The following is an excerpt from Oliver’s recent book, The Coming Aristocracy: Education & the Future of Freedom.

If freedom is to reverse the onslaught of American and global aristocracy, it will likely do so through the greatest freedom trend of our time.

This trend is revolutionizing institutions, organizations, relationships, society and even nations around the world. It is still in its infancy, and many have yet to realize its potential.

The experts tend to overlook it because it seems small. It will likely always seem small because it is a “bottom-up” trend with no “top-down” organizations, alliances, or even affiliations.

Truthfully, it isn’t even a single trend at all–it is thousands of small trends, all following a similar pattern.

Malcolm Gladwell called part of this trend “outliers,” Harry S. Dent called it the “customization” explosion, Alvin Toffler said it is the wave of “revolutionary wealth” as led in large part by “prosumers,” John Naisbitt named it the “high touch” megatrend, Stephen Covey called it the 8th Habit of “greatness,” Daniel Pink coined the descriptor “free agent nation,” and Seth Godin refers to it as “tribes.”

Others have termed it “social entrepreneurship,” “the new leadership,” “a new age,” and even “the human singularity.”

All of these touch on facets of this freedom trend, but I think the best, most accurate and descriptive name for it is the “mini-factory” model.

Modernism came with the factory–the ability to mass produce. This revolutionized the world–economics, governments, how we spend our time each day, what we eat and wear, relationships, the size and functions of our homes and cities, etc.

Today the mini-factory is changing everything just as drastically.

In ancient times the wealthy set up estates or fiefdoms to cover all their needs, and the masses worked to provide the needs of their aristocratic “superiors.”

In modern times the factory provided mass goods and services.

Imagine the impact on everything in our lives if each family could provide all, or even many, of its needs for itself–and do it better than kings or politicians ruling over working peasants or even corporations employing workers to produce goods and services.

Such is the world of the mini-factory.

How Does a Mini-Factory World Function?

For example, what if parents could educate their children better than local school factories, with the best teachers, classes and resources of the world piped directly into their own home?

What if a sick person had more time and motivation to research the cases of her symptoms than the factory doctors, and the availability of all the latest medical journals right on her computer screen?

She would also have holistic works, original studies, alternative and collaborative experts, and the ability to email the experts and get answers in less time than it would take to wait in the hospital lobby.

Ten friends would likely send her their experiences with similar illness within days of her mentioning casually online that she was sick. If she chose a certain surgeon, a dozen people might share their experiences with this doctor.

What if a mother planning to travel for family vacation could just book flights and hotels herself, without calling the “expert” travel agent? Maybe she could even choose seats on the flight or see pictures of her hotel room–all in her own home between her projects and errands.

Welcome to the world of the mini-factory. I purposely used examples that are already a reality. But they were just a futuristic dream when writers like Alvin Toffler and John Naisbitt predicted them before 1990.

Technology has helped it, but the impetus of the mini-factory trend is freedom. People want to spend less time at the factory/corporation and more time at home. They want to be more involved in raising their children and improving their love life.

In an aristocracy, these luxuries are reserved for the upper class. In a free society, anyone can build a mini-factory.

What is a Mini-Factory?

A mini-factory is anything someone does alone or with partners or a team, that accomplishes what has historically (meaning the last 150 years of modernism) been done en masse or by big institutions.

If a charter school provides better education for some of the community, it’s a mini-factory. If it does it at less cost and/or in less time spent in the classroom, so much the better. A homeschool or private school can be a mini-factory.

Of course, if the charter, private, or home school does a worse job than the regular factory, it is a failed mini-factory.

If joining a multi-level company and building it into a source of real income serves you better than an employee position, it’s a mini-factory.

If downsizing from a lucrative professional job in Los Angeles to a private practice or job that pays much less but allows you twice as much time with your family and a more relaxed lifestyle in, say, Flagstaff or Durango and makes you happier, it’s a mini-factory.

Entrepreneurship, alternative education, the downshifter movement, environmental groups, alternative health, the growth of spirituality, community architecture, the explosion of network marketing, home doctor visits, the rebirth of active fathering, and so many other trends are mini-factories.

How do Mini-Factories Impact Freedom?

It all comes down to this: Big, institutional, non-transparent, bureaucratic organizations are natural supporters of aristocracy. Freedom flourishes when the people are independent, free, and as self-sufficient as possible.

I am not suggesting going backwards in any way.

Forward progress is most likely in a nation that is both well educated and highly trained, where big institutional solutions are offered wherever they are best and individuals and groups seek smaller solutions where they better serve their needs, where free government enterprise rules apply and there are no special benefits or perks of class (either conservative aristocracy or liberal meritocracy), and where government, business, family, academia, religion, media, and community all fulfill their distinct, equally-important roles.

Such a model is called freedom. It has been the best system for the most people in the history of the world, and it still is.

To adopt freedom in our time, either the aristocracy must give up its perks and voluntarily restructure society, or the masses must retake their freedoms bit by bit, day by day, by establishing mini-factories.

Mini-factories will be more successful if each person only does a few, and does them with true excellence.

Freedom will flourish best if there is no organization or even coordination of the mini-factories; if individuals, partners, families and teams identify what is needed in the world and in their own lives and set out to deliver it.

This is especially hard in a time like ours where the employee mindset wants someone to “fix” things (like the economy, health care, education, etc.), exactly when an entrepreneurial mindset is most needed to take risks and initiate the best and most lasting changes.

If real, positive, and effective change is to come, it will most likely be initiated by the people acting as individuals, small groups, and teams.

If it comes from the top, it will tend to only bring more aristocracy, and the day of freedom will be over for now.

Whatever your mini-factory contribution might be, consider that it will help determine the future of freedom.

Is it Worth the Challenge?

Mini-factories can be hard to establish and challenging to build. Many people fail once or several times before they learn to be effective.

But the type of learning that only comes from failing and then trying again is the most important in building leaders and citizens who are capable of maintaining freedom in a society.

Note that this very type of education is rejected in a training model of schooling, where failure is seen as unacceptable and students are taught to avoid it at all costs.

This mindset only works if an aristocracy is there to take care of the failures.

In a freedom model, citizens and leaders learn the vital lessons of challenges; failures and wise risk-taking are needed.

Starting and leading a mini-factory, and indeed all entrepreneurial work, is challenging.

Those who embraced this difficult path in history established and maintained freedom, while those who embraced the ease of past compromises sold themselves and their posterity into aristocracy.

In the long term, though, aristocracy is much harder on everyone than freedom.

What Will You Build?

As you consider what mini-factories you should support, start, and build, just ask what things could be done (or are being done) better by a small mini-factory than by the big organizations that try to control nearly everything in our world.

If it could be done just as well by a mini-factory, the change to the smaller entity can drastically promote freedom. If it can be done even better by a mini-factory, it is better for life itself!

The mini-factory is the new vehicle of freedom.

Take a mini-survey: What are your pet complaints? Government? Develop family government models. Health Care? Educate yourself on prevention and self-care. Education? Learn the principles of Leadership Education. Media? Start a blog. Entertainment? Develop a group of hobbyists who share your interests, whether it be Harley road trips, ice fishing, scrapbooking, etc.

You get the idea: Live deliberately, and do not wait for institutions to change to meet your needs.

Do not waste your energy or good humor on complaining.

Find a mini-factory that does it right and get behind it–or start one yourself. So many are needed, and they can bring the miracle of freedom!

The future remains unseen. It is the undiscovered country.

Many ancients felt that fate drove the future, but the idea of freedom taught humanity to look each to his/herself, to partner with others, and to take the risk to build community and take action now in order to pass on a better life to our children and our children’s children.

Today, that concept of freedom is waning–slowly and surely being replaced by a class culture.

Those who love freedom, whatever their stripe–be they green, red, blue, rainbow, or anything else–are needed. They need to see what is really happening, and they need to educate themselves adequately to make a difference.

The most powerful changes toward freedom will likely be made by mini-factories, in thousands and hopefully millions of varieties and iterations.

Aristocracy or freedom–the future of the globe–hangs in the balance…

Click here to learn more about the mini-factory trend and to purchase a paperback copy of The Coming Aristocracy. Click here to download two hour-long webinars with Oliver DeMille explaining mini-factories.

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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:

“World View” is a term recently popularized by philosophers and media pundits who debate spiritual and political matters.

It refers to the lens through which people see (and therefore interpret) the world around them.

All information and observations must pass through this lens and be colored by one’s World View.

Similarly, there is another “View” I would like to propose for consideration, and I’m calling this the “Money View.”

In my nearly two decades of dealing with people and their finances I have slowly awakened to the fact that how people are doing financially is often a direct result of their “Money View.”

Just as with World Views, there are several very different Money Views, each with its own ramifications. These include, but are probably not limited to, the following:

1.  Money as a Mystery – in which people seem to have no clue how money is made (or retained) and therefore think that others who are successful financially are somehow “lucky”

2. Money as a Master – in which one’s entire life is lived out in bondage to the need for more money, or at least the drudgery of scraping by. This is often accompanied by terms such as, “I have to go to work,” or “Another day, another dollar.”

3. Money as a Monster – this is the condition whereby financial pressures become so large they dominate a person’s thoughts and affect him emotionally. Often at this stage relationships are damaged and health is compromised.

4. Money as a Major – in which a person applies most of his focus and fascination on how to acquire more. In this situation money is an idol.

5. Money as a Motivator – this is the condition whereby money is used to push one to higher achievement and greater contribution. This can be for both selfish or selfless reasons. Beware.

6. Money as a Manipulator – whereby a person uses his or her money to get what he or she wants out of other people. It is here where phrases such as “Money is Power” apply.

7. Money as a Minimizer – the condition in which the presence of money diminishes one’s ambition. This is where complacency and mediocrity reside.

8. Money as a Maximizer – where one is driven to utilize his or her money to make a greater contribution and maximize his or her potential. This is usually much more selfless and altruistic than #5 above.

9. Money as a Monument – where money is used as a status symbol, to build a reputation, or as an attempt to establish an immortal family legacy.

10. Money as a Menace – wherein the money one has is a destructive force in one’s life, either by feeding addictions or by causing fights or by dominating one’s time and energy with the care and maintenance required to sustain it.

In considering this list, it may be helpful to ask yourself some questions, such as:

1. Which “Money View” best represents where you are right now?

2. Which of these “Money Views” have you encountered previously in your life?

3. Notice that several of these “Money Views” are quite negative. What are you doing to make sure you are living under a positive and productive one? Which one would you choose?

4. What are you doing to grow in your financial understanding and education?

In each of the above views we see that money is always used as a Means. The key question in money matters is therefore, “As a means for what?”

This is why the Bible again and again treats money as a heart issue.

Money in itself is not evil, but the heart is desperately wicked, who can know it? Money becomes a dangerous or productive tool, depending upon the heart that wields it.

Make sure you choose your “Money View” deliberately and intentionally, don’t simply let it choose you.

Pursue some financial education to enable you to be in charge of money instead of it being in charge of you. And guard your heart when it comes to money, in plenty or in want.

That’s my view.

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Chris Brady co-authored the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Business Weekly, USA Today, and Money Magazine best-seller Launching a Leadership Revolution.

He is also in the World’s Top 30 Leadership Gurus and among the Top 100 Authors to Follow on Twitter. He has spoken to audiences of thousands around the world about leadership, freedom, and success.

Mr. Brady contributes regularly to Networking Times magazine, and has been featured in special publications of Success and Success at Home. He also blogs regularly at Chris Brady.

He is an avid motorized adventurer, pilot, world traveler, humorist, community builder, soccer fan, and dad.

Connect With Chris:

In the American founding era, most of the leading thinkers were rationalists.

This means that they believed in reason as a top method of determining truth.

Note that the general concept of reason has changed since then.

When most people think of reason today, they tend to mix it with the ideas of logic, science and determinism.

In the American colonial and early republican era, this was not the case.

The term “science” was often used to mean general thinking and the idea of learning, and in this sense it coincided with the rational perspective.

But today’s technical science, based on a general consensus of experts along with the empirical use of the scientific method, is quite the opposite of the rationalist viewpoint.

And logic, which is actually a branch of mathematics (rather than philosophy), is very different than reason.

Reason, in the original sense, is the use of one’s own mind to test and analyze the words of the experts, the ancients, and all authority.

In the founding generation, reason was a check and balance on the smug groupthink[i] of the upper classes and elites.

Most of the leading founders usually used the term “right reason” rather than simple “reason,” since this first phrase carried the connotation that all right-thinking people would come to the same conclusions if they had the benefit of adequate information.

In this view, no king, priest, aristocrat or expert can rely simply on some claim to a “divine right” of expertise to be correct—each individual citizen can test everything said by the elites simply by taking the time to obtain all needed information and then think it through.

Forrest McDonald wrote in the introduction to Empire and Nation, a collection of writings by American founders John Dickinson and Richard Henry Lee:

“In the historical view, men have such rights as they have won over the years; in the rationalist view, men are born with certain rights, whether they are honored in a particular society or not.”

Using reason, leading American founder John Dickinson wrote:

“Ought not the people therefore to watch? to search into causes? to investigate designs? And have they not a right of JUDGING from the evidence before them, on no slighter points than their liberty and happiness?”[ii]

It is always up to the people to maintain their freedom, and one of the first steps is to think—independently as they see fit—regardless of the assurances, promises and statistics of experts and elites.

Throughout history, the experts have nearly always worked for the elites, and the regular people have held reason as their first line of defense.

When the regular people put expertise, tradition, authority or official promises above their own reason, they have always lost their freedoms and prosperity.

Dickinson put it this way:

“Indeed, nations, in general, are not apt to think until they feel; and therefore nations in general have lost their liberty.”[iii]

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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.

“We know more than we know we know.” -Michael Polanyi

Feeling overwhelmed by cultural, political, and economic forces beyond your control?

Dismayed that we’re rapidly losing freedom?

Want to make a greater difference?

If so, your power and answers lie in the right hemisphere of your brain, waiting to be activated.

If you’re stuck in left-brain mode, you’re getting left behind.

Read on to learn how to become a more effective social leader, prosper financially, and move the cause of liberty.

1 Brain 2 Brains, Left Brain Right Brain

In 1981, neuropsychologist and neurbiologist Roger Sperry won a Nobel Prize “for his discoveries concerning the functional specialization of the cerebral hemispheres.”

Before Dr. Sperry’s “split-brain experiments,” it was commonly thought that the left hemisphere of the brain was more important than the right.

Dr. Sperry shattered this false view and revealed stunning new insights into how the brain works. As he put it,

“The so-called subordinate or minor hemisphere, which we had formerly supposed to be illiterate and mentally retarded and thought by some authorities to not even be conscious, was found to be in fact the superior cerebral member when it came to performing certain kinds of mental tasks.”

The left brain is linear, logical, objective, verbal, and conceptual. The right brain, visual and perceptual, reasons holistically, recognizes patterns, and interprets emotions and nonverbal expressions.

The left brain is scientific, the right is intuitive, artistic, creative, imaginative. The left brain craves order, the right feeds on chaos.

The left brain demands everything to be literal, while the right brain is electrified by symbols, metaphors, art, and abstractions.

The left brain sees a sentence like “Her heart soared to the heavens” and smirks, “What a load of crap.”

The right brain gushes, “Wow! Cool! Can I soar, too?”

“Good poets make extensive use of ‘right-brain language.’ Forget that sensible, linear, factual, left-brain speech. The language of the right brain is a horse of a different color. A riot of imagery, a cascade of connections, sensations, and associations. The right brain speaks in metaphors, juxtapositions, and similes, using a whole range of poetic devices to express the inexpressible and describe the indescribable.” -Robin Frederick

Clearly, both hemispheres are vital to success in any endeavor. Unfortunately, our society and educational system have traditionally placed way more emphasis on the left.

However, we’re engulfed in monumental shifts.

To navigate these shifts and leverage them to your advantage requires a much higher degree and depth of right-brain thinking than most people are used to.

“Employers are already saying that a degree is not enough, and that many graduates do not have the qualities they are looking for: the ability to communicate, work in teams, adapt to change, to innovate and be creative.

“This is not surprising…The traditional academic curriculum is not designed to promote creativity. Complaining that the system does not produce creative people is like complaining that a car doesn’t fly…it was never intended to.

“The stark message is that the answer to the future is not simply to increase the amount of education, but to educate people differently.” -Professor Ken Robinson of the 21st Century Learning Initiative, a group of neuroscientists, psychologists, and educators committed to educational reform

For social leaders in particular, cultivating your right brain is vital for at least the following reasons:

1. To make more money.
2. To increase your innovation and problem-solving skills.
3. To move the cause of liberty.

Right-Brain Economics

In his phenomenal bestseller A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future, Daniel Pink draws from mountains of research to explain that we’re moving from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

“We’ve progressed from a society of farmers to a society of factory workers to a society of knowledge workers. And now we’re progressing yet again–to a society of creators and empathizers, of pattern recognizers and meaning makers.”

Pink cites three primary reasons for this cataclysmic shift:

Abundance

“Our left brains have made us rich…But abundance has produced an ironic result: The very triumph of [left-brain] thinking has lessened its significance. The prosperity it has unleashed has placed a premium on less rational, more [right-brain] sensibilities–beauty, spirituality, emotion.”

Asia

“If standardized, routine [left-brain] work such as many kinds of financial analysis, radiology, and computer programming can be done for a lot less overseas and delivered to clients instantly via fiber optic links, that’s where the work will go.”

Automation

“Last century, machines proved they could replace human backs. This century, new technologies are proving they can replace human left brains.”

To adapt to these forces, Pink offers six requisite senses for thriving in the Conceptual Age–all of which are right-brain aptitudes:

1. Design. Making things beautiful and functional.
2. Story. Appealing to logic and emotion.
3. Symphony. Connecting dots, seeing the full picture.
4. Empathy. As Daniel Goleman demonstrated in Emotional Intelligence, emotional abilities impact our careers much more than our IQ.
5. Play. “Play will be to the 21st century what work was to the last 300 years of industrial society–our dominant way of knowing, doing and creating value.” -Pat Kane, Author of The Play Ethic
6. Meaning. “Meaning. Purpose. Deep life experience. Use whatever word or phrase you like, but know that consumer desire for these qualities is on the rise. Remember your Abraham Maslow and your Viktor Frankl. Bet your business on it.” -Rich Karlgaard, Publisher of Forbes

Pink challenges individuals and businesses to ask themselves three questions:

1. Can someone overseas do it cheaper?
2. Can a computer do it faster?
3. Is what I’m offering in demand in an age of abundance?

He then concludes:

“Individuals and organizations that focus their efforts on doing what foreign knowledge workers can’t do cheaper and computers do faster, as well as on meeting the aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual demands of a prosperous time, will thrive. Those who ignore these three questions will struggle.”

Get Out of the Box

Change has never been more fundamental, rapid, and disruptive.

More than ever, today’s leaders must learn to recognize, trust, and follow their intuition to connect dots, predict trends, and adapt to new realities.

And where does intuition come from? You guessed it: the right brain.

Roy H. Williams, author of the legendary Monday Morning Memo and founder of Wizard Academy, explains:

“Intellect is linear, putting facts in columns and rows, while intuition is nonlinear, putting all the facts in a big bowl, then stirring them together like soup, watching to see what might ‘connect.’

“…Great leaders have intuition. Explorers have intuition. Inventors have intuition. It is intuition that tells them how to go where none has ever been.”

Accessing and cultivating intuition is how social leaders can successfully navigate change, overcome challenges, and solve problems.

To create different results, we need new ways of thinking, and left-brain thinking isn’t going to get us there.

(By the way, if you want to test your intuition, read this article and connect the dots between Oliver’s thesis and what I’m saying here.)

Fight for the Right

In his eye-opening — and highly intuitive — lecture “The Freedom Crisis,” Oliver DeMille declares that one of the serious flaws of freedom-lovers is that we tend to think and communicate very literally.

The problem with this, as Oliver says, is that

“Literal talk is not what sways the thinking populace. The thinking populace is swayed by symbol, celebrity, and poetry — poetry in the broad sense.”

Literal language is divisive. It repels people with whom we share common beliefs and goals. Symbolism and poetics, on the other hand, speak to universalities. They unite and inspire.

To change hearts and minds and win the freedom war requires us to be artful rather than forceful. In other words, passionate freedom-lovers must take a more right-brain approach to their struggle.

Oliver goes on to explain the difference between sensus solum and sensus plenior.

Sensus solum translates as “one meaning,” while sensus plenior means “multiple, or fuller meanings.”

Sensus solum — or literal — thinking has dominated mainstream education for decades. It trains the masses to think in terms of black or white, right or wrong.

Sensus solum thinkers read things to find the correct answer. It is rigid and, by definition, limited.

In contrast, sensus plenior education — of which poetry is an integral component — explores depth, nuance, multiple perspectives, and holistic thinking. It fosters creativity and innovation.

Bottom line: sensus solum is left-brain thinking, sensus plenior is right-brain thinking.

Which is needed to promote freedom?

Trick question — we don’t need either/or, we need both.

Just as those who cultivate both left and right brain aptitudes will have greater success economically, so will they have greater impact on the freedom movement.

Still, since sensus solum is the dominant perspective most of us have been trained in, it is vital that we cultivate the ability to think in terms of sensus plenior — which means specific and consistent right-brain training.

Get the Right Stuff

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.” -Albert Einstein

This isn’t “touchy-feely, artsy-fartsy” stuff — the realities of right-brain thinking are tangible, practical, relevant, and vital.

Nurturing your right brain makes you more creative, imaginative and innovative, and better equipped to solve problems, overcome challenges, and make better decisions.

It helps you recognize, predict, and capitalize on trends. It helps you communicate more effectively and universally.

In short, it makes you a better entrepreneur and leader.

And it’s the right thing to do. Uh-huh.

10 Specific Ways to Cultivate Your Right Brain

1. Attend Wizard Academy courses.

2. Take art, music, acting, and/or dancing classes. Starve your inhibitions, gorge your imagination.

3. Visit art museums and galleries.

4. Practice writing short stories. One valuable and quick technique is to do what I’ve done on this blog. Another is “mini-sagas”–stories consisting of no more than 50 words.

5. Keep a notepad and pen on your nightstand and write down your dreams. Dreams are your right brain communicating to your left; it has no language functions, so it communicates through symbols. Record not only what you visualized, but also how it felt. Try to interpret the symbolism and apply your interpretations to practical things in your life. Compare your dreams over time to recognize patterns.

6. Read more fiction, fantasy, poetry, and humor.

7. Listen to more classical music.

8. Play more. Seriously. Video games, sports, board games, concerts, leisure time. Intuition kicks in more often and more clearly when you have no deadlines or objectives. Simply play. If you think this sounds silly, consider that Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman was a huge proponent of play.

9. Meditate at least 15 minutes every day.

10. Read and listen to these books, articles, and speeches:

• A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink
• Free the Beagle: A Journey to Destinae by Roy H. Williams
• “The Freedom Crisis” by Oliver DeMille
• Drawing on the Artist Within: An Inspirational & Practical Guide to Increasing Your Creative Powers by Betty Edwards
• Emotional Intelligence: Why it Can Matter More than IQ by Daniel Goleman
• Accidental Magic: The Wizard’s Techniques for Writing Words Worth 1,000 Pictures by Wizard Academy
• “CEO Libraries Reveal Keys to Success”
• “A Liberal Take on Hiring”
• “What Would Plato Do?”
• “Think Your Liberal Arts Degree Won’t Get You a Real Job?”
• “The Liberal Arts & Business”

The American framers overcame domination by an elite upper class by establishing a new system where every person was treated equally before the law.

This led to nearly two centuries of increasing freedoms for all social classes, both genders and all citizens—whatever their race, religion, health, etc.

During the Industrial Age this system changed in at least two major ways.

First, the U.S. commercial code was changed to put limits on who can invest in what.

Rather than simply protecting all investors (rich or poor) against fraud or other criminal activity, in the name of “protecting the unsophisticated,” laws were passed that only allow the highest level of the middle class and the upper classes to invest in the investments with the highest returns.

This created a European-style model where only the rich own the most profitable companies and get richer while the middle and lower classes are stuck where they are.

Second, the schools at all levels were reformed to emphasize job training rather than quality leadership education.

Today great leadership education is still the staple at many elite private schools, but the middle and lower classes are expected to forego the “luxury” of opportunity-affording, deep leadership education and instead just seek the more “practical” and “relevant” one-size-fits-all job training.

This perpetuates the class system.

This is further exacerbated by the reality that public schools in middle class zip-codes typically perform much higher than lower-class neighborhood schools.

Private elite schools train most of our future upper class and leaders, middle class public schools train our managerial class and most professionals, and lower-class public schools train our hourly wage workers.

Notable exceptions notwithstanding, the rule still is what it is.

Government reinforces the class system by the way it runs public education, and big business supports it through the investment legal code. With these two biggest institutions in society promoting the class divide, lower and middle classes have limited power to change things.

The wooden stake that overcomes the vampire of an inelastic class system is entrepreneurial success.

Becoming a producer and successfully creating new value in society helps the entrepreneur surpass the current class-system matrix and also weakens the overall caste system itself.

In short, if America is to turn the Information Age into an era of increased freedom and widespread economic opportunity, we need more producers.

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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.

I searched for him half my life,
named with an uncommon sound.

I looked for him around the world,
but this person refused to be found.

Thankfully, I discovered him,
the good news is, you can too.

However, it won’t be easy,
as he reveals himself to just a few.

You can search our government assemblies,
and only hear legends from his past.

You can search our halls of learning,
reading quaint histories fading fast.

You can search our industrial complexes,
viewing his old portraits in the aisles.

You can search our sports arenas,
reading banners going out of style.

Everyone seems to know this person,
but most refuse his name.

I ceased my fruitless search,
hanging my head in shame.

In desperation, I searched within,
realizing his presence all along.

Since no one else will be him,
I can and will, to become strong.

I am now called responsible,
I am the man with the uncommon name.

My friend, you too have this choice,
for you can be called the same.

The search has ended.
The journey is done.

Who is responsible?
I am; You are; Everybody and everyone.

Sincerely, Orrin Woodward

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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.

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Over grown military establishments are under any form of government inauspicious to liberty, and are to be regarded as particularly hostile to republican liberty.–George Washington

In 1930s Germany, a unitary leader plead for sufficient power to make his homeland safe from the threats faced by his nation.

The German people and their parliament, in the name of security, allowed him to assume virtually unlimited power to make them safe.

The draconian measures implemented to prevent terrorism were soon turned upon the citizens of Germany and they, along with millions of others, lost their freedom.

Who could have imagined how terribly wrong it would go?

In our day, Americans are being asked to trust the head of the Executive Branch to exercise unprecedented power for the purpose of securing the homeland against the threat of terrorism.

Draconian powers including indefinite detention and extra-judicial executions are being authorized against foreigners and Americans alike in a worldwide war against terror that we’re told will last for generations.

It’s no exaggeration to say that the increasing parallels between the former Weimar Republic and modern America are becoming difficult to ignore.

Disturbing as that realization may be, it’s not half as unsettling as the raucous cheers and applause of those who actually celebrate the emerging authoritarian state inflicting harm on others without recognizing the corresponding damage being done to their own liberties.

Like the Germans of the 1930s, Americans appear to be afflicted with a nationalistic short-sightedness that seeks to excuse virtually any abuse of government powers, so long as those powers are directed at others for the stated purpose of making us safe.

As a nation, we stand at a crossroads with the choice of restoring limited government that keeps us free by safeguarding our inalienable rights, or creating an unlimited police state that will promise us security even as it fits us for our restraints.

How our experience with unchecked government power will end is anybody’s guess.

The passage of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) with its provisions for indefinite military detention at home and abroad represents an unmistakable departure from the concept of limited government in America.

With the open assertion of executive power to detain anyone anywhere without evidence, trial or due process the bill heralds the approach of a presidential dictatorship legally authorized to use the U.S. military to impose its will domestically.

The 2012 NDAA follows hot on the heels of the extra-judicial assassination in September of an American-born radical Muslim cleric named Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen.

The cleric’s death by Predator drone missile was ordered by the president after a secret panel within the Executive branch labeled al-Awlaki an “enemy combatant.”

No indictment was issued.

No evidence presented.

No proof required.

The president simply ordered the snuffing out of an individual (as well as a few innocent bystanders) based on his word alone.

This wasn’t the first time such extra-judicial killings have been authorized by the Executive branch, but it’s the first time that the power to do so was openly and brazenly acknowledged.

How could such a naked abuse of government power stand virtually unchallenged?

Attorney Glen Greenwald explains:

“What’s most striking about this is not that the U.S. Government has seized and exercised exactly the power the Fifth Amendment was designed to bar (“No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law”), and did so in a way that almost certainly violates core First Amendment protections (questions that will now never be decided in a court of law). What’s most amazing is that its citizens will not merely refrain from objecting, but will stand and cheer the U.S. Government’s new power to assassinate their fellow citizens, far from any battlefield, literally without a shred of due process from the U.S. Government.”

In our haste to embrace absolute security at the cost of proper government and our essential liberties, we’re making the same mistake many Germans made in the 1930s of mistaking patriotism for its belligerent counterfeit: nationalism.

Orwell addressed this phenomenon beautifully in his Notes on Nationalism written in 1945.  He makes a clear distinction between patriotism and nationalism as follows:

“By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, not for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.”

The desire to dominate others has been an observable part of human nature throughout the history of mankind.

Writer Christopher Manion notes that St. Augustine, in his work City of God, identified libido dominandi or the lust for power in the very first page.

Manion goes on to point out that, “these lusts are more powerful than simple physical appetites. And they tempt us all.”

A perfect example of this mindset can be found in the ongoing Republican presidential debates.

Of the seven candidates still in the running, six of them are seeking to solidify their voter base by promising to expand government powers to secure America.  Most say they would engage in more aggressive, unconstitutional wars abroad.

They have affirmed their support of torture, indefinite detentions, and continued expansion of the global War on Terror.

They are united in their belief that American exceptionalism justifies the projection of military power around the globe out of the fear that “If we don’t dominate the world–someone else will.”

Concern about the proper role of government has no place in their dialogue; only the desire to see American military might continue as the dominant force globally.

Warmongering, exploiting fear and creating enemies to vanquish is a key to maintaining their power.  It’s no coincidence that the more we send our military abroad to police the world, the less free we become here at home.

One solitary candidate has proven the exception by advocating fidelity to the principles of limited government and strict adherence to the Constitution.

This approach would mean less intrusive government and greater freedom at home and less meddling and interventionism abroad.

Too often, this candidate’s message is met with anger and derision by those whose lust for power over others would be checked by such reforms.

For freedom to be maintained, three things are required.

We must be an educated, independent-minded, clear-thinking people.

This can only occur when we have inoculated ourselves intellectually against the daily onslaught of propaganda that beats against us on all sides.

Mass media in America today does not serve to inform and enlighten the public so much as it exists to sell us the agenda of those in power.

To counter this manipulation of public opinion, there is simply no substitute for the power of a good old fashioned liberal arts education.

A classical education enables us to more clearly see the world as it is.  It also leaves us better equipped to speak with clarity and power while persuading others across a broad spectrum of beliefs and viewpoints.

We must be capable of practicing public and private virtue.

Public virtue means that we are willing to step up and do things that will benefit others generally without thought of recognition or personal reward for ourselves.  Public service used to actually include a degree of public virtue.

It can take forms other than public office, but it requires a willingness to serve others to the best of our abilities.

Private virtue means that we rectify our own hearts and minds, as Confucius suggested, before we set out to correct others. It’s not enough to insist that others be good, we must be willing to govern ourselves first.

By setting our selves and our homes in order, our communities and states will follow.

We must be willing to love liberty more than we hate our enemies.

We must have correct forms in our government and our personal lives. 

A form is what gives wet concrete its structure, limits and purpose.

Without a proper form, the concrete would flow uncontrollably and become useless.

In a similar sense, correct forms in government are what define its proper role and upper limits.

They are what allow the powers of the state to be used wisely and humanely for securing our natural rights rather than for simple domination or mischief.

In our personal lives, correct forms include strong marriages and families and sound personal financial practices as well as greater self-sufficiency.

When these elements are widespread throughout a society, self government and freedom flourish.  When they are generally lacking, even well-schooled, highly technologically advanced societies can be led into the abyss.

Military might and domination alone cannot make us or keep us a great nation.

Abiding by correct principles and doing the right things for the right reasons–regardless of circumstances–can.

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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.

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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.

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