Yeppers, this is my one hundredth lens. It's time to re-evaluate.
The value of my lenses may depend on where you start, and if at some point I irritate you enough to stop. For this one hundredth lens I will start with easier challenges found in my lenses. Then I will present provoking concepts.
Perhaps this double-dog-dare will inspire your re-birth of independent thought, a release from your compulsory schooling zombiehood.
Like an old arcade game, how strong are you? I will advance to more opinionated ideas, until many can no longer hold onto the handles and have to let go. Some were afraid to think and have already left. You are still here, ready to face the challenge. To list your name as a TOP PLAYER you have to hang on till the end.
I'll enjoy cranking up the volts.
I hope you enjoy surmounting the obstacles.
Your comments, or lack thereof, will help me decide if it is worthwhile doing another one hundred lenses.
first shock
"If there are several opposing opinions on an issue, all of them can't be right; however, all of them can be very wrong."
Allan Wallace
Do you think Charity and volunteering are for suckers?
What happened to the virtue of selfishness?
For my objectivist friends this is a good place to make a point.
You value the power of the individual and their freedom to make selfish choices. Your reasoning is if we do what is best for ourselves and those we love, others will also benefit as we create and add value. You are concerned that charity is often marketed through guilt and social pressures that amount to extortion.
Let me task you with considering a basic tenet of free societies. In an open market a transaction will not occur unless both parties see a benefit for themselves; all involved parties have to believe they win. increased wealth results from every exchange. Markets unencumbered by intervention continually increase the prosperity of every free person.
Just as the founders of the United States changed John Locke's "life, liberty, and the pursuit of property" when they inserted it into the Declaration of Independence to an equally Lockeian "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," it would be well to recognize not all benefits derived from open markets involve property.
One great benefit within volunteering and charity is the sweet taste of giving. The joys that come from a personal choice to give or volunteer keep growing, unlike most pursued pleasures that diminish with repetition.
To those that have experienced it in large doses, philanthropy can be a tremendous pleasure that brings enormous satisfaction.
And it helps others.
Charity Is A Choice
If you are forced to give: it is theft, not philanthropy.
"The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cat's teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice."
Mahatma Gandhi
They think you should give up your dreams for other's needs they define. Of course they feel obligated to manage and distribute your coerced "gifts," and skim themselves an easy living off the top.
"We elect government officials to referee a game; they have come to believe this means they own the teams, the stadiums, the fans, and the sport." - Allan R. Wallace
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Visionary Leaders - inspiring and leading change
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YOU can learn to be a visionary leader. "Visionary leaders realize it's better to fight tough battles for worthy causes - than lead popular movements doomed to eventual failure." - Allan Wallace Managers focus on control, leaders...
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Bible Based Giving
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Grape vines don't groan while producing grapes; and giving is fruit that comes naturally from a healthy vine rooted in good soil. If you don't enjoy giving, move to a more natural vineyard. Let's take a moment and make simple the tangl...
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Use College Donations (and more) To Shape a Better Future.
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You see the need, you know change must come if colleges are to be prepared for the future. If you have enough concern to give, you have enough concern to influence others. Talk to the person in charge of a program you want to help transform; odds ar...
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How To Raise Money For Charity
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Raising money to support your favorite cause is a good work. To assist you in your good work, here are some insights from training and experience, and several good books with charity fund raising ideas. We will cover the needs of both fundraiser and...
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How Free Markets Make Our World A Better, Friendlier, and Safer Place
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Free markets are equivalent to neighbors trading vegetables for fruit at a garden gate. An insightful quote from one of the greatest economists of the last century: "The great virtue of a free market system is that it does not ca...
Defining writing, authoring, and published authors
Definition of a writer: Someone who writes for themselves and their audience.
Definition of an author: Someone who writes for a publisher.
Definition of a published author: Someone who wrote for a publisher; and succeeded in getting a nice title and a token percentage of the profits they helped create.
Still Here?
You have advanced to level one in the intellectual independence strength test.
Alternative victory:
If you choose another of my lenses to visit because it irritates you, and you read the whole thing while thinking - you win. I don't expect you to agree with me, just realize we may both be wrong.
No sucker for the winners -- just a brighter future.
Increased voltage
Bastiat Free University:
Not being built to segment and distribute information - BFU exists as a catalyst to reignite your love of learning.
Seeking Positive Change In Education
Modern schools have been designed top-down to deliver cogs to social-industrial machines.
Primary and secondary education are used to prepare students for college. The education industry markets college degrees as the only route to get a good job or a promotion. Follow and don't think so you can get a nice job, with benefits, in a bureaucracy. Statistics supporting this sales claim for a college degree are from decades ago when industrialization was still growing.
This antiquated view of life, a leftover from the dying bureaucratic age, is the wrong way to prepare for a future requiring creative minds.,
cures for the common education
Compulsory education insulated you from reality, much of your world view is from manufactured mental dog food. Mad bureaucrat disease.
The greatest change comes when we adapt our paradigms closer to reality. We must forget changing others until after we rethink ourselves.
FIRST: How do you view the world?
Start a list.
SECOND: How can you check if major components of your world view are fairly accurate?
Understand the wisdom within your opposition.
THINK
don't follow
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Alternative Learning Systems & Experimental Education
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Public schools perform much worse at edifying students than private or home schools. They are the wrong environment to facilitate learning. The excuse is public schools help students learn social skills - like how to follow orders. Primary and secon...
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An industrial revolution started the Bureaucratic Age - an information revolution is ending it.
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Winter is ending, spring and its fancies are softly calling. The Bureaucratic Age was winter for individuals; opportunities were buried under blizzards of paperwork, crippling winds of high taxes, and mountainous drifts of regulations. With apolo...
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The Importance Of Education
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"We shall not grow wiser before we learn that much that we have done was very foolish." - F. A. Hayek The supposed purpose of education, as marketed by the education industry, is career advancement, higher pay, and empowering a college gra...
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Netcohort Institute - student powered peer to peer education
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YOU change the world? Only if you want to. Your passions have led you to deep insights, other students need your help to find them. The old model was to go to school, find a job, get experience, and move up the ladder (maybe). The new route is to dev...
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Bastiat Free University: self-crafted, self-directed learning
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Assassin! You are attacked by your fencing instructor. He has regularly beat you due to his greater reach, but you have excelled in the defensive maneuvers he has taught you. With a gasp, you realize he means to kill you, and he has the means with hi...
Hold On
"The risks and rewards of natural enterprise are greater,
and of far more value to society,
than any illusions of security that bind human cogs to a social-industrial machine."
Allan Wallace
Congratulations, Level Two Independent Thought Achieved
The Final Challenge (on this lens)
Seek out mentally healthy thought food, not the predigested kibble thrown at you.
You have been intellectually fattened to remove any potential for strenuous individual mental activity. It will never be considered valuable to any bureaucracy, such as the schools you were forced to endure, to allow consideration that you might exist just fine without its corrosive ministrations.
If what government approved institutions offer is truly valuable to any but themselves, would they make laws forcing it upon us and have to steal from our paychecks to support it? Would they so bend society as to create flaccid axioms intoning the value they offer, all tied to their definition of "success." Would they provide student loans and other inducements to trade in your freedoms for an ersatz life of herd like conspicuous consumption?
Has the forcefully limited thinking of others been used to shape your thoughts?
Ah, but I have made you uncomfortable grasshopper. Ignore the previous and rejoin the corpulent herd; your hungry shepherds, the wolves, miss your compliance within their rituals.
The Final Challenge
If you have not found a sufficiently irritating lens yet, let me offer these.
Pick the one lens of my one hundred lenses most likely to annoy you, read the whole thing, openly thinking as you do.
Survive that, and you are truly a strong person, ready to remake the world.
Get Started.
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"An eccentric old fellow training visionaries." - a lensography
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Whenever I agree with the majority view, I know it's time to examine my foundations. It's not that the crowd is always wrong; they are only always wrong when it is really important. At dangerous extremes visionaries must swim against an almost unani...
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Privatize The Government?
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The first heated arguments to arise when discussing privatizing government services regard road networks, court systems, and police departments. Public education or the post office are mentioned occasionally, but most don't want to talk about co...
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The Official, Authorized, Aggrandizement Of Allan R. Wallace
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This picture is actually of lt.-colonel Allan B. Wallace, taken in 1898. I'm sure he is bald under that hat. I've shown the picture to close friends and they thought it was me dressed up in a period costume. I don't like labels, they are too convenien...
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Bureaucrat Tipping - a push for change
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Bureaucrat tipping is a creative and natural enterprise involving the joy of doing it better yourself. Power corrupts, but bureaucrats are proof that even a little power corrupts absolutely - few of them can tell differences in degrees of power. Bur...
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We Are Ignorant - we only pretend to know
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We view sophisticated modern knowledge and proclaim the ignorance of centuries past. What we ignore is that within a decade the sophisticated will view our ignorance with disdain. In a century the average person will be able to enumerate our errors....
Doing something is not important. Doing the right things at the right times is crucial.
Allan R. Wallace
One Hundred Lenses
Based on this sample, how would you rate them?
We started with the question, "Are my one hundred lenses a body of work or an intellectual corpse?
You Made IT!!!
Write your name on the TOP PLAYERS LIST
You are strong young grasshopper.
Let the world know.
TOP PLAYERS
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Reply
- Tipi Tipi Sep 18, 2009 @ 3:57 pm
- 100 Club here he comes....look out! :) ~ Hey, thanks for reply on the thread in SquidU! You are so gracious... Another great lens...congrats! ~ I'm still working at that goal...I'm slow!
God's blessing on you,
Susie
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Reply
- Spook Spook Aug 30, 2009 @ 12:41 pm
- Yeeeeeeeehaw, congratulations on the hundred Allan. Love reading your lenses but I haven't got the best mind around, it's just that I always appreciate a great mind.Have seen something else here which I need to look at after showering. Here's to the next hundred.
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Reply
- kab kab Aug 23, 2009 @ 10:07 pm
- "We Are Ignorant - we only pretend to know" - I never feel like this quite as much as when I read one of your lenses.
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Reply
- tandemonimom tandemonimom Aug 23, 2009 @ 5:42 pm
- Congratulations on 100 lenses, and on an appropriately weightly effort for your milestone!
lazy arguments
Too many people assume an argument is valid if it supports a conclusion they endorse.
Additional Reading
On the off chance you enjoyed this...
I've written a rough draft to a novel online.
It's good reading now (August 09). It will be better in a month or two when I come back to rewrite and edit it. Each edit will improve it. I think you are a writer if you write for yourself. I did that. You become an author when you write for a publisher according to their wishes - I may never be that.
I'm writing a weekly web serial. A new story of Shirker John Leprechaun comes out every Friday. Follow a curmudgeonly leprechaun's true to life adventures. I'll send you to the prologue, it's great fun.
I hope it gets better.
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Shirker John Leprechaun esquire
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"I am no shirker, once I've been fairly trapped. Unless I can get some pixies to open this lock." With these simple words the adventure begins. Join Shirker John as he updates his true life leprechaun stories every Friday. Be sure to bookmark this...
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Complicit Simplicity - hackers end game
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forward: Complicit Simplicty: Hackers End Game is a story crafted for you. I hope that even more than enjoyment, you may find images to help craft a superior life for yourself and others. Our shared future is in your hands. Hackers, fire up your key...
Are there people that say it better than me?
Yeppers, lots of them.
This is one of many prizes you've won by conquering my game.
Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?
curated content from YouTube
If you wish to re-read, link, rate, stumbleupon, contact the author, make your own lens, and e-mail this lens to life long learners, your family, and to friends:
"Civilization's development has always been initiated by individuals balancing demands within their intimate groups against personal needs for independence and identity. Social engineers and planners always error at this point. What they endeavor is to convert humankind from small, intimate, flexible tribes to a collective with one mind (their mind of course).
They want to make all the complex human herds and packs of individuals into a single hive of drones. They have always failed, they will always fail; for outstanding individuals will continue to emerge - imagining and accomplishing exceptional goals - changing everything." - Allan R. Wallace
100% of direct income from my lenses goes to micro-finance solutions for world poverty provided by the Grameen Foundation. The Grameen Foundation is creating a rising tide of positive influence upon our world.
"If we don't believe in freedom of expression for people we despise, we don't believe in it at all." - Noam Chomsky
by BFuniv.com
Allan R. Wallace trains visionaries.
Allan is Rector of Bastiat Free University, Rector Emeritus of Junior Partner Ministries, and director of developm...
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