by Caleb Nelson
“No. It was my money! It’s not fair to take it from me.”
“That kid could have done jobs, too, and earned money like me,” my son added.
This scenario seemed to upset them both as they began eyeing the grownups around them, seeing a money-stealing-tyrant in every one. So I steered it another direction.
“But what if you had the $10 and saw a kid—a friend maybe—who didn’t have any money. You know he would need money to do fun things, and because you want to do things together, you give him a few dollars. Would that be okay?”
“Yeah,” they both answer.
“Why is that okay, but the other way isn’t?” I asked.
“Because no one made us!”
“Because then maybe they get to say ‘Thank you.”
“Because then we get to have fun together.”
“Because I got to say what I do with my money.”
As all these answers were right, I hoped the lesson was learned. But to be sure, I asked my daughter another question, “So should I force Liam to give you some of his money, even though he worked hard to earn it while you played around?”
It seemed to pain her to say it, but only a little, “No. I’ll be okay with my $2.”
Then Liam’s eyes lit up and he dug his hand into his pocket, pulling out another $2 and handing it to his little sister, “Here, River. Now we can both find prizes in the hay!”
River needed no prompting from me to say an exuberant, “THANK YOU, LIAM!” and wrap him in her grateful arms, squeezing the air out of him with her love.
I watched my children go off to play and had a chance to realize that the battle isn’t between the Haves and the Have-Nots. It’s between the Do’s and the Do-Nots. When a person has worked for their life, wage, and place, they may chafe under the idea that what they’ve earned must be taken from them and given to someone else who has NOT worked.
Many arguments between children—or in fact between any members of a family—can be traced back to principles of property and liberty.
“That’s mine!”
“Don’t touch me!”
“You aren’t the boss of me!”
“Get out of my room!”
“As long as you live under my roof, you’ll obey my rules!”
Even my children saw that when we Have, that means we have something to share, and when we Do, we Have.
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This story illustrates the soul and purpose of this book. Such is the importance of a foundation of principles to a happy and fulfilling life. Even the very young have little trouble recognizing these ideas. But they often get confused as they get older, especially if they have never learned to identify the truths they know in specific words. If we are going to understand how to live in the world around us, we first need to understand how that world works.
But when we look at our understanding of how the world works, we should ask some basic and vital questions, such as, “Is my view of reality accurate?” and “How do I know it?” and “Can I prove it?” These important questions are philosophical ones. The Oxford English Dictionary calls “philosophy” the study of the fundamental nature of knowledge, reality, and existence. Never asking and rationally answering these questions has disastrous consequences.
Most people don’t like philosophy because it doesn’t seem practical; it doesn’t seem to serve any useful purpose in our everyday lives or connect to concrete facts. The little we’ve heard of it is confusing and contradictory, and wondering about trees making noise when no one is around seems like a useless indulgence for people with too much time on their hands. Philosophy has left a bad taste in our mouths, and it’s understandable since much of the “philosophy” we are familiar with is useless because it’s wrong or unprovable. But considering philosophy is defined as the study of existence, shouldn’t it be scientific? Shouldn’t there be some useful and practical purpose in it? There is. Unfortunately, truth is a needle obscured in a haystack of confusion. Many have given up looking in frustration, or concluded the whole pile is useless hay. We, the authors, are excited to report we’ve found the proverbial needle—it is practical and desperately needed. That is why the title of this book is The Philosophy of Freedom—freedom as humans, and freedom from the consequences of false beliefs.
THE SEEN AND THE UNSEEN
Have you ever thought about the way you process information, what you choose to focus on, and what you ignore? The perceptual information you bring in can be broken down into two basic categories: sensing and perceiving. “Individuals who prefer the sensation function are more likely to trust information that is in the present, tangible and concrete: that is, information that can be understood by the five senses . . . They prefer to look for details and facts. For them, the meaning is in the data. On the other hand, those who prefer the intuition function tend to trust information that is more abstract or theoretical, that can be associated with other information (either remembered or discovered by seeking a wider context or pattern). They may be more interested in future possibilities. They tend to trust those flashes of insight that seem to bubble up from the unconscious mind. The meaning is in how the data relates to the pattern or theory.”
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More simply, we could say Sensors focus on concrete facts and Intuitives focus on abstract concepts. “Intuition” sees the forest; “sense” sees the trees. Sensors tend to focus on the details and implementation, while Intuitives focus on the big picture and overall direction. You could think of these two functions as a rally driving team. The Sensor does the work of driving the car, but the Intuitive is the one with the map that tells the driver where to go. The driver and the navigator are a team who can’t win the race without each other. Neither function is better than the other—they each serve an important purpose. When it comes to understanding the world, we have to be able to see details as well as how those details fit into the big picture.
Sensing is a bottom-up approach; intuition is a top-down approach. Two mechanics could perform a repair job equally well from each perspective. The Sensor would likely look at the parts, how they are shaped, and how they fit together. The Intuitive would think about the larger function of the system, considering how the parts conceptually work together and go from there. Each function has its strengths and weaknesses, but both are vital.
Chances are, you’re a Sensor rather than an Intuitive (for more information, see the Myers Briggs personality test.). While everyone has some ability to use both functions, many people have a preference for one over the other. Roughly 75% of the population prefers sensing to intuition.
[4] Furthermore, studies have shown that roughly 75% of the population never makes it to Piaget’s final stage of cognitive development called formal operations.[5] It is only in this last stage of development that people are able to think abstractly. Perhaps this reflects the sensor vs. intuitive preference of the population. Regardless, Sensors tend to have a hard time seeing how abstract concepts apply to their lives or what value they have. This book focuses on abstract concepts, so it will be a challenge to those who haven’t strengthened their intuition muscles. But every principle we share is discussed precisely because it does apply to concrete reality, but is usually ignored. We, the authors, are aware of the frequent gap between the conceptual and the concrete, and have tried to include stories and examples that will help everyone see how principles apply in their lives.
Even if you find abstract thinking distasteful, it is still absolutely necessary to understand. What is the value of the conceptual realm? Someone wholly dedicated to sensing could tell you the precise path, angle, and daily variations of that bright circle thing in the sky, but it takes intuition to assemble those facts into a theory that accurately explains what that glowing thing is and why it does what it does.
With persistence and functioning eyeballs, you could look at the night sky and notice that most of the shining dots seem to rotate around a central shining dot. But you would also eventually notice that there were a couple of shinin
g dots that were following their own paths. That’s all facts would tell you; that’s where your senses end and your intuition must step in. What could explain these observations? What could make sense of them? Why do some of the stars wander? Having knowledge of the heliocentric solar system from grade school as a given fact, it’s hard to appreciate the genius of men like Galileo and Copernicus who assembled so many complex and detailed facts into theories that began to explain the nature of the solar system. It was a tremendous leap forward in science, and it could not have happened without abstract thought. “That’s fine,” you say, “but the motions of the planets don’t have any impact on my life. I still don’t see the value of abstract thought.”
Consider the less tangible, but more important examples, like justice, mercy, love, health, and freedom. Do these things matter to you? You can’t hold them in your hand, you can’t observe them under a microscope, yet they exist as concepts, and without them life is meaningless.
Intuition makes connections between things, seeing how they relate to one another. Ignorance of such relationships leads to disastrous consequences. For example, consider what would happen if you didn’t grasp the conceptual connections between the glycemic index, insulin response, metabolism of fat, and refined grains. You’d quite likely end up obese, and wondering how you got diabetes when you were following the government recommended low-fat diet with 6-12 servings of grains per day. Concentrating solely on isolated facts leads to range-of-the-moment decisions, while ignoring long-term consequences. This is illustrated in Nancy and Eric Gurney’s book, The King, the Mice and the Cheese. The king wants to keep his cheese, but has a problem with mice. Perplexed, he goes to his advisors for a solution. They recommend using cats to chase the mice out. The plan works splendidly, except for the subsequent cat infestation. So the advisors bring in dogs to chase out the cats. To get rid of the dogs they bring in lions. To get rid of the lions they bring in elephants. And finally to get rid of the elephants, they bring the mice back in.
This is a humorous children’s story, but it is more than that. There is a moral to the story, and that moral is an abstract principle—specifically, shortsighted fixes can cause long-term problems. The moral of the story is a general guideline to inform our decisions in any given situation, not just ones involving cheese hoards and animal control. If we know a principle in the abstract, we can apply it to whatever circumstances we find ourselves in. Without the abstract concept, we have no preset, multipurpose guideline. Without the abstract principle to guide our self-taught actions, we have to spend valuable time treating every problem in life as novel and unique. In effect, we are forced to reinvent the wheel every time we need to go somewhere. We will speak more about principles later.
America’s government has demonstrated the same sad comedy of errors as the king in the story because we too have failed to understand important conceptual connections between cause and effect. The political and economic problems we face as a country and as a world are largely because humans do not grasp the connections between freedom, government, prosperity, and peace. Many don’t even know that they are connected at all. Hence, laws are passed to fix things that can’t be fixed by law. Those laws violate principles and cause a cascade of other problems. Then, to fix the new problems ten more laws are made, more principles are broken, and the problems multiply exponentially. A weak heartbeat can be temporarily fixed by a shot of adrenaline. But if the patient’s heartbeat is weak because they’re hemorrhaging, the adrenaline will give the appearance of improvement, but really be hastening death.
Intuition is needed to understand the broader, unseen connections between things. In America, when we have heart problems we go to a cardiologist. When we have nerve problems we go to a neurologist. Specialization has the benefit of detailed knowledge, but a weakness of our healthcare system is that in treating these systems as separate, we sometimes forget they are part of the same body. We forget that systems, like those in the body, do not function in isolation, but affect each other.
Because Sensors are not used to thinking intuitively, they can easily dismiss or miss connections between systems. There will likely be things in this book you have never considered before. Our natural instinct is to dismiss what we’ve never considered. We don’t see the value in what we don’t understand. It is an uneasy feeling to realize we’ve missed important things. Usually it’s a matter of pride that makes us dismissive of new things. After all, we’ve come this far in life without it, so what are the chances the new stuff actually matters? But to elevate our lives to the next level, we must first be humble knowledge-seekers, valuing truth over ego, and remembering that we don’t know what we don’t know.
Sometimes there are connections between systems that we would have never considered before. Many times, the connection between things has more than one step, making it almost impossible to see how they are intertwined. Such subtle or distant connections that we’ve never considered can seem downright crazy. What would you think if you were told that wolves can change the course of rivers and streams? Sounds insane, doesn’t it? There doesn’t seem to be any logical connection between those two things, yet it is true. Here’s your first chance to practice remaining open and curious in the face of cognitive dissonance. George Monbiot described how, in 1995, wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park. For the seventy years before that, there had been no dominant predator to thin the deer population. Without predation, the deer herds grew, and since more animals means more food is needed, the vegetation in the park was heavily grazed on. When the wolves got there, aside from eating some deer, they changed the behavior of the deer. The deer would now avoid areas where they could be easily trapped like valleys and gorges. Without deer there to graze, the vegetation sprang back with vigor. Impressively, the trees in some areas quintupled in height in only six years! More trees attracted more birds and beavers.
“And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. They create niches for other species. And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians. The wolves killed coyotes, and as a result of that, the number of rabbits and mice began to rise, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badgers. Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left. Bears fed on it too, and their population began to rise as well, partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs, and the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer.
“But here’s where it gets really interesting. The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. They began to meander less. There was less erosion. The channels narrowed. More pools formed, more riffle sections, all of which were great for wildlife habitats. The rivers changed in response to the wolves, and the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often, so that the rivers became more fixed in their course. Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places and the vegetation recovering on the valley sides, there was less soil erosion, because the vegetation stabilized that as well. So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park, this huge area of land, but also its physical geography.”
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Mr. Monbiot goes on to explain how whales and their poop are connected to phytoplankton and how phytoplankton trap and reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Thus, indirectly, whaling can have an impact on the amount of greenhouse gas in the atmosphere. These connections are surprising and not in the least bit obvious. There is no “common sense” that would have ever told us about these systemic connections. We couldn’t have dreamed of these connections, yet they exist. What else don’t we know? What else exists that we haven’t considered? We should keep open and curious minds since, as fallible mortals, we are grossly ignorant of most things.
As we’ve seen, even small changes to a system can have massive effects on the whole, for good or
ill. America has governmental and cultural and societal systems made up of thousands of smaller interlocking systems. If our solutions are not systemic, our problems will persist. The information in this book addresses the larger philosophic system that supports all the rest. The solutions to our problems are not as small and easy as electing the right candidate (though that certainly helps). Historically, we have tried to solve our problems by making first order changes—changes in behaviors. We’ve tried Democrats, and when that hasn’t worked, we’ve tried Republicans. When that has failed, we’ve gone back to Democrats, and on and on the pendulum has swung, back and forth, election after election. The solution to our problem will not be to change behavior within the system—if we want true change, we must change the system itself. Only a second order change—a change to the system— is powerful enough to also affect all the parts of the system. If we fix the problem at the source, we fix all the problems that came down the line from it. If we cut the trunk, we kill every branch automatically.
America’s problems are the result of not having a clear, unambiguous, rational philosophy. America began with the vague notion that more freedom was better than less freedom, but never had a full understanding of what freedom was, and how laws must be connected to it. Thus without meaning to, our laws have been piecemeal, short-term “solutions” that actually caused more problems and have eroded our liberty. Here is the value of abstract concepts and philosophy—these problems could have been avoided if more focus was put on understanding the abstract concepts of freedom and prosperity, and how to apply them to the details of life. Had our focus been less on the trees and more on the forest, we could have seen the broader implications of our actions, and the long-term destructive consequences of our short-term fixes.