Changing the World One Mind at a Time.

I learned a lot at FEEcon this past weekend, and although I won’t be able to repeat all of it, here are some more thoughts. 

At one of the breakout seminars, I heard from Yaron Brock, who talked about freedom, economics, and truth. Although I don’t agree with him on everything, I still enjoyed the seminar.

I really appreciated him talking about how we are freer than ever. Within that same vein, though, economists can’t measure happiness and that sometimes throws off our counting for freedom, success, and exchange. To give an example: Say you pay for an amusement park ticket, and you have a personal account you give your receipts to. All you have to give her is the ticket to show that you received something in exchange for your money, unless you tell her how fun it was, or have pictures, they would have reason to say that you didn’t get enough value from your purchase. The problem? Besides the obvious value marketed by a theme park, they can’t directly measure your happiness or add a certain value to it on the books. But I digress. Changing minds is about more than politics its allowing others to see the value of things in the world that you can’t attach a price tag to, and allowing that to guide their mindset.

One of my favorite quotes from him was, ” You can’t eat for me, you can’t think for me.” Although it’s important to teach others to do these things, you can’t do it for them. You can teach one person at a time quite effectively, that’s because it’s really a conversation at that point, a chance to teach the other based on the questions that one student has and how they’re responding to the lesson at hand.

Know that there is value in talking to groups of many sizes and trying to teach large amounts of people but it’s far from the only way to change minds.