Teach Our Children to Become Socrates

 

Teach Our Children to Become Socrates

For most of human history, knowledge has been power largely because knowledge was difficult to obtain. Governments had archives, experts, and intelligence agencies. Newspapers had reporters, editors and printing presses. Universities had libraries and scholars. Corporations had lawyers, engineers and researchers. The ordinary citizen had comparatively little.

Then came the internet. Suddenly, an enormous portion of the world's information became available to almost anyone, but we discovered something important: access to information is not the same as understanding it. If anything, the internet demonstrated just how easily human beings can surround themselves with information that confirms what they already believe. Conservatives can find conservative sources. Liberals can find liberal sources. Conspiracy theorists can find evidence for conspiracies. Almost anyone can type a belief into a search engine and find someone, somewhere, telling them they are right. The problem was no longer simply access to information; it was critical thinking. Now artificial intelligence may change that equation again.

A Research Staff in Your Pocket

I have developed a habit when reading the news.

When I encounter an article that doesn't quite smell right, I don't simply dismiss it because I dislike the newspaper or disagree with the writer. I copy the article and give it to AI. Then I start asking questions. 

• What are the actual factual claims in this article?
• Which claims can be independently verified?
• What are the original sources?
• Did the headline accurately describe what happened?
• Is a statistic technically correct but presented without context?
• What information did the writer leave out that might materially change the reader's understanding? 
• Where does the writer move from reporting facts to interpreting them?
• What would someone who disagrees with this article say?
• And perhaps most importantly: What evidence would demonstrate that my own interpretation is wrong?

Something remarkable has happened. A process that might once have required hours in a library, access to experts, or an entire research staff can increasingly be performed by an ordinary person sitting at the kitchen table in seconds. Think about what that means. The printing press dramatically reduced the cost of distributing knowledge. The internet dramatically reduced the cost of accessing knowledge. Artificial intelligence may dramatically reduce the cost of analyzing and interrogating knowledge. That could be revolutionary. No, that is revolutionary. 

But Don't Trust the AI Either

There is an enormous danger here, however. We must not replace one unquestioned authority with another. AI is not an oracle. Artificial intelligence learns from human-produced information, which contains bias, mistakes, propaganda, conventional wisdom, political assumptions, and sometimes outright falsehoods, so AI can be wrong. It can give too much weight to supposedly authoritative sources. It can mistake widespread agreement for proof. It can overlook contrary evidence. It can repeat a claim simply because thousands of other sources have repeated it, and perhaps most dangerously, it can be wrong while sounding remarkably intelligent.

After using AI to challenge an article, we should challenge the AI.

Ask it:

• What are the weakest parts of your analysis?
• What assumptions did you make?
• Could the sources you relied upon themselves be biased?
• Give me the strongest evidence contradicting your conclusion.
• Separate what you have actually established from what you have merely inferred.
• Now reconsider your original answer.

That is where AI becomes something much more valuable than an electronic encyclopedia. It becomes a partner in critical thinking.

Don't Ask AI What to Think

This is where I believe our schools have an extraordinary opportunity. We should not teach children to ask AI, "What should I believe?" That would be educational malpractice.

Instead, give students an article representing one side of a controversial question and tell them to interrogate it.

• Identify the claims.
• Find the evidence.
• Locate the primary sources.
• Identify loaded language.
• Look for missing context.
• Construct the strongest opposing argument.
• Then challenge that argument.
• Then challenge the AI's analysis.

Finally, ask the student, "What do you think, and why?"

Now we are teaching something far more important than memorizing the approved answer for Friday's test. We are teaching young people how to think.

The Socratic Machine

More than 2,400 years ago, Socrates understood something we still struggle to teach. Wisdom doesn't begin with possessing all the answers.

• It begins with questions.
• What do you mean?
• How do you know?
• What evidence supports that?
• Does your conclusion necessarily follow?
• Are you contradicting yourself?
• What assumption are you making?
• What would prove you wrong?

Those questions remain extraordinarily powerful because they can be directed at anyone.

• A politician.
• A newspaper.
• A professor.
• A corporation.
• A preacher.
• A political party.
• Your parents.
• Your friends.
• Yourself.
• And now, artificial intelligence.

That last one matters. The goal should never be a population that stops saying, "The newspaper says it's true," and begins saying, "AI says it's true." We would have accomplished very little. We would merely have changed authorities. The objective should be citizens who respond to every authority with the same two words: Prove it.

An Informed Population Changes the Balance of Power

Another consequence deserves discussion. Institutions have historically possessed an enormous informational advantage over ordinary citizens. Governments, political parties, corporations, universities, and media organizations possessed resources that individuals simply could not match.

• AI begins to narrow that gap.
• A politician can cherry-pick a statistic.
• A newspaper can omit an inconvenient fact.
• A corporation can carefully word a press release.
• An activist organization can present only the evidence supporting its position.

But now with AI, an ordinary citizen can respond, and here is where the hidden figures pulling the strings of government and the media begin to get nervous. 

• Show me the underlying data.
• Find the original report.
• What did they leave out?
• Give me the argument from the other side.
• And do it in seconds.

That changes something fundamental. It does not mean institutions are always dishonest. It does not mean experts should be ignored. And it certainly does not mean AI is always right. It means institutional authority no longer has to be accepted merely because the ordinary citizen lacks the resources to investigate it. That is healthy for a free society.

Knowledge Is Power—But Only If We Know What to Do With It

We spend enormous amounts of time worrying about what artificial intelligence will do to our children. Perhaps we should spend more time thinking about what it could do for them. Imagine a generation that grows up instinctively asking for evidence.

• A generation comfortable discovering that its first conclusion was wrong.
• A generation that understands the difference between fact and interpretation.
• A generation suspicious not merely of other people's biases, but of its own.
• A generation that understands that disagreement is not evidence of stupidity or evil.
• A generation possessing, in its pocket, a tool capable of helping it investigate almost any question imaginable.

That could create something extraordinarily powerful: An informed citizen.

Our greatest educational opportunity with artificial intelligence, therefore, isn't teaching children how to use AI to find answers. It is teaching them how to use AI to ask better questions, and then teaching them to question the AI itself.

Don't teach our children to trust artificial intelligence.

Teach them to become Socrates. Tell the AI you use to question you as if AI is Socrates. In this manner, we become more like Socrates. AI is now a tool and not a crutch. 

 

History is Not a Search for Saints

 Tell Both: History Is Not a Search for Saints

Humans are a funny bunch.

We have an extraordinary ability to take a complicated human life, select one part of it, and decide that the part explains the whole. We do it with people. We do it with history. We even do it with the Bible.

Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson lived only 39 years. Today we overwhelmingly remember approximately the final two years of his life—the years in which he became one of the Confederacy’s most famous generals. Those years matter. They cannot and should not be erased. Jackson fought for the Confederacy. Slavery was deeply intertwined with the creation of that Confederacy. Jackson himself owned enslaved people.

Tell that.

But don’t stop there. Before Stonewall Jackson became “Stonewall,” there was Thomas Jackson: an orphaned boy, a West Point graduate, a veteran of the Mexican-American War, a professor, husband, Presbyterian deacon, and a man who organized religious instruction for Black people in Lexington, including enslaved people. Those facts do not absolve Jackson of anything. They complete him. Therein lies the problem with much of our modern historical debate: we seem increasingly unable to hold two truths about the same human being simultaneously.

 

The James Blair Test

I live in Williamsburg, Virginia, where we recently had our own argument over historical memory. James Blair Middle School bears the name of the Reverend James Blair, founder and first president of the College of William & Mary. Blair served as William & Mary’s president for an extraordinary 50 years, from 1693 until his death in 1743. He was a minister and an enormously important figure in establishing education, religion and civic institutions in colonial Virginia. He also enslaved human beings and participated in building institutions intertwined with slavery.

Tell that.

But again, don’t stop there. A campaign arose to remove Blair’s name from the school. Mary Lassiter became one of the prominent advocates for changing it. Members and supporters of the NAACP were also present in the public debate. I watched the meetings myself as a Williamsburg-area resident. They spoke, participated and supported the effort to remove Blair’s name. The former James Blair campaign and the current NAACP litigation involving Stonewall Jackson and Turner Ashby school names in Shenandoah County should not simply be declared organizationally connected without evidence.

There is plainly an intellectual connection worth examining. Mary Lassiter has publicly expressed support for the Shenandoah County NAACP’s position on social media. More importantly, both controversies present essentially the same philosophical question:

When does historical accountability become historical reductionism?

James Blair provides an especially useful test because nobody can dismiss the question by saying, “But he fought for the Confederacy.” Blair died in 1743. The Confederacy would not exist for another 118 years. Yet the historical judgment eventually reaches him too.

Why?

Because participation in slavery becomes the controlling fact. The fact considered sufficiently grave that the rest of the man’s accomplishments can no longer justify putting his name on a public school.

I understand that argument. I simply question its limiting principle. If slaveholding alone disqualifies James Blair from public commemoration, what do we do with George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe?

If unacceptable racial views are enough, the list grows considerably longer. If serious personal moral failures are enough, longer still. Eventually we must answer a question.

How much wrongdoing is necessary before everything else a human being accomplished ceases to count?

Benjamin Franklin Wasn’t a Saint Either

Consider Benjamin Franklin. I greatly admire Franklin. Yet the deeper I have read about his life, the more complicated the polished portrait on the hundred-dollar bill becomes. His relationship with his wife Deborah troubles me. He spent years away from her in England. His relationship with his Loyalist son William became bitter and never truly recovered. Franklin had an illegitimate son. He possessed weaknesses, vanities, and contradictions just like other human beings. Imagine teaching Franklin this way:

Benjamin Franklin failed people who loved him. End of lesson.

Everything in that sentence might have some basis in history, and the lesson would still be historically absurd. We would have erased the scientist, printer, writer, inventor, diplomat, statesman and revolutionary because we decided one portion of his life was sufficient to explain the whole. We could do this forever. Thomas Jefferson wrote words about human equality that changed civilization while owning human beings. Ulysses S. Grant became the general who defeated the Confederacy and later defended the rights of freedmen, yet had his own connection to slavery before the Civil War. Abraham Lincoln preserved the Union and issued the Emancipation Proclamation while expressing racial views at various times that Americans today would reject. Martin Luther King Jr. transformed the moral landscape of America while being an imperfect husband and imperfect man.

None were saints. Neither was Stonewall Jackson. Neither was James Blair. Neither is Mary Lassiter, and neither am I, and neither are the people demanding that these names come down.

Tell Both About Our Opponents, Too

That last sentence matters. It would be easy for someone on my side of this argument to look at Mary Lassiter or members of the NAACP and conclude that their motivation must be anger, resentment, hatred, ignorance or revenge.

Upon reflection, however, I don’t know that. I cannot see inside another person’s heart and Christianity tells me to be exceedingly careful when I pretend that I can. Mary Lassiter herself lived through an important piece of the history we are discussing. She graduated from James Blair High School in 1969 as schools were being integrated in 1973. Her family participated in the civil-rights struggle in Williamsburg. That history does not automatically make her position correct, but it deserves to be told.

Tell both about her, too.

Otherwise I would be committing precisely the offense I am accusing others of committing against Jackson and Blair: taking one position held by a complicated human being and allowing it to define the whole person. If I want grace for the historical figures I defend, intellectual honesty requires that I extend grace to the living people with whom I disagree. That doesn’t mean surrendering the argument. Quite the opposite. It means attacking the principle instead of the person, and the principle I question is this:

Should one grave moral failing become the controlling fact by which an entire human life is judged?

The Bible Doesn’t Hide the Bad Parts

This question is particularly interesting to me as a Christian.

I sometimes quote Matthew 7:1: “Judge not, that ye be not judged.”

Upon reflection, even there I must be careful. I cannot pull a single verse from the New Testament and claim to have captured the whole of Christianity. Someone else can turn a few pages and find passages concerning judgment, righteousness, accountability and recognizing people by their fruits. Scripture has to be read as a whole.

Maybe human lives deserve something similar. Look at the people Scripture gives us. Moses killed a man. David committed adultery and arranged for another man’s death. Peter denied Christ three times. Paul persecuted Christians. The Bible does something remarkable with those uncomfortable facts.

It leaves them in.

Scripture doesn’t sanitize its heroes, but neither does it reduce Moses to the killing, David to the adultery, Peter to the denial or Paul to the persecution. It tells both.

There is sin.

There is accomplishment.

There is repentance.

There is failure.

There is redemption.

There is grace.

There is the whole human being.

Perhaps historians, and the rest of us, could learn something from that. I certainly think Mary Lassiter could. 

Remembering Is Not Worshiping

Keeping someone’s name on a building does not necessarily mean endorsing everything that person ever believed or did. Remembering is not worshiping. We should teach children that Jackson fought for the Confederacy, but we continue the story.  Tell them slavery was central to the secession crisis. Tell them Jackson owned enslaved people. Then keep talking.Tell them about the professor. Tell them about his faith. Tell them about the Sunday school he established for Black people. Tell them about the contradictions. Tell them historians disagree about how those facts should be understood.

Tell them James Blair enslaved people. Then tell them he spent half a century building William & Mary.

Tell them Jefferson owned slaves. Then hand them the Declaration of Independence.

Tell them about Franklin’s failures. Then explain what he did in Philadelphia, Paris and London to help create the United States.

Tell them about King’s human failures, including his adultery. Then play the speeches and teach the children what his movement accomplished.

Because history shouldn’t be a competition between people trying to manufacture spotless heroes and people searching for sufficient evidence to manufacture irredeemable villains. History should be an attempt to understand human beings.

Where Does It End?

Virginia is covered with the names of morally complicated people.

Washington.

Jefferson.

Madison.

Monroe.

Blair.

Fairfax.

Jackson.

The names of kings, revolutionaries, slaveholders, soldiers, politicians and imperfect human beings cover our counties, rivers, universities, schools and towns. If moral perfection becomes the standard for historical recognition, eventually we will run out of names, and if we establish a principle under which one sufficiently objectionable fact can invalidate an entire lifetime, we should at least have the courage to apply that principle consistently. That means not merely Jackson. It means Blair. Then Jefferson. Then Washington.

Then wherever the principle logically leads. Perhaps instead of continuously renaming America, we should continuously teach America. Put another paragraph in the history book. Put another exhibit in the museum. Put historical context beside the name if necessary. Explain what the person did wrong. Explain what the person did right. Allow young people to encounter the uncomfortable truth that someone can accomplish extraordinary good while participating in something terribly wrong. That isn’t weakness. That is history.

Grace

And perhaps somewhere in this argument there is room for something increasingly uncommon in American public life.

Grace.

Grace doesn’t mean pretending slavery didn’t happen. Grace doesn’t require Mary Lassiter to change her mind. Grace doesn’t require the NAACP to abandon its argument, and grace doesn’t require me to surrender mine.

Grace permits us to say:

I believe you are wrong without believing you are evil.

Imagine what would happen to American politics if we relearned that sentence. Changing a school name cannot change what happened in 1861. Restoring one cannot change it either. Removing James Blair’s name cannot undo colonial slavery. Keeping it cannot justify slavery. No School Board, judge, activist or columnist possesses the power to rewrite what happened. We possess only the power to decide how honestly we remember it.

Christianity has spent two thousand years reminding us of something we continually forget. Human beings fall and sometimes terribly. Yet Christianity also teaches that failure need not constitute the entirety of a human existence. Maybe history doesn’t need more saints. Maybe it doesn’t need more villains either.

Maybe it needs something much simpler.

Tell the accomplishment.

Tell the failure.

Tell the virtue.

Tell the sin.

Tell the disagreement.

Tell the contradiction.

Tell the whole human being.

Tell both.

America's Favorite Couple

If you have found your way to my blog and opened this page, then you have found an event my wife and I are participating in. You can find this on Facebook, just search for "America's favorite couple."This event is to raise awareness of many nonprofits that help the homeless. It's a fun contest, really, and whether you win or lose, feeding the poor is a worthy cause, and you can donate to it. Please take a moment to copy and paste the link below and vote. 

https://americasfavcouple.org/2026/johnson-039-s-2

 

The Morality of Double Standards

 

The Morality of Double Standards

Political disagreement is healthy in a free republic. Moral inconsistency is not. One of the defining characteristics of a just society is that it applies the same moral standard regardless of who commits the act. Murder is wrong whether the victim is conservative or progressive. Oppression is wrong whether it is carried out by a Western democracy or a Middle Eastern dictatorship. Freedom of speech is either a principle or it is merely a privilege extended to those we happen to agree with. Increasingly, however, public outrage appears less tied to universal principles than to political identity.

When conservative commentator Charlie Kirk was murdered while engaging in public political discourse, some voices immediately searched for explanations that diminished the tragedy. Rather than beginning with the simple proposition that political violence is unacceptable in a free society, the discussion often shifted to whether his views somehow invited such hatred. Contrast that with the treatment of activists who deliberately confront law enforcement during protests. When encounters end in injury or death, the narrative frequently centers on victimhood, systemic injustice, and institutional blame. The same event, loss of human life, is filtered through an entirely different moral lens.

Part of the answer lies within an intellectual tradition that has become increasingly influential in universities, media, and activist organizations. Rather than viewing society primarily as a collection of individuals possessing equal rights and equal moral worth, this tradition interprets history as a struggle between oppressors and the oppressed. Moral judgment becomes inseparable from power.

Under this framework, actions are evaluated less by what was done than by who did it. If an action weakens institutions viewed as oppressive, it is often excused or minimized. If the identical action strengthens those same institutions, it is condemned as immoral. Justice becomes conditional rather than universal. This helps explain why outrage often appears selective in international affairs. When civilians suffer in conflicts involving Western democracies or their allies, condemnation is immediate and often justified. Yet the brutal repression of Iranian citizens by their own government has frequently received far less sustained attention from many of the same activist movements. The victims are no less human. The suffering is no less real. Yet moral urgency often appears unequal. That inconsistency deserves examination.

Thinkers such as Herbert Marcuse openly questioned the classical liberal idea that all viewpoints deserve equal tolerance. His concept of “liberating tolerance” argued that tolerating certain ideas could perpetuate systems of domination. Michel Foucault viewed political struggle largely through the lens of power, even expressing early sympathy for the Iranian Revolution before its authoritarian character became undeniable. Whether one agrees with these philosophers or not, their influence is difficult to deny. Their ideas continue to shape portions of contemporary academic and activist thought.

The danger arises when political objectives replace universal moral principles. If morality depends upon which group holds power, then justice becomes impossible. Every act can be justified if committed by the “right” people against the “wrong” people. Violence becomes resistance. Censorship becomes protection. Intolerance becomes tolerance. History repeatedly demonstrates where that path leads.

The American experiment was founded upon a radically different proposition: that every individual possesses inherent rights that do not depend upon race, class, religion, or political affiliation. Those rights belong equally to friend and opponent alike. They are not granted by the government nor withdrawn because one’s ideas are unpopular. A free society cannot survive if moral standards are applied selectively. The true test of principle is not whether it protects those we admire. It is whether it protects those with whom we profoundly disagree. Universal principles are difficult precisely because they require consistency.

Double standards require only politics.

The Quiet Trade: Freedom, Incentives, and the Inner Break Point

The Quiet Trade: Freedom, Incentives, and the Inner Break Point

There is a pattern in human behavior that we rarely notice while living within it. We do not usually give up freedom all at once. We trade it, piece by piece, for things that make life easier, safer, or more comfortable. Most of the time, we do not even realize we have made the trade. This is not because people are foolish. It is because people are human that we seek safety, we value convenience, and we pursue efficiency. When those incentives are presented to us clearly, consistently, and repeatedly, we respond to them. That is not ideology. That is behavior.

The Quiet Trade. History offers example after example of this quiet exchange. After moments of crisis, people accept greater oversight in exchange for safety. At the time, the decision feels reasonable. It often is. With the rise of social media, people willingly traded privacy and attention for connection and convenience. No one forced them. The trade was voluntary and nearly universal.

In the workplace, tools have evolved to increase efficiency. Today, artificial intelligence allows a person to do in a day what once took a week. This is progress. But every gain carries a question. What are we gaining and what are we quietly losing? When a student uses AI to solve a problem without understanding it, the tool becomes a substitute rather than a support. When social media rewards outrage, outrage increases. When convenience is rewarded, effort declines. These are not moral failures. They are predictable outcomes.

Incentives Shape Culture. Behavior is shaped by reinforcement. What is rewarded is repeated. Culture, in this sense, is self-governing. Not because it votes on its direction, but because millions of individual responses to incentives create patterns over time. People seek security. Institutions are quick and all too ready to provide security. Dependence grows, and control becomes easier to justify, not through conspiracy, but through accumulation.

Subculture Rational, Macro Destructive: What is rational within a subculture can become destructive at the level of the larger culture. A behavior that makes perfect sense in a smaller context can produce unintended consequences when repeated across an entire society. On social media, it is rational to seek attention. At scale, that same behavior fuels division. In politics, it is rational to promise benefits. At scale, those promises can become unsustainable. In daily life, it is rational to choose ease over effort. At scale, discipline erodes. Nations rarely decline because their people act irrationally. They decline when individually rational choices produce results no one intended.

The Illusion of Choice: Behavior is shaped by environment, reinforcement, and conditioning. If you reward outrage, you will get more outrage. If you reward dependency, you will get more dependency. If you reward convenience, you will get less effort. But if the environment explains everything, why do two men in the same conditions walk different paths?

The Interior Break Point: There are moments in a man’s life that cannot be easily explained by conditioning alone. Moments that are quiet, unseen, and unmeasured. A moment when a man decides: I do not want this life anymore. No teacher is present. No structured plan. Just a refusal. Discipline comes later. Structure comes later, but the decision comes first. This is the interior break point.  History is poured once, but each generation decides whether it will treat it as hardened concrete or soften it into something more convenient. If the meaning of history becomes fluid, then its lessons weaken, and when lessons weaken, drift accelerates.

The Role of the Individual: Cultures do not correct all at once. They are corrected slowly and often invisibly by individuals who hold to standards that do not shift with convenience, but this correction is not guaranteed. If incentives become too strong, correction may not come until crisis forces it. Artificial Intelligence and the Next Acceleration: Artificial intelligence offers efficiency, answers, and convenience. It can improve work. It can also replace effort. For the first time, we are not just outsourcing labor. We are beginning to outsource thinking. A culture does not collapse because people act irrationally. It collapses when rational decisions accumulate into unintended outcomes, and it corrects only when enough individuals say "No." A culture changes one decision at a time, made in places no one else can see.

The Crossroads of Choice

 

The image is inspired by one of the most enduring legends in American music.

It depicts Robert Johnson sitting alone at a lonely Mississippi crossroads late at night, guitar in hand. According to blues folklore, Johnson met a mysterious stranger at such a crossroads, who tuned his guitar and, in exchange for his soul, granted him extraordinary musical talent. Although there is no historical evidence that this ever happened, the story became inseparable from Johnson's legacy because of his astonishing skill, his mysterious life, and his death at just 27 years old.

The crossroads legend symbolizes more than a supernatural bargain. It has become a metaphor for the price of greatness, ambition, sacrifice, and the difficult choices that define a person's life. Whether viewed as myth, metaphor, or Southern folklore, it helped make Robert Johnson one of the most influential figures in the history of the blues, inspiring generations of musicians from Eric Clapton and Keith Richards to Jimi Hendrix.

The picture captures that legendary moment, not as documented history, but as one of America's greatest musical myths, where talent, mystery, and the unknown meet at a lonely crossroads under the moonlight.

 

The Crossroads of Choice

 

Over the years, I have spent a great deal of time observing people. Not as a psychologist or philosopher, but as a husband, father, worker, employer, and student of life. The older I get, the less certain I become that any single explanation can account for why some people succeed while others struggle. We are often told that the environment determines outcomes. Certainly, the environment matters. Poverty matters. Education matters. Family matters. Opportunity matters. I have no trouble acknowledging any of that.

But I have also seen too many exceptions. I grew up poor. By all accounts, I should have chosen the easier road like my father before me. I worked from the age of ten delivering newspapers, mowing lawns, and doing whatever jobs I could find. Later came night school, learning a trade, and building a career. Looking back, many of those decisions involved choosing discomfort today for a reward that would not arrive for years.

Why? I honestly do not know. Economists call it delayed gratification. Psychologists speak of self-control. Philosophers debate free will. Yet none of these explanations seems entirely satisfying. Recently, I began thinking about the difference between present value and future value. At every crossroads in life, there appears to be a choice. One road offers comfort now. The other offers the possibility of something greater later. The second road usually requires sacrifice, patience, discipline, and a measure of uncertainty. There are no guarantees.

Yet some people consistently choose the "future value over the present value." I struggle to understand why. I always thought, I am no one special, I am average, yet if I can do it, make a good life, well, anyway I can. Consider work, when I was growing up, it was common for young people to have jobs. We delivered newspapers, bagged groceries, swept floors, and mowed yards. The pay was not much, but perhaps the money was not the most important lesson. We learned that effort preceded reward. We learned that if we wanted something, we often had to wait and work for it. I had to mow 50 lawns at $2.00 per lawn at age 10 to buy a $100 bicycle. I had to deliver newspapers every day, seven days a week, for two months to buy that $100.00 bike. Today, many of those opportunities no longer exist or are far less common. Whether that matters, I do not know. But I wonder if those small experiences helped teach delayed gratification at an early age.

Then I think of my own family. My wife and her brother were raised by the same parents, in the same home, under the same roof. Yet their outcomes could not be more different. My wife worked throughout high school, became disciplined with money, attended college, and built a successful life. Her brother struggled repeatedly and lives in poverty today. My sister babysat at the age of 16, I think, but I do not remember her ever having a job when we were kids, and we are only 18 months apart in age. Today, she is poor, making bad decisions all her life, and I have made it on a high school education to millionaire status, plus some. Same parents, same environment. Different outcomes.

Then I think of my twins. Both were born premature. My son Jacob struggled more as an infant and spent his entire K-12 education under an Individualized Education Program. My daughter Abigail developed more easily in her early years. Different challenges. Different paths. Yet both graduated from college. Both became successful adults. Both worked from high school onward. Both had summer jobs in high school, and I made sure of that. Again, the simple explanations begin to break down. Environment clearly matters. Family clearly matters. Opportunity clearly matters. But they do not seem to explain everything. This leaves me with an uncomfortable conclusion. There appears to be something else at work. I call it choice. Not because I can define it. Not because I can measure it. Not because I fully understand it. In fact, the more I study it, the more elusive it becomes.

We can measure income, test scores, attendance, crime rates, and educational attainment. We can measure almost everything surrounding a choice. We cannot measure the choice itself. At some point, every person arrives at a crossroads. Present value or future value. Comfort now or sacrifice now for something greater later. Why one person turns left while another turns right remains one of life’s greatest mysteries. I do not claim to have the answer. I merely offer the observation. Perhaps the greatest question is not why some people fail. Perhaps the greater question is why some people willingly choose hardship today in pursuit of a future they cannot yet see.

 

That is the question I continue to wrestle with.

Human Conditioning: The Room, the Key, and the Choice

The Room, the Key, and the Choice

Human beings can be conditioned.

That statement is no longer controversial. Pavlov conditioned dogs to respond to bells. Skinner demonstrated reinforcement patterns. Bernays showed how mass persuasion could shape public opinion, desires, and behavior. Modern advertising, social media algorithms, political messaging, and institutional culture all operate on variations of the same principle: stimulus, reinforcement, response.

The deeper question is not whether humans are conditioned.

The deeper question is whether humans can become aware of the conditioning itself.

Most people never see the room they live in because the room feels normal. Culture becomes invisible precisely because it surrounds them completely. A fish rarely notices water. A person rarely notices the assumptions, incentives, fears, rewards, and narratives shaping his behavior because they arrive disguised as common sense, morality, entertainment, belonging, or survival.

Yet some people eventually sense something is wrong.

A contradiction appears. A wall cracks. The room darkens. The person begins asking questions that others no longer ask. Why do people react predictably to certain words? Why do entire groups move emotionally in sync? Why do societies repeat the same cycles under different names? Why does fear shape behavior so effectively? Why do comfort and approval seem to govern so many decisions?

Perhaps awareness begins there.

But awareness itself creates another problem.

If awareness brings freedom, what sustains freedom afterward?

History is full of intelligent and highly aware people who used their understanding not for wisdom, but for manipulation, domination, and power. Awareness alone does not create virtue. In fact, awareness without moral conscience may simply produce a more dangerous human being — one who understands the machinery of the cave better than everyone else inside it.

This may explain why older moral systems emphasized self-mastery so heavily. Stoics spoke of discipline over impulse. Religious traditions warned against pride, envy, greed, and appetite. Classical republics stressed civic virtue. Freemasonry teaches continual moral refinement. Different languages, perhaps, but all wrestling with the same reality: freedom collapses without internal restraint.

This is where the road divides.

One path leads toward conscience, discipline, humility, responsibility, and truth-seeking. The other leads toward appetite, ego, manipulation, tribalism, and power. The frightening part is that awareness itself does not determine which road a person chooses.

This raises the hardest question of all.

Is the choice truly free, or is even the chooser conditioned?

Perhaps there are two forms of conditioning:

• the unconscious conditioning that shapes us before awareness,
• and the consciously chosen structures we adopt after awareness.

Maybe no human being fully escapes conditioning. Maybe the real difference is whether we remain unconscious participants in it or become conscious stewards of what shapes us.

In that sense, freedom may not mean escaping all influence. Freedom may mean becoming aware enough to examine competing influences and deliberately choose which principles, disciplines, and truths will govern one’s life.

Not perfect freedom.

Not absolute independence from environment or biology. Perhaps something morally meaningful nonetheless.

The older I get, the less certain I become that I have solved this puzzle. Yet one thing feels increasingly true: once a person truly sees the room, the walls are never completely invisible again. Perhaps that awareness, incomplete, uncomfortable, and burdensome as it may be, is the beginning of wisdom itself.