.

Both are painting but a partial view of the bigger picture, though there are elements of truth in each viewpoint.

Few people have an accurate foundation by which to understand what their local police actually do on a daily basis, unless they are related to an officer or have attended one of the excellent citizens’ academies offered by many departments.

Those who have had the opportunity to observe for themselves and to speak to officers firsthand can attest to the professionalism and down to earth nature of the vast majority of their local police force.

Most police take seriously the confidence placed in them by the public they serve and when one of their officers crosses the line, they aggressively weed out those who would betray that trust.

Police are expected to respond to some of the worst situations imaginable and to bring order to temporary chaos while behaving impartially and respecting the rights of those with whom they are dealing.

That’s a tall order for mere mortals.

But the vast majority of officers do it anyway knowing that not many people understand their profession and fewer still will hesitate to criticize based upon that incomplete understanding.

Having said that, there are some highly disturbing trends in how the state uses its police powers.

With the increasing procurement of federal funding and equipment by local police agencies across the nation under the auspices of homeland security, there is a real danger of local law enforcement becoming just another arm of the federal government.

Somebody get these guys a terrorist event. Stat!

The ever-increasing militarization of even small town police forces and the use of paramilitary tactics in serving arrest warrants on even the most mundane, non-violent offenses have served to create an “us vs. them” mentality among some members of law enforcement.

What starts out as a group of sheepdogs can quickly become a pack of wolves.

When officers no longer see the public as a community to be served, but rather as an adversarial mass of potential criminals who need to be managed for the safety of the state, trouble isn’t too far off.

The official mentality is shifting from training peace officers to training code enforcers and this creates a corresponding hostility toward those who are not agents of the state.

It also fosters an attitude in which lack of accountability to the general public can lead to a sense of being able to operate above the law.

This flies in the face of one of the nine principles of policing as espoused by Britain’s Sir Robert Peel, who was considered to be the father of modern policing.

His instruction was: “Police, at all times, should maintain a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and the public are the police; the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.”

Law enforcement officers perform a difficult and stressful job that depends upon the respect and trust of the public they serve.

But when the mindset of, “It’s better to be feared than respected” takes hold, both they and the public will find themselves increasingly polarized and more prone to viewing one another as a threat.

Keeping government operating within its proper role is the best defense against the creeping tyranny of a state that is tempted to use the police to advance its interests over the the public’s.

********************

Bryan Hyde is a radio host, husband, father, graduate student at George Wythe University, and seeker of truth. He does professional voice work through his company One Clear Voice.

Bryan blogs at The White Rose Society and writes firearm reviews for The Truth About Guns. He and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Bryan:

“We’re not going to bail our way out of this crisis, we’re not going to stimulate our way out of this crisis, we are only going to educate, ultimately, and imagine and invent our way out of this crisis.”
—Thomas L. Friedman, Meet the Press

 

“By 2020, the U.S. will be spending $1 trillion a year just to pay the interest on the national debt.
Sometime between now and then the catastrophe will come. It will come with amazing swiftness.”
—David Brooks, The New York Times

On the same week[i] the White House released its prediction that unemployment will get even worse every year in 2012, 2013 and 2014, Friedman and Mandlebaum’s book entitled That Used to Be Us focused the national dialogue on the deepening decline of the United States.

Fortunately, Freidman and Mandlebaum also outline a plan for how America can come back soon.

Harry S. Dent’s newest book, The Great Crash Ahead, further elaborates on this topic.

Friedman and Mandelbaum’s argument goes something like this: the United States is in serious trouble because of four great trends that are bringing massive change.

Our decline didn’t start with the housing crisis in 2008, but back in the late 1980s at the end of the Cold War.

Four Trends

First, according to Freidman,[ii]

“We made the worst mistake a country or species can make, at the end of the Cold War, when we misread our environment. We interpreted the end of the Cold War as victory…not understanding that it was actually the onset of one of the biggest challenges we’ve ever faced as a country.

“We had…unleashed two billion people just like us. But the nineties turned out to be quite a party thanks to the peace dividend, thanks to the massive productivity boost of the Internet and thanks, most importantly in many ways, to the collapse in oil prices, which was like a huge tax cut.”

Second,

“9/11 set us on a really bad course. We spent the last decade—in many ways necessarily, in many ways excessively—chasing the losers from globalization rather than the winners.

“And we made up for a lot of the fall behind…by basically injecting ourselves with steroids. Just as baseball players did it to hit home runs, we injected ourselves with credit steroids, creating a huge housing boom and construction boom to create jobs.”

Third,

“The number of people who can compete, connect and collaborate exploded in the last decade. You know,”

Freidman continued,

“I wrote a book in 2004 called The World is Flat, which was about this connecting of the world. We’ve gone from connected to hyper-connected…. When we sat down to write this book, I actually went back to The World is Flat, I looked in the index, and I realized that Facebook wasn’t in it.

“When I said ‘the world is flat,’ Facebook didn’t exist, or for most people it didn’t exist, Twitter was a sound, the Cloud was in the sky, 4G was a parking place, Linked In was a prison, Applications were what you sent to college, and for most people Skype was a typo…

“That all happened in just the last seven years. And what it’s done is taken the world from connected to hyper-connected. And that’s been a huge opportunity, and a huge challenge.”

Fourth, we’ve witnessed a huge generational shift.

“We went from the Greatest Generation, whose philosophy was basically to save and invest, and we are still living off their saving and investing, to basically the Baby Boomer generation, whose philosophy turned out to be ‘borrow and spend.’

“And we’ve really shifted from a generation born in the Depression, World War II and the Cold War—these were serious people, they wouldn’t think of shutting down the government for a minute—to a generation…that is much less serious.

“We’ve gone from basically the values of the Greatest Generation…to a Baby Boomer generation whose values are situational….

“You put them all together, and I think you really account for a lot of the hole we’re in right now…”[iii]

The book goes in more depth on each of these themes. More importantly, the book outlines some well-considered solutions.

For example, major employers, according to Friedman, are “all looking for the same kind of employee now: Someone who can do critical reasoning and thinking…who can adapt, invent, and reinvent the job, because in this hyper-connected world change is happening so fast. You know, there are companies now in Silicon Valley that do quarterly employer reviews…because their product cycle is changing so fast. You can’t wait until the end of the year to find out you have a bad team manager.”[iv]

Clearly, Freidman argues, education has got to change—it’s been too rote, and now it needs to prepare thinkers, leaders and innovators.

This is a hard job for an industry made up of mostly non-entrepreneurial, deeply security-minded types.

“What we argue in the book…going forward there really are just going to be two kinds of countries in the world: HIEs and LIEs: High-Imagination-Enabling countries and Low-Imagination-Enabling countries.

“Forget Developed and Developing….

“We’re not going to bail our way out of this crisis, we’re not going to stimulate our way out of this crisis, we are only going to educate, ultimately, and imagine and invent our way out of this crisis.”[v]

Friedman and Mandelbaum’s analysis is much needed in our current nation.

We train our youth not to take risks, and to get the “right” answer rather than the wise answer.

These two big problems are a serious challenge.

Without wise risk, prosperity and leadership are impossible.

Friedman’s 5 Pillars

The authors of That Used To Be Us note that the United States won at every major historical turn because we followed what Friedman called “the 5 Pillars”:

1-“Educate our people up to and beyond whatever the level of technology is…

2-“Immigration. Attract the world’s most talented and energetic people…

3-“Have the world’s best infrastructure…

4-“Have the right rules for incenting, capital formation and risk taking…

5-“Government-funded research.”[vi]

Note that these five form a powerful private society where the government maintains the right rules and incentivizes free enterprise.

All five have significantly decreased since the year 2000, really since 1989, and today the Right is strongly against 2 and 5 while the Left is adamantly against 4.

Both are caught in the trap of trying to accomplish 1 and 3 using the same old methods that haven’t worked for over two decades.

No wonder we’re in decline.

We’ve stopped doing the most important things that brought America’s original and lasting successes.

The Left pushes too strongly for government-only solutions while the Right rejects any government role.

As journalist Paul Gigot noted,

“The irony is, of the past thirty, forty years, that the prestige of government has collapsed most rapidly when government has tried to do…far more than it is capable of doing.

“Government prestige increased under Ronald Reagan, the great supposed enemy of government, because he showed when you focused on a couple of things and did it well, and got the economy growing, that people said, ‘You know what, they’re competent there. It’s working.’”[vii]

We need government.

We need it to protect equal rights for everyone and maintain a system where all are treated equally before the law.

This encourages free enterprise, economic growth and improved prosperity.

Societies without such governments have little freedom.

Of course, the danger is that good government can become overbearing and put a damper on economic growth and success.

Today we have government that has clearly over-reached in a number of ways, and a backlash from the Right that wants little or no government.

We need to adopt a middle approach, good government that is, in a phrase used in the American founding, “strong and limited.”

Actually, in The Federalist Papers the term was frequently “vigorous and limited.”

We want a strong government, and at the same time we want a limited government. That is what good constitutional government is all about.

Many from the Right may consider the Friedman/Mandlebaum book a push for too much government just as many from the Left will wonder that it doesn’t push for more government solutions.

American citizens should take a step back and consider the proposals on their merits, however.

I don’t agree with every suggestion in this book, but I find a number of them to be well considered.

On the big topic, the broad concept that both government and the private sector must work together in their proper roles in order to get our nation back on track, I think the book is right on.

On the subject of education, this book is especially valuable. In truth, as the authors affirm, bailouts and stimulus packages—as necessary as they may be in certain crisis situations—will not solve America’s problems.

Real solutions depend on wise policy from government and mostly from innovation and leadership in the private sector.

Indeed, the best government can do is remove the current regulatory pressure on small business and allow the entrepreneurial American spirit to get our economy growing again.

Another recent book addresses these same issues from a different perspective.

Doom-and-Gloomers

I have long been a fan of the work of Harry S. Dent because his predictions, like those of John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler, have been strikingly accurate even though they have been more specific, and therefore more likely to fall short, than those from most other forecasters.

Dent argues in his latest book, The Great Crash Ahead, that “the great economic crisis of 2008 will likely return in 2012, or 2013 at the latest, and will be even worse.”

His analysis is alarming, but interesting. Note that Dent is not a doom-and-gloomer.

Remember, when multiple authors in the mid-1990s were predicting a major crash ahead, Dent published The Roaring 2000s, which forecast that the stock market would boom for the next decade.

He also said that the boom would increase until a shock and downturn in 2008.

For most of his career, Dent has taken on the doomsayers and offered a counter-intuitive forecast of economic boom ahead.

The fact that he said the cycles would turn in the other direction in 2008, and that now he says they’ll get even worse, should concern every American.

Dent wrote:

• “Debt and stimulus is like any drug: it takes more to create less effect.”
• “Deflation is the only possible scenario in the decade ahead.”
• “The U.S. Dollar will appreciate and be the safe haven—not gold, silver, the Euro or the Swiss Franc.”
• “Home prices will fall by 55% to 65% from the top before this crisis is over.”
• “Stock [will] crash to between 3,300 and 5,600 on the Dow by the end of 2013, or 2014 at the latest.”
• “Also, the crash will be worldwide, not just in the United States and Europe, as the dramatic China bubble comes to an end.”
• “The trends for the coming decade are crystal clear: we are going to experience a deeper downturn and deflation in prices, not inflation. We call this the Winter season; it comes predictably once in a lifetime, currently every 80 years, which means that very few people will understand what is happening.”[viii]

Whether we face massive inflation ahead, as Ken Kurson has argued,[ix] or the deflation Dent predicts, the economic future promises to be challenging.

As Dent notes, from 1775 to the year 2000 Americans accumulated $20 trillion in private debt.

From the year 2000 to 2008 (latest numbers), we accumulated $22 trillion more—for a total of $42 trillion.[x]

No doubt this trajectory has increased since 2008.

Since the economic difficulties ahead follow patterns that we haven’t witnessed since the 1930s, most of the current common wisdom on economics is lacking or just plain wrong.

“Unlearning is the key to times of change and transition,” Dent wrote. “What worked in a boom does not work in a downturn.”[xi]

Here are some of the things which have changed:[xii]

• “It is your father’s economy”!
• Don’t buy a bunch of new stuff—get out of the spending habit.
• Make do with what you have.
• Expect lower wages and lower prices.
• Realize that debt is going to get a lot more expensive than it used to be.
• Realize that assets and savings will be worth more over time.
• Start thinking in terms of multiple streams of income.
• “In the new world, management is the problem, not the solution.”
• Entrepreneurship is in: “the coming decades and century will be seen as the age of the individual and the entrepreneur.”
• Keep your business “lean and mean.”

Dent’s charts, arguments and analyses are a great read.

Add to this view the following thoughts from Friedman and Mandelbaum’s book, and we have an important look at the probable future in the years just ahead:

“No one should ever have to say ‘I am moving from America to Singapore because it is more hospitable to innovation and entrepreneurship.’ Just the opposite should be true. ‘You will know you’re successful,’ said PV Kannau, the India outsourcing entrepreneur, ‘if new companies in China and Brazil say, ‘We want to move our headquarters to America because that is the best place in the world to do business.’’

That’s not happening right now, because our regulatory and tax scheme is far from the best in the world….

“Twenty years ago, even ten years ago, a report such as this one would never have been commissioned. The United States was the best country in the world for business of any kind, the one with the largest and most open market, the most transparent legal system with the strongest property rights, the biggest and most efficient financial system, the most modern infrastructure, and the most dynamic ongoing research and development in almost every field. It was a magnet for capital and talent. No company of any size, indeed no company that merely aspired to international growth, could afford not to operate there, and none needed a consultant to tell it that.

“Now, alas, things are different. Over the past decade especially, American has changed, and not for the better.”[xiii]

How many more voices need to say the same thing before Washington listens?

Until we free up the American economy, reduce the red-tape and taxes on small business, and become the most inviting economy on earth, our economic problems will continue.

Many believe they will get worse—much worse.

The real tragedy is that all this is avoidable.

Free enterprise works.

America knows how to incentivize and encourage business growth. It’s time to get serious about restoring our free-enterprise economy—and soon!

The United States has one of the highest business tax rates in the developed world, and one of the most burdensome regulatory schemes.

Of course we can’t compete in such circumstances.

The question every American should ask is simply, why?

Why would the country that stands most for freedom in all world history now turn its back on the principles of freedom that made it great?

Why would we put our trust in bureaucracy, regulation and government rather than the proven dynamism of American enterprise?

We Can Only Ask, “Why?”

Whatever the answer, unless we make changes quickly the economic forecast ahead is dismal.

Friedman said America is like a nation turned upside down.

At the bottom is an enterprising people passionately seeking to overcome economic challenges with innovation, ingenuity and tenacity, while at the top is a government consistently blocking the entrepreneurial efforts of its people.[xiv]

Again, we can only ask, “Why?”

When Paul Kennedy wrote The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers over two decades ago, many scoffed at his prediction that American hubris was leading to our eventual downfall—in the way so many great nations and empires of history have declined.

Even the leading voice of anti-decline, Joseph S. Nye, has suggested that many of Washington’s policies are making it difficult for the U.S. to remain the world’s economic leader.

Hopefully the solution won’t be as drastic as Friedman, Mandelbaum and Dent predict.

“Shock therapy,” they suggest, may now be the only effective way to change our country.

If this is true, we are in for rocky times ahead.

One thing is certain.

Friedman and Mandelbaum rightly argue that the best way out of this is not so much to study the fall of Rome, the Ottoman Empire, or other historical examples of what not to do, but to make a national focus of studying what worked best in our own American history.[xv]

We know the answers, because they are part of our national heritage.

It is time to put aside our modernist sense of superiority and admit that we want what past generations had economically and learn what worked for them.

It will work again, if we are willing to learn and make the needed changes, because the principles of freedom are timeless and powerful.

Decline is not inevitable, but only a wise people well-studied in the principles of historical success can avoid it.

We must become such a people.

[i] September 1-7, 2011

[ii] Meet the Press, September 4, 2011

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Ibid.

[vi] Ibid.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] From Harry S. Dent, The Great Crash Ahead.

[ix] See Ken Kurson, “Let Them Eat iPads,” Esquire, May 2011.

[x] Op. Cit., Dent.

[xi] Ibid.

[xii] Ibid.

[xiii] Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum, That Used to Be Us.

[xiv] Op. Cit., Meet the Press.

[xv] Op. Cit., Freidman and Mandelbaum.

***********************************

Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

We can learn a lot about freedom by understanding how Marx wanted to establish communism. One of his ten planks of establishing communism was this:

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes…

Take away property and you take away freedom. If a man or woman cannot own land, a house, his or her own things, freedom is gone.

Note that there is more than one way to abolish property and ownership. One is to make it illegal, to not allow ownership. This is extreme, of course.

But there are other ways that are less obvious.

For example, what if it is legal to own property but only those who can afford a license, taxes, filings and attorneys to implement these things can actually own land.

This is an “abolishment,” but it is of the right rather than the left. To the person who can’t own the house, the land, or the car, however, the reality is the same.

Another way to abolish land or house ownership is simply to establish a legal-economic system where the majority cannot afford such ownership without advanced education and/or the careers which require such education.

Another is to disallow immigration so that the poor of other nations have no change to come to your nation and benefit from a system that allows ownership.

The left can abolish property ownership simply by taxing at rates that keep those with money from investing in real estate development and keep those with little money from seeking ownership.

There are many other ways to in effect abolish property ownership. Any of them hurt freedom.

Whatever your politics, it is important to evaluate each policy to ensure that you are not unknowingly supporting a Marxian reduction of freedom.

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

Adversity Quotient (AQ) is the ability to persevere through numerous setbacks in order to achieve one’s dreams.

Everyone has the ability to develop AQ, but winners through purpose, vision, and perseverance develop it, while the rest do not.

The LIFE community is a great way to start learning AQ. Here is a portion of the Adversity Quotient chapter from RESOLVED: 13 Resolutions for LIFE. Enjoy. Sincerely, Orrin Woodward

Two Types of Pain

Another compromise that leads to failure and despair is an improper response to the pain inherent in the process of growth.

There are actually two types of pain: one comes from the inside due to the change process; the other comes from the outside due to criticism from those unwilling to make the same changes.

Hope is the only fuel capable of burning through both types of pain.

Without hope, either of the pain versions will trump one’s willingness to endure, instead choosing to stop the pain by quitting the journey.

Author Robert Grudin writes,

“One might reply that most people who surrender simply lack the ability to get very far. But it is more accurate to say that ability and intelligence, rightly understood, include a readiness to face pain, while those characteristics which we loosely term ‘inadequacy’ and ‘ignorance’ are typically associated with the avoidance of pain.”

When the pain reaches a certain threshold, everything inside of a person screams for relief, but champions, people with high AQ, persevere.

Continuous Focus

Pain is overcome through the continuous focus on one’s purpose.

Moreover, achieving greatness will require a faith that can move mountains, an AQ to endure the rising pain in the process, eventually reaching levels of success that more timid souls refuse to believe possible.

Grudin elaborates on the outside pain given to achievers as an unjust reward for their quest for personal excellence:

“Modern society has evolved an idiomatic defense of non-achievement so subtle and elegant that it almost makes failure attractive.

“We can equivocate with failure by saying that we could not stand ‘the pressure’.

“We can inflate mediocrity by calling cow colleges universities, by naming herds of middle-level executives, vice presidents or partners, and by a thousand other sorts of venal hype.

“We can invert the moral standard by defending a fellow non-achiever as being too sensitive or even too good for the chosen arena.

“This double rejection of pain—a surrender sanctified by a euphemism—has in our time achieved institutional status. Because it includes its own anti-morality, it can be passed on with pride from generation to generation.

“Other ages may have been as full of non-achievers as ours, but no other age, I believe, has developed so comprehensive a rhetoric of failure.

“To conclude, then:  those people in quest of intellectual dignity and independence in the late twentieth century must act in a cultural context that has done its best to annul or camouflage one of the key elements in the quest, the challenge of pain.

“For this reason such people currently labor under a double burden: they must face the pains inherent in their task, and they must do so in a culture that has little appreciation for their suffering.”

What Winners Know

Today’s achievers then, handle not only the traditional pain associated with excellence, but the additional pain associated with the envious prattle of today’s internet age non-achievers.

Champions understand that it’s better to be mocked and criticized by non-achievers, than to become a non-achiever themselves.

AQ can be developed, but only through discarding excuses, rejecting compromises, and choosing to feed one’s faith, not one’s fears.

In order to achieve dreams, people must willingly surrender who they are, to become who they dream to be. One cannot have his cake and eat it too.

AQ refuses to surrender personal responsibility (what one desires) to an impersonal environment (what is offered).

Bestselling author Chris Brady, in his book Rascal, articulates what it takes to break free the herd,

“It takes character to be different. It takes character to stand apart from the masses for legitimate, purposeful reasons.

“It takes character to be who God called you to be without succumbing to the pressures of others and their ideas of who you should be and how you should live.

“For those who embody this concept and live a truly authentic life, we will assign the name of Rascal.”

People with AQ are Rascals, refusing to be lulled to sleep by comfort, choosing instead, to pursue their convictions over conveniences.

Rascals pay the temporary price of pain for success, rather than pay the permanent price of regret for failure.

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Orrin Woodward is the co-founder of TEAM, a leadership development and training company, and the New York Times best-selling co-author of Launching a Leadership Revolution.

Named by the International Association of Business as a Top 10 Leadership Guru, he is dedicated to building leaders and entrepreneurs and promoting freedom and prosperity.

Orrin blogs regularly at Orrin Woodward. He lives in Port St. Lucie, Florida with his wife and four children.

Connect With Orrin:

“A powerful tide is surging across much of the world today, creating a new, often bizarre environment in which to work, play, marry, raise children, or retire. In this bewildering context, businessmen swim against highly erratic economic currents; politicians see their ratings bob wildly up and down.Value systems splinter and crash, while the lifeboats of family, church, and state are hurled madly about.”
—Alvin Toffler, The Third Wave

1-Sources of Modern Conflict

We live in a society deeply troubled and increasingly distressed, partly because we have refused to accept a definition of what constitutes “truth”.

For some, True is what is sincerely believed; for others, True is what is scientifically proven. Some believe that the True is what works, and others define Truth as that which sells.

One solution is to substitute Wisdom for Truth. Can’t we all agree that, whatever sources and methods will give us ultimate truth, we can certainly learn wisdom from many (perhaps most) sources?

From ancients to moderns, our sages have urged us on a pursuit of wisdom. Stephen Covey recommends that people make a lifetime study of the great “wisdom literature,” a profound term for the classics and great books of human history. Indeed, the idea of wisdom literature narrows the classics that must be read and simultaneously broadens the list of books that should be considered “great.”

Plato considered wisdom the ruler of all other virtues, and Socrates dedicated his life to showing that no men were entirely wise. He said that humility is necessary for wisdom, and that only God is truly wise. Both the Greeks and the Hebrews were seekers of wisdom. Sophocles wrote, “Wisdom is the supreme part of happiness,” and Aristotle agreed.

Interestingly, as Mortimer Adler points out:

“Wisdom is more frequently and extensively the subject of discussion in the ancient and medieval than in the modern books. The ancients seem to have…a greater interest in understanding what wisdom is and how it can be gained.”

We may well have lost much wisdom simply because it is not a priority in modern times.Is it any wonder that we don’t find what we aren’t even seeking?  We don’t begin to approach the ideal that we never aspire to.

“In the tradition of the great books, the moderns usually assert their superiority over the ancients in all the arts and sciences. They seldom claim superiority in wisdom. With the centuries, far from increasing, wisdom may be lost.”

A unique and potent feature of wisdom is that it “cannot be misused”—unlike art, science, technology, leadership skills, knowledge, courage, loyalty, belief and power. All of these have at times been used for destructive or narcissistic goals, but any misuse of wisdom is patently un-wise, and therefore a counterfeit.10 Real wisdom is always, by definition, used positively—wisely.

Art, science, religion, mathematics—all celebrate wisdom, and all profess to seek wisdom. Yet few textbooks or academic manuals make any claim to it. Modern scholars are not expected to be wise. They are instead asked to be expert, focused, precise and prolific, among other things—but seeking wisdom is often a dangerous tact in many modern academic settings.

And our culture does little to learn wisdom from its elderly, despite the fact that this was the major source of wisdom for most people in history.

2-The Fall and Decline of a Primary Value: Wisdom

Some historical societies have placed duty as the highest goal, while others emphasized righteousness, and still others strength or progress. All of these require wisdom. For example, to paraphrase Aristotle, if a society’s definition of duty, righteousness, strength or progress is noble, then seeking duty, righteousness, progress or strength is laudable.11 But if the society’s definition of these things is bad, then seeking them is mere “cleverness.”

A society like ours that frequently puts success as the highest priority needs a wise definition of success. Otherwise, seeking success is merely selfishness.

A wise definition of success necessarily includes genuine happiness.  In other words, part of wisdom is prudence, which includes the ability and habit of seeing how the lessons of the past and events now occurring will most likely impact the future and allow us to provide for it.  Another vital part of wisdom is knowledge, and still another is understanding.

Aristotle went a step further: “…it is impossible to be practically wise without being good…”

Socrates says that no talents, strengths, abilities or virtues are of any real value absent of wisdom. Wisdom strengthens every other strength, and its absence nullifies or at least weakens any supposed strength. Socrates says that “…everything the soul attempts, under the guidance of wisdom ends in happiness.”  Aristotle applies this same thing to nations.

Wisdom is the indispensable element of success—personal, national, societal.

Likewise, for those who see progress as highest goal of society, a wise definition and application of progress is needed. Progressives at times forget this, as do those seeking success. While some have defined progress in terms of economic justice, others have put it more in terms of political liberty.

The American founding ideals combined these in a complexly considered yet ultimately simple formula: All people must have equal opportunity before the law by being treated as part of the same class.

The innate differences in individuals and their choices preclude an exact equality of results, but equality of opportunity before the law is the starting point of real freedom.   The goal of the American framers was thus a truly wise government.

In our time, unfortunately, the goal of wisdom has been largely lost and is certainly undervalued and seldom discussed. It may be assumed by some, or even many, but it has lost its place as the first and most prominent value in our society.

Societies that once held wisdom as the highest value only to lose it later include Athens, ancient Israel, the Roman Republic, and Britain, among others. When they lost the central priority of wisdom, they soon lost their place as world leader. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that the wisdom priority was part of what brought them each to power in the first place.

One key to overcoming this modern slide away from wisdom is to remember what government is really for. Aristotle taught that “…the state is the last stage in the development of social life which begins with the family” and therefore all government actions can be easily, and effectively, judged by how they positively impact the family.

Sometimes a return to the most basic principles is the height of wisdom.

Aristotle says that the study of truth is “…in one way hard, in another way easy.”  It is hard when we want to know every detail of truth, easy when we simply seek to find and apply wise principles.

3-An Indispensable Element of Success

What if we turned the modern debate between science, art, politics, conservatives, liberals and all the various “-isms” away from ultimate truth and focused instead on wisdom. A return to studying wisdom would likely coincide with what Covey called the replacement of the Success approach with a renewal of the Character ethic.

Are we a society obsessed with noticeable achievement or dedicated to meaningful contribution? Do we mostly value marketability or quality?

These naturally separate into competing categories. The first category, called Great, includes wisdom, character, quality and meaningful contribution. Against this is pitted the second category, Good, which includes the positive but lesser values of success, marketability, notability and achievement.

In business parlance, the good is the enemy of the great.

Which is more important to our future: a society arguing about truth or a society seeking to learn and apply wisdom? Do we need a nation of people who want to be seen as leaders, or do we need a society of people who lead?

Too often the language of modern experts is like the following talk show parody: “All brontosauruses are thin at one end; much, much thicker in the middle; and then thin again at the far end.”  This is a factual statement, but it’s not very helpful. You can prove it using science, but knowing this truth doesn’t accomplish much.

Another example: “Even if World War I consisted of nothing but a very, very large number of quarks in a very, very complicated pattern of motion, no insight is gained by describing it this way.”

These ridiculous examples are a lot like the reality, however. Steven Pinker wrote:

“Social psychologists have amply documented that people have a powerful urge to do as their neighbors do. When unwitting subjects are surrounded by confederates of the experimenter who have been paid to do something odd, many or most will go along.

They will defy their own eyes and call a long line ‘short’ or vice versa, nonchalantly fill out a questionnaire as smoke pours out of a heating vent, or suddenly strip down to their underwear for no apparent reason [just because everyone else in the room is doing so].”

Certainly politics frequently proves this sad reality.

Truth alone is limited. It needs wisdom to make any sense.Indeed, only with wisdom can we actually understand truth when we find it. Yet we have emphasized and idealized truth for over a century in modern society—leading to stagnation in our political and national progress. Those on the right have tended to seek truth for success, while their counterparts on the left have sought truth for progress.

Both have achieved much, but we have reached a point where both are failing to deliver solutions for our major challenges.

4- A Solution

Today we need a widespread paradigm shift to a Wisdom society—a people diligently seeking wisdom.

Does it make any sense in our increasingly post-modern society to keep engaging in the debates between science, art, religion, conservative, progressive, socialist, libertarian, hawk or dove? These dialogues have been in a rut for decades.

If real progress in such arguments seemed likely, we would of course keep talking.But America is increasingly divided into like-thinking cliques that reinforce shared views and attack everything about alternative perspectives. These voluntary factions frequently isolate themselves from competing viewpoints and increase their adamant views.

This enclave style of thinking is the norm in our current world, and the Internet has drastically exacerbated the problem.

There are fortunately some exceptions to this trend. The rise of political independents may be the rescue of the current e-closing of the American mind.  It also remains to be seen how the Millennial generation (born between 1984 and 2001) will combine social media with political involvement—they might choose a more inclusive, open and dialogue-oriented approach than Boomers and Gen Xers.

Given their generational values and tendencies, this could well be the case.

In the meantime, how can we resurrect a belief in the importance of wisdom? So far wisdom hasn’t been a driving force on social media. But then neither has it been a major priority in modernism itself. Our schools seldom emphasize teaching us to be wise, and few business, government, religious, media or other major institutions seem committed to such a course either.

Despite notable exceptions, in general wisdom is a lost priority, like fertile soil or turntable records. A few people care a great deal about these things, it is true, but the society has moved on.

Putting the goal of wisdom behind us is a major mistake. Wisdom should be the ultimate purpose of every school, every American teacher,every business and social leader, and a high priority for the rest of us. A national revival of the search for wisdom is long overdue. Only the incredibly naive claim to be wise, but the free nations of history were made up of citizens deeply committed to the continual search for wisdom.

We must also recognize and utilize wisdom when we do find it. Tocqueville noted that while Americans were less formally educated than the European elite of his day, they were constantly learning and prone to apply their knowledge in practical ways.

Indeed, advanced formal education is at times a roadblock to creative thinking.

Ultimately wisdom is about more than mere knowing—it requires doing. We must apply wisdom, or it isn’t really wisdom.

This is true both in domestic and international affairs. Washington has lost its reputation for wisdom across America and around the globe. Our increasing dependence on experts since the 1950s has even reduced the role of parents as the wise ones in the home. Wisdom is undervalued at nearly all levels of of our modern world.

Our society is deeply in need of a rebirth of interest in wisdom. We talk incessantly of things like Success, Talent, Progress and Getting Ahead. We trust IQ, promote EQ, and try to stay well-versed on the latest theory of personality types. Regular citizens across the nation keep an eye on fashion, health, technological, parenting, architectural, entertainment and cultural trends.

We glorify high test scores, prestigious associations and personal status symbols.

But we undersell, or simply ignore, the indispensable element of lasting success and truly progressing society—wisdom. We need a healthy dose of optimism in our society, and perhaps nothing would merit more optimism than a national paradigm shift to A Wisdom Society.

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Oliver DeMille is the founder and former president of George Wythe University, a co-founder of the Center for Social Leadership, and a co-creator of TJEd Online.

He is the author of A Thomas Jefferson Education: Teaching a Generation of Leaders for the 21st Century, and The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

Oliver is dedicated to promoting freedom through leadership education. He and his wife Rachel are raising their eight children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Oliver:

Famous for its rich culture and heritage, Burma is also sadly renowned for the brutality of its current regime. Political and armed conflict between the repressive military regime and its opponents have displaced more than 3.5 million people over the years.

This, in turn, has led to a refugee problem that spills over into neighboring countries like India which now hosts nearly 100,000 Burmese refugees.

This influx of refugees has created unique challenges and opportunities for communities within India.

In New Delhi, for instance, many Burmese refugees exist on the margins of the community without legal protection, health, education and other means of taking care of themselves. Even the local poor tend to view the newcomers with suspicion and resentment.

The refugees are not issued work permits which relegates them to the informal work sector where limited, low-paying and back-breaking employment is the norm.  Because the Indian government is not a signatory to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, it takes no responsibility for the the refugees.

This means that the refugees are excluded from mainstream society and are forced to live in the shadows where poor health, language barriers and lack of opportunity combine to keep them shut out.

Fortunately, the need of the Burmese refugees has not gone unnoticed and the Students in Free Enterprise (SIFE) New Delhi chapter has boldly stepped forward to seek a solution.

The stated goal of SIFE, in this instance, is to play a role in the development and economic sustainability of these long-neglected refugees.

To that end, Project AARAMBH was begun with 3 current initiatives including:

1. Promotion of women based small handicraft entrepreneurial units
-Marketing goods such as handbags, laptop bags, purses, woolens, coats, shawls, all traditional Burmese handmade designs.
-Facilitating professional training for improved skills operations and scalability.
-Engaging the women and leaders of these small units in marketing work to increase their awareness and to network, thus laying the base for sustainability.

2. Placement Cells
-Creating an avenue to help people in the Burmese refugee community who are in need of a job
-Working as a 2 way forum, an interface between the people and the factories and shops which have job vacancies. The objective is to ensure just, sustainable, fair pay work for the refugees while ensuring regularity and consistency for the employers.

3. Outreach
-Reading out to the local population and college students to create awareness about the community and their plight.
-Engaging college students as volunteers in different parts of the project.
-Community initiatives for holistic development e.g. Health Camp

Statesmanship has always been exemplified by those who see a need in the world and who step forward on their own initiative to seek solutions. Project AARAMBH from SIFE in New Delhi is a fine example of how students using their technological and business skills are making the world a better place starting in their own community.

They are living proof that a small, tireless minority can make a bigger-than-life difference simply by getting involved.

If you’d like to help or to learn more about Project AARAMBH you can contact SIFE at parthnsharma@yahoo.in or learn more here.

“…the farm is a teacher of virtue and of the life devoted to freedom.” -Menander

Two nights ago we held our first official book discussion on the though-provoking book, Beyond Capitalism & Socialism edited by Tobias J. Lanz.

Click here to download the recording now. (Be patient with the download; it’s a big file.)

You’ll also enjoy this document, which features my review (including my response to Oliver DeMille’s review), notes taken during the discussion, and links to additional resources about all the concepts discussed.

The discussion will be difficult to follow if you haven’t read the book, so we urge you to snag a copy.

For those of you on the call, we had a glitch at the end that shut down the webinar right as I was about to close with this quote from Victor Davis Hanson in The Other Greeks: The Family Farm & The Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization:

“…where will be the needed counterpoint to our amoral philosophy, to our national ethos? Where will be the singular critic, the often unpleasant individual, the cratered veteran of a continual, a personal struggle with nature, the cultural dissident who will still choose to go it alone in order to protect the old notion of a community, who will have innate distrust for authoritarianism, large bureaucracy, and urban consensus? Where will be the person prerequisite to, the exemplar for, democratic and egalitarian government?

“…What are professions are there now in this country where the individual fights alone against nature, lives where he works, invests hourly for the future and never for the mere present, succeeds or fails by his own intellect, physical strength, bodily endurance, and sheer nerve? In what other vocation now does an American care so little about his own appearance, about the type of car he is to drive, about the title of the job he is to enjoy, about the status of his associates, and so much about the promptness of his action, the unambiguity of his intent, and the value of his promised word?

“Will our contemporary and abstract policy-making or learned philosophical discussion, will the novelists among us, will the American university professor and consultant of the day, will the institutionalized scholar, government planner, and academic theorist on the Left and Right, will they provide the needed counterpressure, the necessary barricade to the growing tyranny of a uniform, materialistic, urban, selfish, and ultimately Hellenistic culture?

“Or at long last, when we seek in vain for our lost American polis, will we look for it amid the ghosts of our own georgoi, now gone to a world beneath our feet?”