OH SFL Regional Conference Talk, Oct. 24, 2015

YOU ARE NOT A LOTTERY TICKET.HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD, STARTING NOW.

Social Change

What life do you want to live?

What world do you want to live in?

YOU ARE NOT A LOTTERY TICKETTHESE ARE MEANINGLESS

You Are Not a Lottery Ticket

Individuals are not determined by statistics. Life is not left up to chance.

You don’t need to be lean, you don’t need to pivot.

Thiel on startups. Us on life.


Definite Indefinite

Optimist United States, 1950-1970

United States, present

Pessimist China, present Europe, present


Definite Indefinite

Optimist Hegel, Marx Nozick, Rawls

Pessimist Plato, Aristotle Epicurus, Lucretius

SOCIETIES ARE NOT CIVILIZATION VINSTITUTIONS MATTER, BUT ARE NOT DESIGNED

Societies Are Not Civ V

Your life is not up to chance, it takes design. BUT…


Your life is not up to chance, it takes design. BUT…

This applies to all people in an order.

Societies Are Not Civ VIndividual lives are complex to plan for outsiders.

Societies are aggregates of individual lives.

Ridiculously difficult to plan.

Spontaneous Order vs Rational Constructivist Order


Libertarians get a bad rap for leading people to believe that we are opposed to planning.

The more the state plans, the more difficult planning becomes for the individual. — Hayek

I don’t want to do nothing. There’s plenty to do.

The question I ponder is who plans for whom? I don’t want to do nothing. There’s plenty to do.


Do I plan for myself? Or leave it to you?


Do I plan for myself? Or leave it to you?

I want plans by the many, not by the few.

Where Will You Live? 4 Options For Your Society

Society Individuals

Spontaneous Order

Constructivist Order

Definite Any technological revolution

Space-race USSR Modern-day

China

Indefinite Great Stagnation United States

European Welfare Nightmare

How Will You Live? 4 Options For Your Life

SocietyYou

Spontaneous Order


DefiniteCapitalist,

Entrepreneur, Innovator, Passionate

Professional

High-ranking Government

Official, Smashed-Dreams Peon

IndefiniteListless Worker

(See: Office Space)

Low-ranking Government

Drone, Welfarist

Where Are We Today?

Society Individuals

Spontaneous Order




China



How Did We Get Here?How did we go from the Industrial Revolution and the Tech Boom to the Great Stagnation and Office Space?

Blame our parents?


The strange history of the Baby Boom produced a generation of indefinite optimists so used to effortless progress that they feel

entitled to it. Whether you were born in 1945 or 1950 or 1955, things got better every year for the first 18 years of your life, and it had

nothing to do with you. Technological advance seemed to accelerate automatically, so the Boomers grew up with great expectations but

few specific plans for how to fulfill them. Since tracked careers worked for them, they can’t imagine that they won’t work for their

kids, too.

Peter Thiel, Zero to One


Blame our parents? Law/Legislation?


Blame our parents? Law/Legislation? Culture?

The Biggest Threat to Liberty: Compulsory State Schooling

Recall the society matrix. Where do schools fall?

Where Will You Live? 4 Options For Your Society

Society Individuals

Spontaneous Order




China




Compulsory state schooling (“public education”) is the product of an entirely constructivist mindset.

The Scientific Management of Everything and Prussian Collectivism

Can we compare 1850 to 1920? To 2015?

Indefinite schooling.


Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Address to the German Nation, 1807: “By means of the new education we want to mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest. … If you want to influence [the student] at all, you must do more than merely talk to him; you must fashion him, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will.”


Fully schooled society.

School-creep.

School vs. education

E.g., Pre- and Post- government schooling MA.

Three Ways Out

Cultural / Legal / Individual

Which do you control?

Living Free

Now: Living with Definite Optimism for a Spontaneous Order.

Living With Definite Optimism

What life do you want for yourself? What future do you want to build? Do you have to deschool yourself?

How can you most efficiently get there?

Go and build it.

Living Free

Now: Living with Definite Optimism for a Spontaneous Order.

The future: Raising Free People.

Raising Free People

Home education

Sudbury schools

Private schools

Thousands of other options crowded out by the government monopoly on schooling.

Further ReadingZero to One, Peter Thiel (w/ Blake Masters), 2014.

“Cosmos and Taxis,” FA Hayek, from Law, Legislation, and Liberty, Vol. 1, 1973.

Weapons of Mass Instruction, John Taylor Gatto, 2009.

The Underground History of American Education, John Taylor Gatto, 2003.

Free to Learn, Peter Gray, 2013.

Contact Me

www.discoverpraxis.com

www.zakslayback.com

@zslayback

[email protected]

http://www.discoverpraxis.com

http://www.zakslayback.com

mailto:[email protected]

OH SFL Regional Conference Talk, Oct. 24, 2015

Education

Transcript of OH SFL Regional Conference Talk, Oct. 24, 2015