THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

WHY YOU AND I ARE "SIMPLISTIC" | 2002-05-11

In his huge book, 1984, George Orwell sums up his entire message this way

"Freedom is the right to say that 2 plus 2 equals 4."

The reason Orwell's statement is so wise is because propagandists always try to tell us that things are not as they appear.

Your professor told you that all the things he said are really very, very complex. But what one learns from a lifetime of experience is that people's real motivations, no matter how many degrees they have, are very simple.

Any human being who is hired to talk daily for years to a captive audience will do what any human being does when he talks: he tries to look good.

All humans, left to their own devices, say whatever they think makes them look good. No matter how hard I try, WhitakerOnline is going to contain lots of references to my background and my experience, and not all of them are going to be for your benefit.

Benjamin Franklin's short autobiography is great because he starts off by admitting that the main reason he wrote about himself was his own ego.

But almost every European or Canadian will look you straight in the eye and tell you that his teachers and professors did not push political leftism and socialism because political leftism and socialism makes professors look good.

This simple fact has never occurred to anybody, though if you think about it just a moment you will realize it is one of the most important facts in the world today.

Like supply and demand, once you actually look at professor's natural human bias, it changes your whole view of the world. What is terribly hard is to get people to see how important this simple fact is.

No matter how "complex and unsimplistic" you get, you can't know anything about real world economics until you have done a lot of thinking about supply and demand.

By the same token, you are simply not IN this world until you have done some serious thinking about the UNAVOIDABLE human biases of the people who ruled your life for at least eight years.

To repeat

It is not surprising that almost all Europeans and Canadians worship professors. You are the miracle because you went through eight years of this and it didn't take.