Ignorance: the Tyranny of Manipulation

[NOTE: I will eventually write several posts on this subject, as there are several important forms of manipulation which can only be made possible when the people are ignorant.  You will find be able to find them by going to the tab titled “Enemies of Liberty” in the header of this blog, scrolling down to “Ignorance: the Tyranny of Manipulation” and hovering over it with your curser.  Once they have been written, the additional posts will then appear to the right of the sub heading.]

“If a nation expects to be ignorant — and free — in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

–Thomas Jefferson, letter to Colonel Charles Yancey, January 6, 1816

Manipulation is a form of deception, so, to understand how manipulation is an attack on our free will, please see “Dishonesty: the Tyranny of Deception.”   Ignorance is what makes manipulation possible.  It is impossible to manipulate (and very difficult to deceive) an educated person or people.  But education does not mean schooling, and educated people know and understand this.  A person can get an education without ever attending a school.  In fact, so far as the principles of individual rights and liberty are concerned, a person can be educated without even being able to read or write.  In fact, the belief that one must go to school to be educated is actually the result of intentional manipulation.  But those with a proper education know and understand that some of the greatest minds in history were self-taught.  Therefore, it is essential that a free people be properly educated as to the fundamental principles and ideals of individual rights and liberty.  Once again, our founders knew and understood this, and they tried to help us remember this by leaving us their wisdom:

“Children should be educated and instructed in the principles of freedom.”

–John Adams, Defense of the Constitutions, 1787

 “It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives.”

–John Adams, Dissertation on the Canon and Feudal Law, 1756

“The foundation of national morality must be laid in private families…. How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers?”

–John Adams, Diary, June 2, 1778

“But of all the views of this law none is more important, none more legitimate, than that of rendering the people the safe, as they are the ultimate, guardians of their own liberty. For this purpose the reading in the first stage, where they will receive their whole education, is proposed, as has been said, to be chiefly historical. History by apprising them of the past will enable them to judge of the future; it will avail them of the experience of other times and other nations; it will qualify them as judges of the actions and designs of men; it will enable them to know ambition under every disguise it may assume; and knowing it, to defeat its views.”

–Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, Query 14, 1781

 “The best means of forming a manly, virtuous, and happy people will be found in the right education of youth. Without this foundation, every other means, in my opinion, must fail.”

–George Washington, letter to George Chapman, December 15, 1784