As a father I am constantly on the lookout for lessons, stories, experiences, and role models that will be edifying for the development of my children.

Several years ago, while he was still a surprising sensation at the University of Florida, Tim Tebow came onto my radar screen.

There was something attractive about his relentless drive for excellence, his incredible work ethic, his will to win, and his unflappable attitude.

I also appreciated his testimony as a Christian.

Watching Tim Tebow go from being the youngest winner of the Heisman Trophy to a number 1 draft pick in the NFL was a source of excitement for my young boys.

I felt comfortable allowing them to watch his interviews, read his book, and listen in to his exploits as he transitioned into the professional ranks.

Tim Tebow, a home schooled missionary’s kid who preaches at prisons and responds openly and honestly to crass questions from interviewers and critics alike, seemed the perfect role model for my children.

But something was amiss.

As Tebow put on his NFL cleats a disturbing chatter seemed to grow around him.

It seemed that the football “experts” were breaking their necks trying to see who could be more critical of young Tebow and his abilities.

They railed against his throwing motion. They railed against his accuracy. They laughed at Josh McDaniels, the then NFL head coach of the Denver Broncos who drafted Tebow in the first round.

And they even poked fun at his faith and his purity.

My children were learning hard lessons from this, but I guess that’s what role models are for.

“Why are they saying so many negative things about him, Dad?” “Those people sure are being mean to him.”

And on it went.

Then nearly a year went by before he got his real shot.

There were flashes of excitement in a couple starts his first season, but Tebow didn’t win the starting job and was sitting on the bench as the first five games of his second professional season rolled by.

Finally, however, Tebow had waited patiently and prepared in obscurity long enough.

His opportunity arrived, and just five games into the 2011 regular season, with the Broncos languishing at 1 and 4, Tebow was given his chance.

But nothing is that easy, not even in fairy tales.

Tebow’s play seemed to justify the claims of the critics. He missed wide-open receivers. He overthrew easy passes. He fumbled. He got sacked in the backfield.

He rolled up terrible statistics the likes of which no NFL quarterback could expect to post and still retain his job.

All the while the critics howled with their “I told you so’s.”

However, one thing Tebow did was win. In fact, his whole team seemed to start playing better. The defense stepped up to an unbelievable level.

Receivers started making stupendous catches. Running backs started nearly defying gravity. And Tebow himself seemed to come alive when the pressure was the greatest and pull victory out of the jaws of defeat – several times.

I am writing this article a bit early.

Althought Tim Tebow and the Denver Broncos have won four out of the last five games, anything could still happen and they could end up at the bottom of their division.

Their near-miss wins could easily start turning to losses, and if that happens, I have no doubt whatsoever the critics will have a field day once again.

None of that matters, however, because Tebow has already proven something extremely valuable, namely, that while people talk about lack of skill they should never underestimate the power of will.

What Tim Tebow brings is leadership.

He has that special ability to energize a team of players to each perform at their very own personal best.

He inspires, instills confidence, and makes those around him believe that anything can happen if they just have faith.

While the statistics bemoan his performance, Tebow proves again and again that there are some components in victory that can’t be measured.

There are intangibles to greatness that come from deep within, that defy the odds and mystify prognosticators, and that just simply can’t be contained.

Leadership matters. Character matters. Attitude matters. The will to win matters.

Critics, however, don’t matter.

Tebow has shown all this and more.

I personally hope he keeps on winning in his unconventional way, in front of the NFL experts who so haughtily claimed “That’s not the way it’s done here.”

The world needs to understand that unconventional doesn’t mean wrong, inadequate, or below grade.

Unconventional just may mean revolutionary.

They said Tim Tebow wasn’t ready for the NFL. Perhaps the NFL wasn’t ready for Tim Tebow.

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

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:

By Bryan Hyde

For sheer entertainment, Glenn Beck is at the top of his game.

His characteristic sarcasm, his irreverent, over-the-top humor and his undeniable passion have propelled him to rightful status as a top talk radio personality.

Beck is reminiscent of a young Rush Limbaugh, who tackled the topics others dared not and gleefully skewered every sacred cow of the smug political class.

On some issues, Beck has led out where even Limbaugh feared to tread.

He’s called into question the Federal Reserve and the soundness of our nation’s current monetary policy.

He has blown the whistle on political operatives like Van Jones who might otherwise have found sanctuary in high government positions.

Beck has been especially passionate about need for each of us to make a stand, to rectify our own hearts and to put our houses in order spiritually as well as temporally.

As with most commentators and pundits, I’ve found myself in violent agreement on some points and quietly discarded those points with which I could not agree.

I’ve tried to be particularly magnanimous where Beck is concerned because he is a respected and beloved figure of many of my listeners here in Southern Utah.

He’s done a great deal of good and I cannot dismiss the fruits of his efforts to awaken an apathetic public from his bully pulpit.

But I can no longer consider Brother Beck to be a friend of liberty.

It is one thing to be sincerely mistaken or to espouse a particular point of view based on incomplete information.

It’s quite another to subscribe to and promote a deliberately distorted ideology that seeks to subjugate others through fear-mongering and pandering to humanity’s basest tendencies.

The targets of Beck’s dogmatic vilification are the Palestinian people whom Beck and other nationalistic propagandists have reduced to a caricature of a wild, violent people who pose an existential threat to Israel.

All it takes to transmogrify Beck from thoughtful, impassioned commentator to outraged spittle-flinger is the mention of the word “Palestine.”

Cheered on by his studio sycophants, Beck loses any pretense of nuance or fairness in his portrayal of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict that has raged on since before he was born.

Beck’s version of this conflict follows this approximate line of thinking:

• Israel is good and cannot be faulted for any actions undertaken by its government to protect its interests against the evil of those who would deny its existence.
• Palestinians (sneer) have no business claiming victim-hood because they lost the land now occupied by Israel fair and square when the UN recognized Israel as a nation.  It’s not like there was ever an officially recognized nation-state called Palestine, right?
• Anyone who bears even the slightest sympathy for the Palestinian people must have some kind of ulterior motive or wish to see Israel “wiped off the map.”

The problem here is that Brother Beck’s take on this conflict is long on emotion and hyperbole and very short on historical clarity.

It’s part and parcel of the dismissive outrage so often exhibited by Americans who simply cannot fathom that acts of government ruthlessness toward innocent people can indeed spark incidents of violent retribution.

This is even more true when a people feel they no longer have anything to lose.

As Charley Reese once pointed out, If ever a people has been steam-rolled by history, it’s the Palestinians.

Their lands were first absorbed by the Ottoman Turks and then wrested away by the British Empire following WWI.

When the Brits chose to give up their Palestinian Mandate as a home for European Jews following WWII, the occupation of those lands continued, though under new ownership.

It’s ironic that Jewish radicals like Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir used terrorist tactics including bombings to ultimately dislodge the British from what would become the nation of Israel.

In 1948, nearly 700,000 Palestinians were stripped of their lands and became refugees who were forbidden to return to their homes, their businesses and their orchards.

A Christian Palestinian named Elias Chacour unflinchingly chronicles his own family’s experience in his book “Blood Brothers.”

Chacour tells of being forced from his home and beaten by Israeli soldiers.

He writes of the machine-gun and grenade attacks in which those same soldiers murdered entire villages of Palestinians.

Chacour’s recounting of the tale isn’t a call for sympathy and vengeance, but a plea for Palestinians and Jews alike to learn from the atrocities and stop the cycle of revenge being carried out by both sides.

A true peacemaker: Elias Chacour at right

He has been a peacemaker in every sense of the word, though his book tells a side of the conflict that would prove highly inconvenient to the “Israel uber alles” narrative preferred by Beck and others.

Prior to reading this book I was highly Zionist in my thinking.  Reading it didn’t make me hate Israel, but it clearly illustrated that true peacemakers are few and far between in this conflict.

There are enough bloodstained hands and innocent lives lost in both camps to merit a mixture of outrage and sympathy for Israelis and Palestinians.

Beck’s willingness to downplay the plight of hundreds of thousands of innocent Palestinians is as pathological as the unjustified hatred he claims these refugees are directing towards Israel.

The truth of the matter is that people who started the Israeli/Palestinian conflict have long since passed away or are approaching the end of their lives.

Most of the young people dying for land on both sides of a conflict they were born into are very deserving of our sympathies.

Beck’s stereotyping isn’t helping their plight.

Glenn Beck could use his considerable influence as a peacemaker—if he was willing to remove his ideological blinders.

Instead he is choosing to foment that conflict by acting as a willing propagandist for the Israeli government.

This particular blind spot on Beck’s part reveals a nationalistic streak that is wholly incompatible with liberty.

It seeks to persuade listeners to hate a group of people they’ve never met and to find purpose in exercising dominion over others.

It excuses government actions and policies that would be considered inexcusable if they were happening to ourselves.

Pointing out how aggression and injustice by Israel’s or America’s governments is not the same thing as saying that the Israeli or the American people deserve terror attacks.

When government ruthlessness reigns, innocent people will suffer on all sides.

Beck has led out admirably when discussing many topics, but on the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, he’s become part of the problem.

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

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 Hydeologue.com. He and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Bryan:

Nightmares

Imagine you’re on stage in front of a bunch of people.

They’re all looking at you, it’s quiet as a funeral home, you can hear a pin drop, your mouth is dry, and you have no idea what to say or what you’re even expected to say.

You don’t know why you’re there, you don’t even know who these people are, and then you realize it’s a dream.

For a lot of people this isn’t only an occasional nightmare, it’s a real life fear.

I’ve heard that right next to the fear of dying many people have a fear of public speaking.

One of the things you can do to take a lot of the fear out of speaking in front of people is to prepare.

Obviously, the reason so many people have had that nightmare, and the reason it’s so scary is because we don’t know the context.

We don’t know how we got there, we don’t know what’s expected of us, we don’t know what we’re supposed to say, we don’t know what those people are expecting us to say.

We don’t even know what language we’re supposed to say it in!

Maybe they all speak Greek, for all we know.

The point to remember about effective public speaking is that preparation sets the context, and the better prepared we are, the more we have things in context, and then it’s a lot easier to get on with saying the things we’re supposed to say in a relevant way.

This article is not about actually delivering a talk or how to deliver a talk.

There are a lot of materials in the Launching a Leadership Revolution series for that.

This is more about the preparation behind what makes communication impactful, and here’s an important take-away phrase to make sure that you remember:  Information is not communication.

Some people seem to think that just because they have a bunch of information that they are going to put into verbal words it means they are communicating.

It doesn’t.

They perhaps haven’t communicated anything.

There’s a right way to deliver a message and it involves a lot more than simply mouthing a bunch of words.

Preparation is Necessary

Public speaking is best when the speaker has taken time to prepare.

I’ll never forget a talk that was given by a young man.

Afterwards I was chatting with him about it and he said, “Yeah, I hardly even prepared at all for that, I just gave it a little bit of time and whipped out.”

I didn’t say it, but I couldn’t help thinking, “Well, it showed.  You didn’t have to tell me that, I could tell you hadn’t prepared.”

Only the very best, by the way, can get away without preparing, and this only usually works because their very life is daily preparation for what they’re saying from stage.

An illustration of this would be my business partner and co-author Orrin Woodward.

He’s a very effective public speaker, and he’s famous for being able to move a crowd, and yet I’ve seen him step off an airplane, be ushered into the back of an auditorium somewhere with nothing more than a general idea of the main point he wants to communicate.

He’s got nothing written down.

He’ll grab a piece of paper, he’ll give it some quick thought, sketch out some concepts, and hit the stage.

With no more than that he does a landmark talk that just moves the crowd and changes people’s lives.

I’ve seen that happen where he’ll come off afterwards and say, “Man, I didn’t even get to my notes.”

He’s prepared, but he hasn’t gone through some of the formal preparation that we’re talking about, but he’s prepared by the very living of his life, and the topic he was covering was something near and dear to his heart, and something he was living with every minute, every day.

So that’s a little different.

But even so, after giving thousands and thousands and thousands of public talks, you can feel free to loosen up a little bit and go for it like Orrin Woodward does.

Until then, you might want to follow the recipe we’ll go through in this article that works for the rest of us.

So preparation is necessary.

I think the reason people don’t do it properly (and the reason that young man had told me he had just winged it, and said it without even being embarrassed) is either they don’t know that they’re supposed to, or it’s too much hard work.

Now it’s not drudgery, it’s not impossible, but it does take some energy to organize your thinking – and by the way that’s what good communication is. It begins with organized thinking.

But it’s not enough just to prepare.  One must prepare in the right way.

The reason I give this little warning is because much preparation either doesn’t happen, as we already discussed, or it produces the wrong kind of communication, and by that I mean an endless stream of information.

This fact, that fact, this platitude, that platitude, this one-liner, that one-liner, blah, blah, blah, blah, tell, tell, tell, tell, and information is not communication.

So if your preparation leads to too much information, too many points to try to be made, too many facts and figures, and too much burying of the listener in factoids, then that’s not the right kind of preparation either.

So this article is geared toward getting you to be able to communicate in a way that’s both memorable and worthwhile to the listener.

Here’s the principle behind this: good communication begins with good thinking.  Proper preparation, therefore, is the thinking behind what is going to be said.

Don’t we all wish that people would think a little bit more before they say something?

Especially when they’re going do it in a formalized way in front of an audience with a microphone on a stage, you would certainly hope that things have been thought through a little bit.

The Hardest Work There Is?

So proper preparation is the thinking behind what’s going to be said or communicated, and as Henry Ford said, “Thinking is the hardest work there is, perhaps that’s why so few people engage in it.”

So with a little salute to Henry Ford, let’s do some of the hard work of talking through how we should be thinking about communicating so that we don’t waste our time, and we don’t bore listeners to tears with our information, all the while thinking that we’re communicating.

Additionally, some of these principles will also work if you’re forced to communicate spontaneously, because we don’t always have time to sit down and think things out ahead of time.

We might be in a meaningful discussion with our spouse, and we certainly don’t want to sit down and create a 5 bullet point presentation to make to our spouse, so these principles will be at work in all your communication, and will keep you from just droning on and on without truly connecting.

It should be obvious now that most communication therefore is not communication at all.

This is very important to understand.

Most of the time, when someone is addressing an audience, much of what is spoken is not actually communicated.

Firstly, it’s generally not all that well received, and more importantly not that completely received.

There’s all kinds of studies that suggest we only retain a small percentage of what we hear.

We only retain a little bit higher percentage of what we see.

We retain a little bit higher percentage of what we actually experience and do ourselves.

So understand that by speaking to a crowd, you’re already limited just in the mathematics of that kind of communication, so you’ve got to put everything in your favor, because most of it goes in one ear and out the other.

And most of it is not remembered very long afterwards if it’s remembered at all. So what ends up happening with most talks is they’re mere words.

They’re just clanging symbols – a drone of noise. Unfortunately, that’s most of verbal communication.

Just by the sheer mathematics of it much doesn’t get heard or remembered.

So we want to fight that trend and turn the tables in the other direction.

Interesting, Memorable and Clear

One thing to keep in mind regarding verbal communication is that it should be interesting.  Now what does interesting mean to a listener?

Well, it means that it’s relevant to them.

What you have to understand is that when you’re speaking, someone is giving you their attention, or they’re at least acting like they are by sitting there quietly and supposedly listening.

But the effect we can have on their attention span is to stay interesting, and the way to stay interesting is to stay relevant for them.

You might respond to this by saying, “It is relevant to them. After all, I’m talking to them about their future.  I’m talking to them about their finances.  I’m talking to them about their marriage.  I’m talking to them about how to build their business.  I’m talking to them about how to invest their money. Of course it’s relevant to them.”

Yes, these things may be true in general, but your communication has to be acutely relevant to them.

It has to be relevant to them every single minute.

You have to earn their undivided attention, because if you allow them to drift off by you being uninteresting or by just blasting out information that doesn’t seem relevant to them in the moment, they’ll be thinking about the babysitter back home, or the food they’re going to have once they leave the auditorium, or even the vacation they’ve got planned for the following weekend.

Their minds are very susceptible to quickly drifting away from what you’re saying and going elsewhere, even though they’re still sitting there quietly and politely.

So we’ve got to be relevant every possible moment we can.

Another thing is to be memorable.

We want to package things we say in ways that the audience can remember.

Obviously it has to be of value, your content has to be valuable, which means you have to actually have to know what you’re talking about, which I guess should go without being said.

Still, never forget that your information needs to be valuable, so dig hard to make sure what you’re delivering is of value.

The next thing is, and this should be obvious, but your information needs to be clear. It needs to be stated clearly, and I don’t mean how you pronounce the words.

What I mean is the way in which you state your point should be very clear.

It should connect with the audience.  They should be hanging on your every word and connected to what you’re saying and waiting eagerly to see what you say next.

What you say should be moving – it should stimulate some action.

It should cause the listener to think, and all this is done through words.

But the words are not the end result; rather, they’re the catalyst.

Now what exactly do I mean by that?

Well, words are used as vehicles for images in the mind and emotions in the soul.

You see, it’s not the words themselves, but what the words create in the mind of the listeners that counts. Better said: it’s not the words you say, it’s what they convey.

Keeping this in mind will tend to keep you from being boring, because you won’t be too enamored with the sentences you’re creating and spouting, but you’ll be using those sentences to create word pictures and video images in the minds of the listeners.

All right, so how do you go about doing this?

The Big Picture

Well, let’s start with a 30,000 foot view.

Whenever you’re going to communicate, start with the big picture in mind.  Ask yourself what is the one big thing you want to get across?  If they could only get one thing from you, what would it be?

(Believe it or not you would actually be doing quite well if the next day a listener to your talk could summarize your it in one statement, say, “You know, the big thing I took away from Bill’s talk was –”.)

So start with that at least, and think in the beginning, “All right, what’s the one big thing I want them to take away from this talk?”

Or, “What’s the one big action they will take after hearing my talk?” or “What’s the one big change in their life that will result?”

So understand the 30,000-foot, the high level, the big picture view.

What is it that you want them to take away from it?

If you can’t answer that about a talk you plan on delivering, don’t expect your audience to ever have a chance to summarize it.

The best you’ll get will be something like, “I don’t know what he’s talking about, he’s kind of going on and on about this and that, and blah, blah, I don’t know.  He was fired up about it, though, I can tell you that.”

So make sure you’ve got the big picture in mind and you have that one big thing at least that you want to communicate so your audience has a chance of catching it, and then remember this one big thing as you think through what you’re going to say, so you can figure out ways to make that one big thing prevalent, to make it clear, and to make it stick in their minds.

 Illustrate, Illustrate, Illustrate

Okay, and just so you know, the one main thing I want readers of this article to take away is to illustrate your points with stories, examples and such.

Illustrate, illustrate, illustrate.  Don’t just tell them – show them.

My takeaway line for you is this, “You haven’t told them until you’ve shown them.”

Okay, so I’m being a little cryptic right now, because I’m telling you exactly what my main point is to be, and what the takeaway line should be, but if ten weeks from now somebody says, “Hey, did you read that article by Chris about blah, blah, blah, about communication that isn’t information only, what did you take that to mean?”

You say, “Well, I think he’s telling me to illustrate my points with stories and examples and stuff, not just tell them, and I think he said something about how you haven’t told them until you show them.”

Boy, if you get that, I would be just tickled pink (whatever that means).

Let me share a story to illustrate my point, and at the same time I’ll also set up the main body of how I was taught to do this.

I was asked to preach a sermon one time many years ago.

Flattered and honored, I tried my best.

I prepared like crazy and organized my thoughts and followed some of what I’m telling you here about what at least I thought I knew about how to do this.

In the end, though, I’m afraid that it didn’t carry the day.  As a matter of fact, I’m quite certain I didn’t do that well.

So I was handed a book about how to preach and how to communicate better, and this book changed everything for me because the author laid out a very simple formula that anyone can follow.

Now, following a structure or framework doesn’t have to be rigid or boring.

I’m not a big fan of these public speaking courses that tell you to say what you’re going to say, then say it, and then tell them that you said it.

I have never followed those exact kinds of overly structured talks.

Not that there’s anything wrong with those, per se, but I believe there are other extremely good ways to communicate and move people, and great ways to get your point across that don’t have to be quite so scripted.

Now, back to the point.

This book I read talked about 3 things.

The author said to make sure that you always state, illustrate, and then apply what you’re saying.

State means to clearly indicate your point. Illustrate, which means to color your main point with examples, and then apply, which means to tell them how it relates to them and their life and the actions they’re supposed to take as a result of it.

State: Be clear, be clear, be clear.  Make sure that your statement of point is very clear.  What is your main point?  State it authoritatively and directly.

Illustrate: This is where most speakers fall down.  The natural tendency I see among people who get up to speak to an audience is that they state, and then they state, and then they state, and then they state, state, state, state, state, state, state, logic, logic, logic, information, information, information, until the death of the audience.

They think that telling is teaching.  It’s not.  Stop the tell, tell, tell, and start showing them instead.

I remember listening to this one speaker who had a definite mastery of his material.

He had the nuances, he had the details, he had the techniques, the principles, the specifics, and he had logic upon logic upon logic upon logic.

This guy knew his material cold.

He had a wealth of information that the audience had paid to come hear him teach.

But yet what he did for 50 minutes was tell, tell, tell, logic, logic, logic, tell, tell, tell, state, state, state.

As I looked around the room I saw people on their phones, and they weren’t on their phones taking notes, they were on their phones texting, playing games, and checking messages.

I saw one lady lean over, put her head on her spouse’s shoulders, close her eyes, and just kind of rest.

I saw another couple of people look at each other, shrug, and get up and leave.

I don’t know if they left for the entire evening, or just went to go get a smoke or a drink, I don’t know what it was, but it was total, what I would call an exit of boredom.

These are all signs that the speaker had totally lost the crowd.

The worst part, however, was that he was totally oblivious to the fact. He continued on with his logic as though it was the most interesting thing in the world.

So what did I just do, by the way, by telling you that story of that speaker who was killing his audience?

I gave you a story to illustrate my point.

You might not remember anything from this article, but hopefully weeks from now you’ll remember that poor sap up there killing his audience with his state, state, state, state, state, state, state, talk, talk, talk, talk!

So the stories illustrate the points, and often people don’t really remember what you state.

They only remember the illustration.

In this case I have used a negative story, but positive ones will also work. Remember: stories are the language of the imagination. What you’re trying to tap into is the audience’s imagination.

You’re not communicating until you’ve got their brains tracking with yours.

The easiest way to do this is through the telling of a story because stories connect with the imagination, and it’s the imagination that causes their attention span to be so short.

Our imaginations are so active.  They flit and jump from thing to thing, and we think of this and imagine that, picture this and daydream about that, and if the speaker does not capture the imagination, he doesn’t command the attention of the listener.

It’s the imagination that is responsible for the attention of the listener.

When you’re trying to get the listener’s attention, you’re trying to capture their imagination.  If you lose their imagination, you lose their attention, and off they go daydreaming or something else.

So stories are the language of the imagination.

You’re speaking to their imagination, which means you need to think in terms of pictures and images and visuals and videos and all those things.

So think hard about your main point when you’re getting a talk ready, and come up with a story to illustrate it, or several.

Many ask, “Where do I get a story?  I don’t know how to come up with a story.  I’m teaching them to brush their teeth more often, or whatever, how can there be a story for that?”

Well, find some story of somebody who was a really good example of teeth brushing, or someone who was a really bad example of teeth brushing.

Show some pictures of people who never brushed – I don’t know, come up with something that will provide memorable images.

You can do it from your own experience, you can do it from something you’ve read, you can do it from something you’ve heard, or you can even make one up.

Is there a parable from the bible, is there a fable from Aesop’s Fables, is there a nursery rhyme, is there a Doctor Seuss story, is there a cartoon?

Or, obviously, you could feel free to show photographs or film clips to literally illustrate your point.

Or maybe use diagrams, or come up with some kind of a drawing or something that would show it, or come up with a chart or a graph – some way to reinforce what you’re saying.

Other places you can go to add that color might be poetry, or song lyrics, or maybe a scene from a favorite movie, or some really gripping dialogue from a play.

Another great source is famous quotes.

Probably Winston Churchill or Benjamin Franklin or Abraham Lincoln said something that you could use to illustrate your point (and by the way, those 3 guys get credited with saying more things that they didn’t say than almost anybody in the world).

So make sure, before you assign a quote to someone, that you’ve got the right author behind the quote.

Another thing you could do is utilize similes or metaphors.  A simile is where you say “this thing is as that thing.” A metaphor is where you say “this thing is like that thing.”

So you could say, “Life is a game,” that’s a simile.  Or you could say, “Life is like a box of chocolates,” that’s a metaphor.

But you could use those kind of colors and illustrations, and by the way, don’t be afraid to use humor too.

And you can use several – this is an important point, you can use several illustrations, one-liners, quote and stuff, pictures, whatever, you can use several stories to illustrate a point.  You can mix them in.

I’ve done several already just so far.

Application Time

Now let’s move on to the third one: Apply. Remember we had state, illustrate, and apply, and actually I really think it should go like this: state, ILLUSTRATE, and apply.

But let’s consider this third and final step of applying your information to the listener.  This is what makes it relevant to the listener. This is where you tell them why it’s important for them.

And by the way, you can state things all throughout your talk, you can illustrate all throughout, and you can make application to their life and why it’s relevant to them all throughout what you say.

But here’s one of the keys: connect it to their interests.

This is why the nightmare that we talked about at the beginning of you standing on stage and not knowing what to say, not knowing the context, not knowing who that audience is, not knowing what you’re expected to say, this is why that’s so terrifying, is because there’s no connection.

There’s no context.

But the more you understand your audience, the more you understand your point or your material that you’re going to convey, the more you can connect the two together, and there’s less reason to be afraid.

When considering the application step, always remember what’s in it for the listener.

This is also where you tell them what you would like them to do as a result of your information.

When we talk about application, we’re talking about action.  What action should the listener be taking as a result of the information you’re conveying to them?  What is the action?

Should they be making a purchase, should they be joining a team, should they be making a change in their life, or all of the above?  Whatever.  Make sure that it’s explicit.

All right, remember this: it’s better to make one point very well than several poorly or not at all.

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

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:

Time magazine recently published a cover article on reforming American education, and its leading argument was the need for more great teachers.  The details, however, contained more of the same old edu-bureaucratic ideas which have been promoted for the past thirty years.

Opening the teacher rolls to more people with real-life business and professional experience is a good idea, as is the age-old argument that teacher pay must significantly increase.  But unfortunately most proposals are full of more red tape that further stifles good teaching.

As long as we have massive government bureaucracy and overwhelming levels of regulation on teachers, educational problems will increase.

Television networks also aired a number of recent news programs on educational reform, corresponding with the release of the new education documentary Waiting for Superman.  Not only are statistics and debates about education currently flying around in the professional and public forums, but most “regular” Americans are deeply worried about our schools.

According to an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, 58% of Americans believe that major changes or a complete overhaul of education is needed. Another 36% believe that some change is needed. Only 2% of Americans give our education system an A grade, while 77% give it a C, D or F.

Many Americans are concerned with what they see on the Fall 2010 reality show School Pride. The program found schools in seriously dilapidated condition: mice running around in plain view, restrooms and drinking fountains that don’t work, ceiling tiles falling on kids in school, and so on.

News Corp CEO Rupert Murdoch says that the public schools are “Failure Factories” which imperil the Middle Class.

“The failure rates of our public schools represent a tragic waste of human capital that is making America less competitive… Upward mobility in America is in jeopardy unless we fix our public schools… In plain English, we trap the children who need an education the most in failure factories…”

While many liberals discount the words of Murdoch (whose company owns The Wall Street Journal and Fox News), it was liberals—the same group that produced Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth—who brought us Waiting for Superman.
Both the left and the right have long voiced the need for improved education; but little real reform has resulted.

In Waiting for Superman, five kids seek to be accepted into prestigious charter schools, but across America many youth are forced to remain in failing local public schools.  The documentary portrays bad teachers (mostly tenured) and the unions that support them as a (the?) major problem.

In the movie, the teacher’s union in Washington, D.C. rejected schools chief Michelle Rhee’s offer to double teacher pay in exchange for getting rid of tenure and adopting merit pay.  But in truth, it will be great teaching that solves the education crisis—if we solve it at all.

As The Economist put it:

“…the movie also has a message of hope: there are good schools and teachers in America, whose methods could make its education system as good as any in the world if only they were allowed to.”

The Challenge

This comes at the most challenging time in decades, as overextended state houses attempt to balance deficit-ridden budgets and pay for basic services. Education appears to be failing at the very time that states can least afford to fix the schools.  Even with all the hype, most current proposals will increase the very regulation and bureaucratic requirements that hamstring great teachers and keep them from delivering truly quality education in schools across America.

I’ve visited many schools over the years, and inevitably teachers say their biggest challenge is that the system won’t let them really teach.  Dilapidated schools certainly need some work, but the educational process needs just as much. Given the choice between a great teacher and a plush classroom, which do you think would make the most difference?

Many conservatives and even liberals who have been otherwise critical of the Obama Administration’s agenda have praised the White House’s educational plans.

The major proposed initiatives include:

• An extended school year
• A national weeding out of the teachers which perform worst
• Increased emphasis on math and science
• 10,000 more science, math, engineering and technology teachers
• Nationalized teacher and student standards

Current plans are not emulating the Swedish model, where teachers are compensated and held in similar esteem to doctors, lawyers and engineers, nor do they idealize the model of elite private schools in America with individual tutors and deep study of the greatest classics of humanity (arguably the best schools in the world).

Instead, the initiatives appear to be modeled after the 1980s Japanese schools and the current educational system in France.

Many conservatives and liberals now seem to agree that the ideal system would include:

• High standards set by the central government
• Strict grading based on these nationalized standards in each subject
• Classes that teach to the national tests
• Teacher career advancement based on student test performance
• A meritocratic jobs system based on student grades
• Study hours per day and subject dictated by national education managers

This is more than a conveyor belt; it is a “mechanized-style” assembly line which assumes that every student in the nation has the same learning styles, interests, goals, dreams and abilities—or should.

Unfortunately, the results in both Japan and France include(d) high levels of mental illness among the youth, a high drop-out rate which leaves students with few career options and creates a perpetual unemployed class that is a drag on society, a society of students and workers who spend their lives “feeling like numbers” instead of individuals, and a nation of citizens and officials with a bureaucratic mentality.

And the “dirty little secret” is that the test scores of nations with such systems are still middle of the road—not top of the class.

Ultimately, the result of such education is reduced national innovation, initiative, ingenuity and entrepreneurialism—the very skills and habits which made America the world’s economic leader and which are needed to get the U.S. economy back on track.

The research, articles and books promoting major educational reforms to drastically boost America’s entrepreneurial mindset are myriad.  So why are we following the educational path of other nations (indeed nations whose students test in the middle and whose economies follow suit), instead of the effective private schools in our own nation?

Conspiracy theories aside, why don’t we simply emulate the best schools in our nation (and the world)?

The first response is likely that such education is too costly; but the facts simply don’t bear this out. For-profit educational institutions have proven that quality education can be delivered at less than the national cost-per-pupil, yet both the Bush and Obama Administrations have “radiated hostility” toward such programs (as do both Republican and Democratic leaders in many states).

Fortunately, the Obama team has been supportive of innovative charter schools. And Obama-led incentives to public schools which perform well are a positive free-market-style initiative.  In a few places huge donations are given to school districts, such as $290 million from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to three districts in Florida, Pennsylvania and Tennessee, and $100 million from Mark Zuckerberg to New Jersey schools, among others.

Unfortunately, most programs still fail to truly teach innovation, initiative, independent-thinking and entrepreneurial leadership.

Isn’t it time to really reform American education? If our schools continue on their current path, the future of our competitiveness in the world economy is bleak.  What can we do in order to simultaneously test well, compete for leadership in the world economy, and deliver schools which give every child the high likelihood of an excellent education in all subjects along with leading skills in innovation, initiative, ingenuity and entrepreneurial thinking?

Six Proposals

To cut through the reams of commentary on education, I will be as brief as possible in outlining six reforms which can truly “fix” American education. Further discussion on each of these is certainly worthy of our time, but my purpose here is to be as clear and concise as possible.

True educational reform will take a great deal of wise thinking and leadership, but it is not nearly as complex as the bureaucracy so often claims.

Here are six educational proposals that would significantly improve education:

1-Let Teachers Teach
Common-sense regulations for safety should remain, but we need to get rid of the massive levels of regulation forcing school boards to follow numerous policies which actually hurt education, requiring principals to shut down their best teachers and make them teach to the mediocre tests and standards, and preventing teachers from throwing away the bureaucratic manuals and lesson plans and really connecting with each student.

This is more complex than a simple change in attitude can achieve, but it is the first step. We need to give classroom teaching back to the teachers, or we will never see a significant improvement in American education.

2-Individualize
With proposal #1 above in process, great teachers can do what they do best—find out what each student needs and help him/her get it! Until this happens, we will never really know who the good versus bad teachers are. As long as teachers are following the manuals, they aren’t truly teaching. Once they are allowed to individualize, we will naturally see which teachers are great teachers.

And, many of the great teachers who have left the education profession because of the mediocrity of the conveyor-belt system will come back to a teaching career. Together these changes will revolutionize education. Individualized, personalized, focused education is education; anything else is something else.

Until we individualize, like the best private and elite schools do, we will never see the same quality of education in our schools. Indeed, most of the so-called “good students” in our schools excel precisely because they receive such personalization in their learning.

3-Restore Principals
The title “Principal” originally meant “Principal Teacher.” When we took principals out of the classroom, we de-emphasized learning and put the focus on management.  Great teaching occurs much more frequently and effectively when it is led by a great teacher in every school—who is also the boss. Most principals today are managers rather than educators because of the massive amounts of regulation they have to supervise.

Dump most of the regulation—everything that doesn’t protect safety or social equality—and put a master teacher in each school as the Principal. Then evaluate principals on the quality of education for the whole school. The rest will take care of itself, as great Principal Teachers drastically increase the quality of teaching and learning in every school.

Indeed, great principals naturally individualize the work of each teacher, encouraging them to bring their greatest strengths to the classroom. When this occurs, great teaching spreads and quality learning flourishes. This change will not be easy, but it will greatly impact the excellence of our schools.

4-Institute Flexible Exams
Allow flexible exam options where students can be tested according to their strengths—oral exams, projects, presentations, essays, multiple choice tests and other options agreed upon by the teachers, students and principal.
Instead of making students fit the system, great education occurs where committed educators adapt the system to the needs and abilities of the students.

This allows teachers to simultaneously teach to the test (raising the level of measurable progress) and do it in a way that personalizes the material to each student’s abilities and strengths. This encourages teachers to really, truly teach, helping each student identify, seek and obtain excellent and quality goals.

This is not, by the way, a weakening of standards; students should start where they can most effectively learn and succeed, and then over time teachers should help students master multiple and all modes of testing, making school exams more interconnected with and helpful in career and real-life skills.

5-Reform Teacher Training
Reduce some of the current teacher-training coursework and replace it with an intensive study of the greatest classics in human history using The Great Books and The Great Ideas. Leave the basic facets (such as classroom management, lesson planning, educational ethics, teaching specific topics, etc.) of teacher training in place, but in a more compact form.

Most of these are only truly learned on the job anyway, which is why Education majors and programs are often seen as among the easiest on most campuses.

In the new model, teacher training would last roughly the same amount of time as it currently does, and it would contain three main parts: teacher training, The Great Books, and student teaching. This kind of broad immersion in the Great Conversation will infuse life and excellence into the entire educational system.

The better educated our teachers—of all grade levels and educational topics—the more we are likely to see quality increase in our classrooms.

6-Empower Principals and Teachers
Give each teacher an administrative assistant/teacher’s aide, a laptop, a cell phone, and a set of—or subscription to—The Great Books.

Like Sweden, where teaching is an honored profession at the level of law and medicine, the United States needs to empower great teachers. And Sweden spends less per pupil than the U.S. does, with higher returns.

The reduction of expenses created by cutting the massive educational regulatory and bureaucratic apparatus (at federal, state and district levels and in each individual school) will free up a great deal of funding to pay for these changes.

Increasing teacher salaries would help, but almost no teacher goes into education for the money. Nearly all teachers pursue their profession because they want to help young people and to make a real difference. Items 1-6 will make teaching a dream for those who really love teaching and helping youth.

Conclusion

These six changes would drastically increase the quality of America’s public schools, by making them more like the private and elite schools which systematically produce high-quality educational results year after year.

All 6 would have significant impact on the quality of learning in our schools, and even just items 1-4 would greatly improve our schools.

Proposals 1-4 should be simultaneously implemented first (perhaps in a few test cases run concurrently in urban, suburban and rural schools), followed by proposals 5-6 as funding allows.

Such reforms would cause a veritable renaissance in American education. Until such changes, or reforms much like them, are instituted, we will most likely continue to see American education produce mediocre results.

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

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:

If patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel as Samuel Johnson suggested in 1775, one can’t help but wonder what the first refuge might have been.

In our day, the answer to that question would most likely consist of what Gilbert Ryle referred to as the bogus or unspecified predicate as a means of silencing dissent.

The bogus predicate usually takes the form of an accusation of “hate” or “racism” being leveled against the targeted group or individual. Supporting superlatives like “radical” or “extremist” or “bigot” are often used to reinforce the illusion that the accusation contains a measure of substance.

For instance, how many media reports or commentaries on the Tea Parties have centered on accusations of underlying racism or radicalism? How many of those accusations have sought to paint the entire movement with the same broad brush?

There are a couple of glaring problems with this approach.

First, simple logic dictates that broad generalizations are questionable at best when trying to make the exception appear to be the rule. But the real breakdown in validity occurs when such thundering accusations are put forth without specific, quantifiable content to define them.

The late Joseph Sobran put it like this:

Such charges — sexism, homophobia, racism, anti-Semitism, and the generic all-purpose hate and bigotry — are what the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle called “bogus predicates.” They sound as if they mean something, but they have no specifiable content. The listener is invited to fill them out with his own emotional associations. Murder implies that someone has killed someone else. What does bigotry imply?

When such a charge is made without defining the offense in clear and concise language, simply being accused can prove as effective as a conviction in the minds of the uninformed public.

This deliberate lack of clarity actually works in the favor of the accuser much as the catch-all accusation of “anti-Soviet activities” was used by those individuals tasked with keeping the Soviet gulags fully stocked with political prisoners.

Sobran once rightly observed that had the Soviets ever clearly defined what the term “anti-Soviet activities” actually meant, it would have ceased to be a useful tool in their hands.

Those who direct accusations of racism and extremism at Tea Partiers or any other peaceful but politically active group of dissenters are engaging in similar rhetorical sleight-of-hand by leveling vague charges that are not easily proved or disproved.

How exactly does one prove that they aren’t guilty of an offense which, lacking specifiable content, could mean wildly different things to different people? By using a bogus predicate, the burden of proof is wrongly placed on the accused.

Meanwhile, the accuser can smugly stand by without having actually proven anything except his or her ability to level accusations.

None of these observations should be taken as an unqualified endorsement of the Tea Parties or their participants as the saints-that-walk-among-us; they simply serve as a handy example of how language can be perverted for the purpose of manipulating the unthinking masses.

The political right has also been guilty of using similar bogus predicate tactics like the accusation of “terrorist activities” in order to sway public opinion and to stifle dissent.

It’s an intellectually bankrupt tactic that allows misinformation to flourish and serves to cloud the already murky waters of public discourse even further.

One of the greatest challenges we face as a society today is that of cutting through the propaganda and being able to see the world as it really is. Denying scoundrels their refuge in unspecified predicates would be a good start.

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

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 Hydeologue.com. He and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Bryan:

“Raise their heads on gilded poles! Roast the fatted calf! We need a rousing song–summon Toby Keith!” – from The Onion on the killing of Usay & Quday Hussein by U.S forces in 2003.

The past couple of weeks have revealed a great deal about the character of the average American. It’s not exactly good news either.

When the news broke that 9/11 mastermind Osama Bin Laden had been killed by U.S. forces in Pakistan, it took mere minutes for an orgy of celebration to break out across the nation.

Even the news media, which used to at least try to be circumspect in its coverage, couldn’t help but allow a bit of gloating to surface in the headlines including these gems:

• “Bin Laden Demise: America Rejoices After a Decade”
• “Rot In Hell!”
• “We Got the Bastard!”
• “Got Him! Vengeance at Last: U.S. Nails the Bastard!”
• “Justice Has Been Done”

Look, according to the Law of the Harvest, Bin Laden reaped exactly what he sowed as a murderous religious fanatic. No sympathy here. I can even understand the relief and emotional closure that many feel at this time.

But what about those who celebrate Bin Laden’s death with cheers, chants, chest bumps and high fives? Does his killing at the hands of our military really prove once and for all the that greatness of this nation resides in its ability to terminate despicable individuals with extreme prejudice?

Consider how John Quincy Adams summed up America’s greatness in 1821:

But she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy. She is the well-wisher to the freedom and independence of all. She is the champion and vindicator only of her own. She will commend the general cause by the countenance of her voice, and the benignant sympathy of her example. She well knows that by once enlisting under other banners than her own, were they even the banners of foreign independence, she would involve herself beyond the power of extrication, in all the wars of interest and intrigue, of individual avarice, envy, and ambition, which assume the colors and usurp the standard of freedom. The fundamental maxims of her policy would insensibly change from liberty to force…. She might become the dictatress of the world. She would be no longer the ruler of her own spirit…. [America's] glory is not dominion, but liberty. [emphasis mine]

At the risk of being extremely unpopular, I suggest we take a step back and see what the joyful celebration of any bloodshed actually says about us as a people.

Muslims are often characterized in our media as blood-thirsty, vengeful people who dance in the streets when their foes are killed or maimed. Thank goodness we’re not so crass, right?

Remember how outrage in America hit a fever pitch when a video was shown purporting to show Arab people celebrating in the streets following the 9/11 attacks?

The footage was later revealed to be video of a wedding celebration. Yet few Americans ever knew they’d been played like a fiddle at a barn dance. The current reaction of many U.S. citizens to a man’s death halfway around the world shows that we’re not immune to the effects of official propaganda.

This type of misinformation inflames emotions and whips the crowd into the type of frenzy where facts simply don’t matter. What really counts in the minds of too many Americans is that Bin Laden’s death supposedly validates our nation’s inherent greatness.

The official line is that “justice has been served.” But that may not strictly be the case.

Vengeance has certainly been served. But justice usually involves a modicum of due process; a cornerstone of our legal system that serves to limit government and protect individual liberties.

Though the official version of events has changed several times since the story broke, it’s clear that whatever justice Bin Laden will receive will be administered in the hereafter.

Bob Higgs has zeroed in on the inconsistency of what separates us from the kind of mindless blood lust that characterized Bin Laden and his minions:

No matter how much one may believe that people must sometimes commit homicide in defense of themselves and the defenseless, the killing itself is always to be deeply regretted. To take delight in killings, as so many Americans seem to have done in the past day or so, marks a person as a savage at heart. Human beings have the capacity to be better than savages. Oh that more of them would employ that capacity.

Yet we can see that many Americans have enthusiastically fallen for this trick, dancing in the streets in celebration of a man’s death in faraway Pakistan. Such unseemly behavior is not the stuff of which true greatness is made.

Joseph Sobran long ago observed that there is a degree of tragedy involved even when someone is crushed by the enormity of his own evil actions. Is it unreasonable to think that even the Creator grieves at the loss of one of his children?

Salon Magazine’s Glenn Greenwald dares to pose the vital questions that need to be addressed:

But beyond the emotional fulfillment that comes from vengeance and retributive justice, there are two points worth considering. The first is the question of what, if anything, is going to change as a result of the two bullets in Osama bin Laden’s head? Are we going to fight fewer wars or end the ones we’ve started? Are we going to see a restoration of some of the civil liberties which have been eroded at the altar of this scary Villain Mastermind? Is the War on Terror over? Are we Safer now?

And then there’s the notion that America has once again proved its greatness and preeminence by killing bin Laden. Americans are marching in the street celebrating with a sense of national pride.

Our situation hasn’t changed because one man was waxed by our military. We are still less free as a people, more entangled as a nation, and far deeper in debt than we were a decade ago.  Are those facts worth celebrating as well?

We aren’t less free today because Bin Laden succeeded in personally wresting our freedoms away from us. We are less free because we’ve allowed our own government to take them from us, incrementally, in return for the promise of protection from our official enemies.

Our greatness as a nation depends more upon the quality of our individual character as citizens and less upon which official enemy we’ve just annihilated.

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

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 Hydeologue.com. He and his wife Becky are raising their six children in Cedar City, Utah.

Connect With Bryan:

“How many legs does a dog have if you call the tail a leg? Four. Calling a tail a leg, doesn’t make it a leg.” — Abraham Lincoln

But political rhetoric would have you believe that it is not a tail but a leg. It’s time to apply the potent laxative of logic to constipated political spin. Your life (freedom) depends on it.

Skeptical? Read on.

The political correctness movement was not the beginning of linguistic spin intended to get you to first believe, then to swear that the excrement you consume is really organic delicacy.

The un-duped would say, “Egad, man. You are eating a steaming pile of dog feces!” but if you dupe enough people over enough time, dogs become the world’s most important commodity and Mastiffs the greatest breed.

Dung devourer creation is profitable enterprise. Solitarily standing in the way of obscene windfall is a skeptical populace armed with logic and motivated by freedom.

Linguistic codification, the marketing wing at Excrement Eaters Unlimited, enjoys a remarkable history of obscene profits and of death and debauchery desensitization.

Spin Tutorial

Spin takes on several forms. The two most popular are Euphemisms and Dyseuphemisms. When there is an attempt to make a word or idea sound better than it is, a euphemism is created. The opposite is true for a dyseuphemism. Here are some examples:

Insect Extermination

Alexandr Solzhenitsyn makes the case that post revolution communists co-opted euphemistic phraseology to disguise a reality that would have ensured an early end to both empire and existence for Lenin groupies. Here are some examples:

Euphemism:Pacification
Reality:Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets. If people cause trouble, you can create peace by getting rid of them.

Euphemism:Transfer of Population or Rectification of Frontiers
Reality:Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry.

Euphemism:Elimination of Unreliable Elements
Reality:People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of Scurvy in Arctic labor camps.

Solzhenitsyn painstakingly documents several other euphemistic reality incursions. “Thus the death penalty was rechristened ‘the supreme measure’ — no longer a punishment, but a means of social defense.” (Gulag, page 436)

In 1927, the benevolent Russian Central Committee abolished capital punishment except for crimes against the state and army, including “banditry.”

In time, the revealed reality was that “every armed nationalist who doesn’t agree with the central government is a ‘bandit,’ ” and, similarly, “any participant in an urban rebellion is also a ’bandit.” (Gulag pg 436)

Lenin expressed his sinister intent from the beginning when he said, we must go about “purging the land of all kinds of harmful insects.” The “insect” classification grew progressively larger.

“Insects” included not only all class enemies but also “workers malingering at their work.”

George Douglas of the Foundation for Economic Education said,

“It is not possible for us at this time to fully investigate exactly who fell within the broad definition of insects; the population of Russia was too heterogeneous and encompassed small, special groups, entirely superfluous and, today, forgotten.

The people in the local zemstvo self-governing bodies were, of course, insects. People in the cooperative movement were also insects, as were all owners of their own homes. There were not a few insects among the teachers in the gymnasiums.

The church parish councils were made up almost exclusively of insects, and it was insects of course who sang in church choirs. All priests were insects—and monks and nuns were even more so. (Gulag pg 27 -28)”

So far, political attempts at euphemization in the United States have not been as toxic as they were in Russia in 1927.

George Orwell is erroneously credited with originating the term Doublespeak from his book, 1984, in which the term never appears.

Regardless, Doublespeak refers to Euphemism and Dyseuphemism. Doublespeak examples span all levels of comedy and severity. Both sides of the political spectrum employ Doublespeak for rhetorical advantage.

But before dung-heap diving, peruse Doublespeak’s lighter side.

Euphemisms for someone who has died:
passed on, checked out, bit the big one, kicked the bucket, bitten the dust, popped their clogs, pegged it, carked it, turned their toes up, bought the farm, cashed in their chips, fallen off their perch, croaked, given up the ghost, shuffled off this mortal coil, assumed room temperature.

On the heavier side, politicians are notorious Doublespeakers, yet both are pot and kettle. Consider, first, the liberal point of view:

Doublespeak: Abortion
Real meaning: Killing and removal of a human fetus from its mother’s womb.

Doublespeak: Affirmative action
Real meaning: An attempt to achieve equality of outcome by favoring women and non-white males.

Doublespeak: Working Americans
Real meaning: Non-professionals who may or may not work harder than professionals and other wealthy people, and probably have invested less in schooling and training than professionals but should view themselves as oppressed by lazy, greedy professionals and entrepreneurs and vote for their liberal advocates.

Doublespeak: Community organizing
Real meaning: Do whatever you can, including lie, miscount, cheat, fudge and threaten, to give your group more than one vote per person (See ACORN).

Doublespeak: Affordable Healthcare
Real meaning: Shifting healthcare costs away from near-term voters and burdening the next two or three generations.

Doublespeak: Social Justice
Real meaning: Using the word “justice” implies that subsidy is deserved as a matter of justice. Therefore, the taking from one and giving it to another is authorized by morality and law and should not be questioned. Socialism.

Doublespeak: Planned Parenthood
Real Meaning: Promote abortion and undermine traditional families.

And on the conservative side,
Doublespeak: Strong National Defense
Real meaning: Meddle in world affairs, in campaigns with dubious gains and huge loss of fortune and life.

Doublespeak: Neo-conservatism
Real Meaning: Dupe the base, pacify the independents and get some libs to believe that you will somehow spend money like a drunken sailor and still ensure prosperity.

Doublespeak: Operation Iraqi Freedom
Real Meaning: Wow, no WMD’s. Let’s re-brand the war to be about freedom and not defense.

Please add some of your own in the comment section. I love them. If I were a doublespeak consultant, I would advise the following…

The NEA (National Teacher’s Union) should change its name to, “Society to Protect the Future of America’s Children.” Any critic would be going up against three sacred untouchables— Children, America and Future.

The Communist Party should change its name to, “The American Institute for the Promotion of Compassion.”

Truly the emperor is naked no matter what you hear from Congress, Hollywood and the media. Calling a thing by its name has liberating power in thought and action.

With the exception of comedic and artful uses, if doublespeak is not confronted, it will get passed off as reality. When this happens, life, freedom and goodness are sacrificed.

Solzhenitsyn says of most of his countrymen who allowed Lenin to exist and thrive, they “didn’t love freedom enough” to fight for it from the beginning.

If you choose not to engage, the question becomes, “how would you like your excrement served, madam?”

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

David B. Grant is the founder of Summa Logica Productions, which promotes formal logic training, particularly among youth, and helps you become a better thinker, reader, and writer. He is the author of Joseph Spider and the Fallacy Farm.

David holds degrees in Philosophy (BA) and Business (MBA) from Brigham Young University. He teaches Entrepreneurship and Operations at Southern Utah University.

He resides in Cedar City, Utah with his wife and five children.

In 1552, St. Francis Xavier, one of the founders of the Jesuits, sailed to China in an effort to convert souls to Christianity.

He never made it to the mainland, but others would soon follow who would have vast impact in China and on world technology exchange. The same efforts were undertaken at about the same time in South America.

The campaigns were eminently successful. At the peak of Jesuit prominence in China, several Jesuit Priests served in the emperor’s court and enjoyed thousands of converts to Christianity.

In Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay, the Jesuits set up a unique society, successful by almost any measure, that lasted for 130 years. It took the martyrdom of the priests to finally end what many considered heaven on earth.

These amazing priests, armed with education and the conviction that what they were to accomplish was divinely appointed, impacted the world in profound ways. The priests were armed with three foundational skill sets that are virtually neglected in today’s educational system.

You have to go out of your way, and only then at the University, if you want to learn Logic, Economics and Statistics (LES). Why these are not every bit as foundational in the American education system as reading, writing and arithmetic is a travesty.

Through these foundational skills, the Jesuits were regarded as prophets in that they were able to predict crop cycles, planetary movements, tides and weather patterns. Their goodness and strict adherence to a clear and defined order made them trustworthy advisers and leaders.

The logic training they received came from the educational fare of the time, the Trivium.

Trivium learning consisted of three disciplines, Logic, Grammar and Rhetoric. Or, a thing as it is (Logic), the symbolism of the thing (Grammar), and the communication of the thing (Rhetoric). In the case of LES, Logic is the study of a thing as it is, Statistics is the study of the symbolism of the thing, and Economics is the study of the thing as it is exchanged.

2002

Studies at Cornell University point out one thing that most parents of teens already know and at least one thing that they do not know. The already known thing is that teens have a hard time processing certain types of information.

The result is that they have difficulty recognizing future consequences resulting from current actions, choosing between good and bad actions (or better and best), overriding and suppressing unacceptable social responses, and determining similarities and differences between things or events.

What was not previously recognized by parents is, in the words of Dr. Geidd:

“…unlike infants whose brain activity is completely determined by their parents and environment, the teens may actually be able to control how their own brains are wired and sculpted.”

Kids who “exercise” their brains by learning to order their thoughts, understand abstract concepts, and control their impulses are laying the neural foundations that will serve them for the rest of their lives. Dr. Giedd says:

“This argues for doing a lot of things as a teenager. You are hard-wiring your brain in adolescence. Do you want to hard-wire it for sports and playing music and doing mathematics–or for lying on the couch in front of the television?”

1960

Especially since the 1960s, but going back even further than that, the modern educational focus took a radical shift inward.

Instead of the student being a somewhat passive subject that stands before the wonder and awe of the world and learns as much as possible about “things,” educational theorists presumed that the real wonder was not in “things” but in one’s self.

The modern concept of self has Cartesian origins. The Cartesian epiphany, “I think therefore I am,” is not mere highbrow phraseology, but has had viral impact in all aspects of modern life.

A theorist’s check is populace consent. Said another way, to be successful, a theorist’s ideas need to be conveyed in a way that either the populace at large is convinced or the group in power is convinced.

The turn away from the world and toward self had the advantages of timing, a weakened logic core, stealth and sloth appeal. The industrial revolution seemed to provide a shortcut for everything.

Thanks to Pasteur, you could shortcut an illness. Cars allowed for time shortcuts. Shortcuts were created for everything from science to sex to religious rite.

Because shortcutting was so successful in science, production, and other areas, it was implicitly believed that all areas of life cold be shortcutted as well.

Here was their shortcut argument for education.

On average, confident people do better in school, have better relationships and make more money in life. Confidence is really self confidence. Self-confidence can be taught and learned through self emphasis.

If we teach self-emphasis (self-esteem), we can bolster self confidence and thereby get people to do better in school, have better relationships and make more money.

The argument has several fatal flaws. I will mention three.

One of the logical flaws in the argument is a Cum Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc fallacy. The argument assumes that because confidence and well-being occur at the same time, that confidence must have caused the well-being.

The metaphysical flaw is in the assumption that there actually is a self that is somehow separate from a person. The ethical flaw in the argument is that the concept of self elevates the satisfaction of the needs of the ego as being a higher order good than the satisfaction of the needs of others.

Christians should have spotted this weakness early.

(It is Jesus who taught and exemplified the opposite. In an attempt to lull the Christians, some clever religionists found what was thought to be justification for radical self-regard in the passage “Love thy neighbor as thyself.”)

(A deeper look into the injunction shows that Jesus is quoting Leviticus 19:18, and in the original Hebrew, there is no reflexive like there is in English. Careful study of the passage will yield a different conclusion than, “therefore, I have to love myself before I can love my others.”).

2011

Fatherhood and my ecclesiastical assignments put me into the path of raging adolescents. Their uniqueness is dwarfed by their commonality and predictability. I am finding that there are fewer surprises and many more common experiences.

The adolescents having difficulty all suffer from the same LES malady. They confront the world as a thing to be dominated, with an underdeveloped frontal lobe and with no logical, statistical or economic check and balance against dysfunction.

Their statistical mistake is that they believe they are exceptional, that probabilities, actuarial tables, and data do not apply to them.

They take risks that have enormous possibility to destroy with dubious gains in momentary satisfaction. Their economic mistake is that they trade time, money, health, psychological health, true, lasting friendships and solid grounding for social currency that promises to yield some combination of the three P’s: power, pleasure, popularity.

Their logical mistakes are legion.

In a previous blog I wrote about the anecdotal fallacy. Here is the example I used.

The fallacy is the Anecdotal Fallacy. Basically, the fallacy is committed when immediate or more emotional evidence is given greater weight in an argument than what may be mountainous evidence supporting the opposite or another position.

The famous description used is the Volvo versus Saab dilemma. Suppose that you need a new car and after weeks of research, you have narrowed your choice down to either a Saab or a Volvo. After more methodical study, the Volvo is the clear choice.

You have read hundreds of magazine and customer reviews and nearly all of them indicate that the Volvo is the better choice. You decide to buy a Volvo the next day. That night, you attend a social gathering and you excitedly tell a friend of the family about your decision and your research.

The friend says, “Oh, NO! Don’t buy the Volvo. My sister bought a Volvo and it was nothing but trouble. She ended up selling it for parts after three years of ownership.” In the morning, you ignore the mountain of evidence, and because of hearing your friend’s experience, you go to the Saab dealership and buy the Saab.

The ‘Twilight‘ Anecdotal Fallacy

For most abuse situations, there was ample evidence that abuse was statistically probable long before there was any commitment or involvement between the victim and the perpetrator. A friend recently told me of her aunt who was getting involved with a man who had a history of abusing women.

When confronted about the statistical likelihood that she would become a victim of abuse, her aunt said, “He would never do that to me. It’s different between us.”

As you read this, ask yourself how this is going to end for the aunt. Let me add some more evidence. The man was incarcerated for abuse in the past, and he has shoved some of the female relatives of the aunt.

If you conclude from the evidence that there is a high statistical probability that the aunt will be abused, you are correct. Mountains of evidence point to a high probability of abuse, yet the aunt is sure that she is can escape high statistical probabilities.

Everyone thinks they are the exception. The affliction of supposed clairvoyance born of emotional connection is hardly a teenage-only malady.

Bella and Edward

Here is Bella’s evidence: Edward has killed humans in the past. The taste of human blood is the only thing that really satisfies. Her blood is beyond delicious and Edward has said that he may not be able to stop himself if he gets a taste. He has warned her to stay away from him. He has told her that he is dangerous. He is exciting.

At one point in the dialogue between the two she is asked, “Are you afraid?” Her response is, “No.” Somehow, in spite of the evidence that she should be afraid, the only evidence that mattered was, “He is exciting.”

It’s a story. Who really cares?

In the bedroom of one of my friend’s daughters (she’s 13) hangs a poster of Edward over her headboard. If the light from her window hits the poster just right, you can see several good-night kiss marks on Edward’s face.

Edward will come along someday. He always does. The dangerous thing for my friend’s daughter is that Edward, true to form, will be problematic.

He may be violent, addicted to substances or media or have multiple other vices, and he will be exciting. When he comes along, she will recognize him as Edward and will respond like Bella, “I’m not afraid. He wouldn’t hurt me; I just know it.”

The modern educational curriculum is incapable of delivering the kind of education that safely guide teens through their brain challenged years. It must be done by parents and mentors.

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

David B. Grant is the founder of Summa Logica Productions, which promotes formal logic training, particularly among youth, and helps you become a better thinker, reader, and writer. He is the author of Joseph Spider and the Fallacy Farm.

David holds degrees in Philosophy (BA) and Business (MBA) from Brigham Young University. He teaches Entrepreneurship and Operations at Southern Utah University.

He resides in Cedar City, Utah with his wife and five children.

This is a follow-up article to this article.

The Rise of Women

In 2010 America saw more women than men in the paid workplace for the first time. In the wake of this major development, business is evolving in several significant ways.

For example, columnist Jennifer Braunschweiger has outlined many changes ahead, including the following:

• The growing popularity of replacing flextime with “Customized Career Lattices” where employees can increase their work responsibilities for a time or scale back to emphasize family or other life events for a time.
• The widespread growth of home offices. This is a huge trend, and according to Braunschweiger, some companies (such as IBM) have as much as 40 percent of their labor force working off-site.
• A move from face-to-face to results-based evaluations which downplay the “old-boy network” and emphasize actual performance on the tasks assigned.
• An increase in parent-friendly laws that allow employees the latitude to care for family needs first.
• Another author suggests to women employees: “do your most important task first thing” and schedule your day so you can leave work early. And it is now considered okay for women to wear the same exact outfit on Tuesday that they did last week.

These represent a growing mental shift in America’s corporate culture, but the office isn’t the only place changing in order to accommodate the rising influence of women. The newly popular buzzword “femivore” is defined as: “A highly educated opt-out mom who stays home to raise the kids, vegetables and, increasingly, chickens.”

More and more such women are having an impact on society in the home and beyond, and numerous publications provide on-going advice, recommendations and tips for the femivores and the millions of work-at-home women careerists. These include Family Circle, Woman’s Day, Country Living, Whole Living, Better Homes and Gardens, Real Simple, Redbook, More, and many others.

For example, each month “The Careerist” column in Marie Claire gives advice on work.

The November 2010 focus is on “The Careerist @ Home,” and provides a number of guidelines for work-at-home women, including how to best show off your books to visitors and keep all electronics in one area to increase floor space5 — and perhaps also to separate work from private life. The next page provides guidelines for an efficient and effective wardrobe for those who work from home.

Another article proclaims that

“…women are on a tear right now, shrinking the wage gap and even out-earning men at the entry level,” and then outlines various tips for wise female financial planning in challenging economies: don’t use debt; freelance on the side; sell yourself; plan for retirement; sell your old and unused books, dvds and cds online; be upfront about your goals; scale back; and sell overpriced gadgets like your iPhone.

The trend of the “two-half-income household” is returning — where partners both work half time and take care of the home half time, and participants say such an arrangement reduces stress and increases the quality of life for both men and women.

Another significant trend is the growth of “Intentionals,” who sometimes call themselves “non-moms” for their choice to not have children. There are over 1.5 million American Intentionals, and the non-mom fashion is articulated in books like Two is Enough, The Childless by Choice Project, and Childfree and Loving It.

These trends show that women have more options than ever. At home and in the workplace, the status of women is rising across America. Some would say, “It’s about time!” and most men and women agree that increasing opportunities for women is a great accomplishment in the modern United States.

On the world scale, some major philanthropic organizations, including the Carter Center and Buffett’s NoVo Foundation, emphasize donations that empower women and girls. A donation to a woman, according to Peter Buffett, “ripples out in ways that it just doesn’t when you give the dollars to a man.”

As for women in business and government, when asked if they are generally different than men, French Finance Minister Christine Lagard said:

“Yes…I think we inject less libido, less testosterone, into the equation….It helps in the sense that we don’t necessarily project our own egos into cutting a deal, making our point…convincing people, reducing them to, you know, a partner that has lost in the process….

“I honestly believe that there is a majority of women in such positions that approach power, decision-making processes, and other people in the business relationships in a slightly different manner.”

She noted that there are male and female exceptions to the rule, but that these generalizations are usually accurate.

Gender Roles in Pop Culture

Popular culture is alive with changes in this Rise-of-the-Women era. Women, whether at work or home, are bonding in increasingly high numbers via e-relationships. The old cliché that when men stress they go somewhere alone and when women stress they meet together and bond is being leveraged by the Internet.

On average, women visit a social networking site 5 times a day, 64 percent of women consider themselves a bit addicted to such sites, and most women have between 100 and 300 friends on their sites. The average young working woman spends over 2 hours a day surfing the Web and another 90 minutes a day emailing. Surfing the web at work is good for your career, women are assured.

Women’s clout is on the rise at home too. With over thirty years of the pro-choice/pro-life debate putting women firmly in charge of pregnancy, some men now complain that they want more children but their wife has the uterus and all the power.

A heralded new book, Cleopatra: A Life by Stacy Schiff, reintroduces perhaps the greatest classical feminist of Western Civilization, and the movie “Easy A” takes The Scarlet Letter to a new generation — with a very different cultural spin.

As for men, this year’s pop culture is rolling out Boardwalk Empire (an HBO series about male-dominated 1920s Prohibition culture), Lonestar (about a con artist lying to the two women in his life; critically acclaimed by the experts but cancelled after just two weeks), and Michael Douglass as the iconic man at his worst in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” (where he and others play the Wall Street “fat cats” storyline right out of the White House’s worst nightmares).

The stereotypes are captured in the comedy Running Wilde: responsible, capable woman meets playboy, self-centered man. It’s the same concept as the hit Cougar Town.

This theme is repeated often in each week’s primetime television: Castle, The Good Wife, Psych, Lie to Me, The Mentalist, Modern Family, Bones, Parenthood, Life Unexpected, House, 90210, 30 Rock, and many others. In Glee and Desperate Housewives the stereotypes are epic.

The overall message? Men are flawed, and women are strong and responsible but need several good friends to make everything all right. Book titles cited in recent women’s magazines include:

• Best Friends Forever: Surviving a Breakup with Your Best Friend ;
• Best Friends: the Pleasures and Perils of Girls’ and Womens’ Friendships ;
• The Decision Tree: Taking Control of Your Health in the Era of Personalized Medicine (features guidelines for including your online network of friends in your health choices);
• The Positive Power of Negative Thinking (celebrating the idea that venting to friends can help women in many ways)
• The Twisted Sisterhood: Unraveling the Dark Legacy of Female Relationships.

Girls’ magazines also offer articles on dealing with your BFF, BGF, and ongoing “Friend Maintenance.”

For any guys who don’t know these terms, they stand for Best Friend Forever, Best Guy Friend (not a boyfriend or involved with the girl in any kind of romantic relationship), and the ongoing necessity of working on, planning, fixing, and sustaining relationships with close friends. The to-do lists are long and impressive.

Women work on average nine hours more per week than they did in 2004, 20 while still doing as much non-employee work in the home. Men, on the contrary, do less housework when they are unemployed or underemployed. And as a result of the Great Recession and high unemployment, this is impacting a lot of households.

Pop culture does have a few men who are “the good ones”—like Chuck, Smallville’s Clark Kent or “McDreamy” on Grey’s Anatomy. But good men are rare, the current plot assures us, as most males are selfish, uncommitted, cheating and a lot like “Mad Men” characters.

Fortunately, in the new post economic-collapse culture, women have their group of friends to depend upon. Such friends are mostly other women, but can also include a close, platonic guy friend like on “Hellcats,” “Stargate Universe” and nearly all reality shows.

New Rules

In the entire top-tier movie and primetime schedule it is rare to find functional, happy, supportive married couples. Instead, the following rules seem to guide our current entertainment culture:

1. Marriage is the end of romance, or at least the end of high ratings (this has a long history in primetime television);
2. The exception is where marriage is a place of cheating or other major conflicts (e.g. Glee, Life Unexpected, Private Practice, The Good Wife, Desperate Housewives, Brothers and Sisters, Modern Family, Parenthood, Stargate Universe, Undercovers, Covert Affairs, etc.).
3. If a marriage is working, some big problem — usually secret to all but the viewer — is lurking or exploding the relationship (e.g. Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Undercovers, No Ordinary Family, Friday Night Lights, Covert Affairs, Gossip Girl, 90210, One Tree Hill, etc.)
4. Single life is more romantic, a lot more fun, and, frankly, better than married life (see Desperate Housewives, Brothers and Sisters, all the CSI and NCIS programs, Hawaii Five-O, The Event, Gossip Girl, 90210, House, Chuck, Chase, Castle, Bones, Parenthood, Life Unexpected, and pretty much every reality show).

These themes are reinforced by nearly all primetime programs. In wikinomics terms, the overwhelming presence of these themes and the rareness of counter examples is a major message. In short, primetime television has adopted the culture of daytime TV. We are way past the “nudge” or “tipping point” which sways culture with little things. The trend is now the culture.

The men and women in Bachelor Pad, Jersey Shore, The Apprentice and Survivor seem to have it all figured out — just be selfish. Or even more profound, the lead character in “Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps” talks about money like it is a lover. He refers to money as “she,” and describes the challenges of making relationships work.

Maybe drawing conclusions about male or female roles from the entertainment industry is dangerous, but even Napoleon knew that a nation’s music and stories are more powerful than its armies. These movies and TV programs are popular for a reason, and even if most Americans don’t adopt the values they enjoy watching, certainly some things do rub off on the culture.

The End of Marriage

Why then is marriage portrayed as so unromantic? Undesirable? To be avoided?

We have to ask ourselves if this is a new feminism: “We don’t need men in our lives. We get more degrees than men do, we have more jobs than men do, and more of us are managers.

Many of us get paid more than our men, and eventually as a group we’ll get paid more than men in general. So, men have a choice: They can be what we want them to be, or they can hit the road.”

The story is frequently repeated in our entertainment: see Private Practice, Cougar Town, Fringe, Human Target, Eureka, No Ordinary Family, Desperate Housewives, 90210 and so many others. Repetitive, perhaps; but these are our prime time. It is what it is. We watch what we watch.

But, on the other hand, could the marginalization and vilification of marriage be a new paternalism of some sort? Is it men saying, “Fine. You want to be equal? Well, why don’t you just be in charge? We never liked responsibility anyway. We’ll just make money and play — through our twenties, thirties, forties and, in fact, always. Good luck with that equality thing…”

Historically many analysts felt that marriage tamed men, made them less selfish and more helpful to the women and children in their lives. It had its share of structural problems too, most obviously from dominating men who were tyrants in the home or at work.

But is the new view of romantic and married culture rewriting the ideal for man as well-funded playboy? And if so, is this new version something women (or men) really want?

Popular entertainment portrays flirting as romantic, dating as romantic, and even weddings as romantic. But marriage after the wedding is rarely depicted as a romantic endeavor.

And how about the commercial advertisements that appear in between scenes of the programming? In fact, very often marriage is represented on screen as the end of romance. Marriage is rendered as full of problems, hard, and more often than not just plain bad.

In the male/female debate, it seems we’ve lost the main point. The older version of equality feminism, whether you liked it or not, at least had the merit of believing that a woman could “have it all.” It was at the very least adult: Men had responsibility and power, and women wanted the same opportunities.

In contrast, today’s model says a woman can have a career, money, power and friends, or kids, vegetables, friends and chickens, but why on earth would she want the complication of a husband?

And as for men, well, “boys will be boys” — let them play, spend away their money pursuing fun, and depend on them for nothing. Men may “want to be in relationships,” but marriage is another issue.

This is a sad brand of feminism indeed! If men and women have lost the dream of marriage as the ultimate romantic love, if real estate, promotions, more money or even raising the kids have become the ultimate ideal, then our society has truly lost something of great value.

According to the new values, there seem to be three great overarching rules for women: 1) never date someone who ever dated your best friends, 2) your girlfriends are the only ones you can really depend on, and 3) you have to be selfish in romantic relationships to avoid getting hurt.

The result? Pretty much everybody gets hurt. A lot.

To be continued…

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

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:

To preserve our freedom, the U.S. legal code must separate political parties from government, and citizens must learn to consider more than the Democratic and Republican parties.

Republics throughout history have always been dominated by self-serving parties whose goals are adverse to the rights and combined interests of the people. Ours is no exception, but it is time that changed.

Rather than fighting present realities, we must change the model that created them, and those discouraging realities will change automatically.

Most of the founders loathed parties. Political parties have rarely been non-biased pursuers of liberty. In essence, political parties are simply privileged civic clubs with pet projects, favorite issues, internal intrigue, a special privilege of being intimately connected with government operations, and goals for obtaining and maintaining power.

Why are we the people so fixed on our current two-party system? What lasting value does it really have in reference to the life, liberty, and unalienable (non-transferable) rights of men?

Do we believe that freedom cannot exist apart from the two dominant parties?

We are the masters of this nation, and we have the power to put any political party or system out of business just as fast as we could a regular retail store by deciding not to shop there.

Our long overdue political paradigm shift away from this structure can be summarized in these words from George Washington’s Farewell Address:

“All obstructions to the execution of the laws, all combinations and associations, under whatever plausible character, with the real design to direct, control, counteract, or awe the regular deliberation and action of the constituted authorities, are destructive…and of fatal tendency. They serve to organize faction, to give it an artificial and extraordinary force; to put, in the place of the delegated will of the nation the will of a party…

“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge, natural to party dissension, which in different ages and countries has perpetrated the most horrid enormities, is itself a frightful despotism. But this leads at length to a more formal and permanent despotism.

“Without looking forward to an extremity of this kind (which nevertheless ought not to be entirely out of sight), the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party are sufficient to make it the interest and duty of a wise people to discourage and restrain it.”

Are we wise and courageous enough to fulfill our duty of discouraging and restraining the mischiefs of party?

Legislative Damage Caused By the System

The primary debate in our elections, legislative chambers, and executive offices is not about what it should be: the securing and protection of the rights of the people. Instead, we have the same scenario James Madison lamented in “Federalist 10″ and sought to overcome:

“Complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith, and of public and personal liberty; that our governments are too unstable; that the public good is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties.

“Measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice, and the rights of the minor party; but by the superior force of an interested and over-bearing majority.

“The prevailing and increasing distrust of public engagements, and alarm for private rights, which are echoed from one end of the continent to the other…must be chiefly, if not wholly, effects of the unsteadiness and injustice, with which a factious spirit has tainted our public administrations.”

Here are a few things — all of them adverse to freedom — that both of the dominant parties have brought to this nation:

• Unconstitutional foreign wars and involvement;
• Unconstitutional internal improvement tax schemes designed to support certain businesses and localities over others; also called bringing home the bacon to your local district;
• A heavy progressive or graduated income tax;
• Centralization of credit and money in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank and an exclusive monopoly;
• Free education for all children in government-run public schools and the combination of education with industrial production;
• The redistribution of wealth through government programs and bailouts;
• The combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries and the subsidizing of the cash crop market;
• Unconstitutional involvement and regulation in business and private life;
• The confiscation of real money (gold/silver) and the virtual outlawing of their use through legal tender laws;
• Complete and total corruption of the electoral college as originally intended, to the point where the president is not an impartial representative of the Constitution towards the nation as a whole, but is a policy puppet for a single specific interest group (party) whose job it is to ensure that party’s agenda is accomplished;
• Violation of most protections in the bill of rights through various surveillance and “guilty until proven innocent” laws
• The continuation of New Deal economic philosophy;
• The continual support of the military-industrial complex;

When was the last time any of these were openly discussed on either of the two party’s platforms, in a public debate, or in our legislative chambers?

Electoral Suppression Caused By the System

In Federalist 10, James Madison endorsed the hopeful benefits a large republic would offer to controlling the violence that can be caused by a super powerful majority:

“…as each representative will be chosen by a greater number of citizens in the large than in the small Republic, it will be more difficult for unworthy candidates to practice with success the vicious arts by which elections are too often carried; and the suffrages of the people being more free, will be more likely to centre on men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters.”

However, the party structure has disrupted the ability of the people to independently choose “men who possess the most attractive merit, and the most diffusive and established characters.”

Here are a few examples.

First, because of the government relationship of the parties, every other year across America less than 10 percent of each state’s population select the office holders for the next term.

This happens in the party conventions by the delegates selected in caucus meetings. The people at large do not select their candidate of choice; the parties do.

Second, whenever vacancies require filling, most state election laws require that the party who the previous candidate belonged to should either suggest a few options from which the vacancy is filled, or they simply nominate one candidate and the proper state authority makes the appointment.

Third, the media almost entirely neglects any other candidate option than the Republican or Democratic choice that has come out of the party convention system.

The masses are essentially limited to two options, because that is all the system wants them to be presented with.

A basic principle of freedom is choice. The more choices available the more freedom exists. The opposite is true as well: the less choices available, the less real freedom.

Fourth, we have also been lulled into a notion that casting a vote for the person most likely to win is the best use of the right to vote.

Most know the person most likely to win is the golden child of the dominant party.

Yet it does not necessarily follow that the party’s candidate is the best choice of merit. For the last 150 years a vote for either party has been a vote for bigger government.

Casting a vote solely out of the candidates electability, or chances of winning, plays a significant role in the reason we cannot elect the most qualified candidates. It is a greater waste of a vote to vote with the crowd than that of your conscience and of the best merit.

Fifth, candidates do not represent the voice of the people. They represent the voice of a party.

Consider especially the president. As originally understood the president of the U.S. was to be an impartial defender of the constitution and the rights of the people en masse. The constitution was constructed in a specific way that made him independent from other branches of government or social pressures.

However, with the party-government union he is none of these things. He is no longer an impartial pursuer and defender of liberty, but is a hireling of a party.

It is easy to see how destructive to liberty this arrangement is, especially considering the reality that parties never have the virtuous and best interest of the whole at heart, but the interest of the few.

These and similar scenarios are played out every two years for virtually every possible elected position all across America.

We have to change the model so that votes of the electorate encourage multiple parties, instead of naturally gravitating towards and empowering a two-party system.

To be continued…

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

Kyle Roberts is a small business owner who has committed his life to the cause of freedom. He is dedicated to recreating strong local self-government in his community by creating, and helping others create, institutions that create and preserve freedom.

He teaches a four-part lecture series on the Original Understanding of the Constitution for free to the community.

Kyle lives in Spanish Fork, Utah with his wife Kim and two children.

Connect With Kyle: