Steve Jobs Commencement Speach

Steve Jobs knows something about creating financial freedom. Hear his advice to Stanford University's graduation class of 2005.

Education and the "Whole Man"

Here is a disturbing quote upon which I only just stumbled.

"Two respected German historians looked out on the carnage after 1945 in search for meaning, one from within the country, where he had spent his entire life of eighty years, the other from the safer refuge of the America to which he had been driven. Both had token pride in their native culture and its achievements; both now stood in horror at the sight. The older man, Friedrich Meinecke, called the sight before him "The German Catastrophe" and in Gordon Craig's felicitous phrase offered the following explanation: "the emphasis upon power at the expense of spirit has corrupted the values of the people and stunted their political growth." 1 The younger historian, Hajo Holborn, later Sterling Professor of History at Yale, allowed more time to pass before offering a more expansive but similar analysis. While paying attention to the role social conflict had played in paving the way for Hitler. Holborn placed a major portion of the blame elsewhere:

The actual decline of German education goes far to explain not only why so many Germans voted the Nazis into power but also why they were willing to condone so many of their subsequent crimes. German education hardly dealt with the "whole man"; it chiefly produced men proficient in special skills or special knowledge but lacking not only in the most primitive preparation for civic responsibility but also in a canon of absolute ethical commitments. Although the churches provided this for a good many people, and to a greater extent within the Roman Catholic Church than within the Protestant Churches, the number of Germans who looked to the church for guidance was limited. The higher philosophy and the humanities of the period were largely formalistic or relativistic and did not produce a firm faith. In these circumstances it was inevitable that so many people fell for cheap and simple interpretations of life and history, as offered by the racists. To young people in particular this proved an irresistible temptation. 2 "(excerpted from Education, Moral Values, and Democracy: Lessons from the German Experience by Douglas F. Tobler Fn, BYU Studies, vol. 28 (1988), Number 2 - Spring 1988 .)

Add to that the following:

"The purpose of the foundation [the General Board of Education] was to use the power of money, not to raise the level of education in America, as was widely believed at the time, but to influence the direction of that education....The object was to use the classroom to teach attitudes that encourage people to be passive and submissive to their rulers. The goal was--and is---to create citizens who were educated enough for productive work under supervision but not enough to question authority or seek to rise above their class. True education was to be restricted to the son and daughters of the elite. For the rest, it would be better to produce skilled workers with no particular aspirations other than to enjoy life." (G. Edward Griffin in The Creature from Jekyll Island, (copy write 1994. Thirteenth printing: June 2002) on Rockefeller's General Education Board, founded in 1903.)

Even if Griffin were wrong is his assertions of motive, we must look long and hard at the current result. The recent financial collapse can in good measure be laid squarely on the shoulders of a populace as described in that last sentence. We are the product of our own making. The question should be what are we becoming and is that okay? History shows us where the present course will lead.

If we cannot manage to rally behind a unifying force, we will have only ourselves to blame for the inevitable.

1. Gordon Craig, Germany, 1866-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 763. See also Friedrich Meinecke, Die Deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen, Dritte Auflage (Wiesbaden: Eberhard Brockhaus Verlag, 1945), 161 and passim.

2. Hajo Holborn, A History of Modern Germany, 3 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1969), 3: 813.

Change

The following is the fourth installment of the paper on Personal Freedom.

"'Status Quo' is Latin for, 'The mess we are in.'" -- Ronald Reagan

Understanding Choice, Cause and Effect, and Responsibility lead to a singular option—accept or reject it. Some may argue that one can accept a truth but do nothing about it. I contend that inaction alone is the indicator of rejecting a thought or idea. As the ancient author said, “shew me thy faith without works and I will shew thee my faith by my works.” If a person believes that a diet will work but does nothing about it, the diet, and their belief in it, will avail them nothing. Only a belief that motivates to and includes action constitutes faith. Ergo, “…faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.”

The action that must ensue is, again, a singular option—do something, or do nothing. There is no status quo. There is only growth or decay, advance or retreat. Change is constant. Change is certain. It is the obvious result of the endless ripples affected by all of the causes that occur around us. Jim Rohn puts it eloquently when he says, “All positions are temporary.” He goes on to say that if change is inevitable, we might as well choose the change we want.

”We can also do nothing. We can pretend rather than perform. And if the idea of having to change ourselves makes us uncomfortable, we can remain as we are. We can choose rest over labor, entertainment over education, delusion over truth, and doubt over confidence. The choices are ours to make. But while we curse the effect, we continue to nourish the cause. As Shakespeare uniquely observed, "The fault is not in the stars, but in ourselves." We created our circumstances by our past choices. We have both the ability and the responsibility to make better choices beginning today. (Jim Rohn, Change Begins With Choice)

Now, suffice it to say that you have a choice: you can accept what has been presented and go on, or reject it and go back. The key question to any and every decision is;

Where will this choice lead me five or ten years down the road, and is that okay?

Look for "The Keys That Unlock the Doors" as the next installment of the paper on Personal Freedom.

Prosperity

"Our prosperity as a nation depends upon the personal financial prosperity of each of us as individuals." --George Clason

The Law of Cause and Effect: Part II

The following is the third installment of the paper on Personal Freedom.

Responsibility

In this sense, we will employ Steven R. Covey’s use of the word. He explains that all of us are “response-able” or able to respond. In other words we can choose how to respond to the situational effects of our given circumstance. Many argue that their responses are someone else’s fault—I have a hot temper because I’m an Irish red-head; It’s my parent’s fault; I didn’t have the opportunities others did; I was abused; I’m too fat, too thin; too ugly, too beautiful; too dark, too light, too short, too tall; too rich, too poor; it wasn’t in the stars; et cetra at nauseum. These people are really just arguing for their limitations—caught up in their self-justification endeavoring to excuse their feelings of fear, inadequacy, or guilt and shame for inaction. Jim Rohn said, “You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of. You don't have charge of the constellations, but you do have charge of whether you read, develop new skills, and take new classes.”

Once we recognize our “response-ability,” we are faced with the truth of our responsibility. We are responsible for what we think, feel, say, and do in response to our circumstances. Concurrently, we are responsible for the consequences pertaining to our choices. There is no shirking that responsibility. We can hide from it, ignore it, or deny it, but in the end, there it is. Every choice is a cause which in turn has its effects. It also means that if you don’t like the effects you are experiencing, you can change them by changing the causes.

“If you don't like how things are, change it! You're not a tree.” –Jim Rohn

At this point I may have lost some of you. For the idea of such responsibility strikes such fear into the hearts of some that they choose to crawl back into bed and pull the covers over their head.

Perhaps this would be a good time to consider whether freedom after all, is what you really want. The very idea! Who in their right mind would not chose freedom over captivity? Consider the illuminating social study that the fall of the Soviet Union has afforded us. A generation in economic, social, intellectual, spiritual, and personal confinement and a large majority of the population find themselves quite without the internal compass necessary to capitalize on their new found liberties. Similarly we can look the people of ancient Israel. Four hundred years in captivity and they had grown accustomed to being cared for. They were unprepared, unwilling, and unable to step up and take responsibility for caring for and acting for themselves. As such, part of the reason given for their wandering in the wilderness for 40 years was to allow a generation to die off taking their mistaken ideologies with them.

But what of the modern individual; have we not similar tendencies? How many of us are prone to shirk our responsibilities? Be honest now. Have you ever heard someone say, “It’s not my fault!” Have you ever heard anyone say that when you were the only one in the room? It’s true we are a generation of “excusiologists.” We employ billions of dollars per annum to attorneys, courts and legislators to either get us off the hook, or to hold someone else responsible. The most absurd example is the so called McDonald’s Coffee case. While the public scoffs at the plaintiff as being the fool who was unwilling to accept responsibility for dropping her coffee, the truth, as the court found, was that McDonald’s was unwilling (without compulsion) to accept responsibility for persistently preparing a beverage to a temperature sufficient to cause third degree burns and skin grafts. [1]

Such compulsive fault finding and placing blame perpetuates a subconscious life philosophy toward the same end. The results are people who, as stated above, feel that they are owed something and that they are not to blame—for anything. The often unspoken end to that line of thinking is, “and therefore I have no control.” Ironic isn’t it? Control, or self-determination is one thing that permeates nearly all of the human needs Maslow depicted in his 1943 paper.[2]

Thus we have exposed another great lie of the human condition. We tend to do things erroneously believing they will yield certain results, when the natural consequences are actually contrary to what we want. Much has been and could be written on this topic, which is, in my opinion, the very essence of insanity or at the very least dysfunctional. Suffice it to say that we as sentient beings will accept certain basic needs being gratified by others for a time. But there comes a point when our needs for esteem and self-actualization cannot be given us by someone else. Those needs are not satisfied unless we take the responsibility to do so. I submit that once one has experienced the sweet satisfaction of self actualization, he is, or should be, far less willing to allow someone else to remove from him the responsibility for the baser needs. This is nature of growing up.

It is an unspoken but commonly held belief that what we as people really seek deep down is the freedom from consequences. This fact was vocalized to my surprise by a group of youth who were responding to the question ‘What is freedom?’ Their answers feeding off one another in a brainstorming fashion eventually drew out that what they really thought freedom to be is freedom from consequences. But in the same instant they said it, they realized, as you just did, that there is no such thing. Yet that is what we humans seem to crave. Historian Edward Gibbon on the fall of Athenian democracy said,

In the end, more than they wanted freedom, they wanted security.

They wanted a comfortable life, and they lost it all -- security, comfort and freedom...

When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society, but for society to give to them...

When the freedom they wished for most -- was freedom from responsibility...

Then, Athens ceased to be free.[3]

But freedom is not free. Neither is captivity free. There is a price for both. The difference is that you often don’t know the price for captivity and ignorance until later—sometimes too late. [4]

Here is indicated the inextricable connection between personal and political freedom which will be discussed later on. The important message is the imperative nature of personal freedom and the responsibility it demands.

We all feel that we would like to do certain things and not suffer any consequences for those choices. That is the essence of our carnal natures. That is the essence of what we must master. The mastery of those tendencies is what constitutes character and maturity.

"What if you could be anything, or anybody, you chose to be? Think about it. What would you choose to be?" Nido Qubein

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[1] Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants, P.T.S., Inc., No. D-202 CV-93-02419, 1995 WL 360309 (Bernalillo County, N.M. Dist. Ct. Aug. 18, 1994) details from nmcourts.com

[2] Maslow, A. H. (1943). A Theory of Human Motivation. Psychological Review, 50, 370–96. (See Chart in Appendix.)

[3] Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1998 edition, Wordsworth Editions Limited

[4] In his book Escape from Freedom, Eric Fromm explores this social/psychological dichotomy. He writes, “The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton (mindless conformity), identical with millions of other automatons around him, need not feel alone and anxious any more. But the price he pays, however, is high; it is the loss of his self.....freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual's potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously." (Eric Fromm, Escape from Freedom, 1941, Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 115 West 18th Street, new York New York, 10011, clarification added.)

See installment four on Change.

The Law of Cause and Effect: Part I

The following is the second installment of the paper on Personal Freedom.

The concept of choice introduces us to the Law of Cause and Effect. This is a universal law that, like gravity, is always in effect whether or not you know about it or even believe it. It has been called by many names as it has been discovered and rediscovered over the centuries. It is known as the Law of Reciprocity. Ancient script calls it the Law of Harvest or the Law of Reaping and Sowing. Newton’s third law of physics is the Law of Action-Reaction, and Emerson called it the Law of Compensation.

This law requires that for every effect or result there is a cause; or as more commonly stated, you reap what you sow. Its meaning is both a word of condemnation and a word of hope. It means that you are who you are, you have what you have, you do what you do, you know what you know, and you lack what you lack because of the choices you have made. Now the tendency here for some may be to argue that they are experiencing the effects of what others have caused. This idea may be true, but refers to situational effects.

Situational Effects implies another very important principle which is, we do make choices but we cannot choose the consequences. In an extreme example, one can choose whether or not to pull the trigger. Once that choice is made, the consequences will unfold naturally and beyond anyone’s control. The consequences of that choice may be that a life ends, a person goes to prison, lives are disrupted, and the ripple effects of that choice reverberate across space and time. It is rightly said that no man is an island. Every person touched by that choice is experiencing a situational effect—they have been placed in a situation not of their choosing. (Excluding those who chose to associate with a disreputable individual or other ethereal, distant choices.) But for purposes of this discussion, we will say that Victor Frankl was in a concentration camp for reasons not of his choosing. And that the heart-break of losing his wife to an executioner was also an experience not of his choosing.

The fact is that all of us, every one with no exception, are experiencing situational effects in every moment of every day. It is a mistake to think that because we did not create the situation, we are not responsible for how we respond to it.

For the continuation, see Part II: Responsibility