“Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.” – George Orwell, 1984
A couple days ago something caused me to start thinking about my high school education on economics. Realistically, my lack of education on economics, while I was in the school system.
I remember being in grade 9 or 10 social studies and being taught about mercantilism. The lesson was that colonizers were able to exploit colonies by purchasing raw materials abroad and then processing them back in the motherland.
There is no doubt that European colonizers were guilty of many terrible things. But purchasing resources abroad, and then processing them at home is not one of them.
The idea was that if I buy a piece of wood from you for $10, then use my skills to turn it into a chair which I sell for $100, that I have somehow wronged you. Since I increased the value of something by $90, I have somehow conned the man who sold me the wood. Even though I am responsible for taking something that used to be worth $10 and turning it into something worth $100, I am somehow doing something wrong.
Some point later on, in the same class we learned about the Great Depression. My memory of high school is pretty fuzzy, but the narrative we were taught was the Great Depression kind of appeared out of nowhere. No one saw it coming until people started selling stocks. Kind of like a hurricane, you can’t say what started it. But, once it started, it was the story of labor getting together, mass demonstrations and unions fighting for the common man, then eventually the problem was solved by this New Deal thing. The government solved the problem (this is the way a lot of problems are solved in school textbooks) by employing a shit-load of unemployed men. Building roads and random stuff made the depression go away.
Only years later, when I discovered Larry Reed’s Great Myths of the Great Depression did I see a more sensical version of events.
I have had countless conversations with people who think that governments solved the Great Depression by spending a ton of money they didn’t have on projects that didn’t actually create much value for society. But because this lesson was taught, when a new financial crisis appears the government can revert the most politically advantageous solution (print money for FREE STUFF!!).
Your view of reality and of life in the present is to a large extent, grounded on things you believe about the past. Many of these lessons were fed to us as children, in schools, and are presented from only one viewpoint. The history you have learned is the foundation for many of your beliefs about the present moment. It’s time to give that foundation an inspection.
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