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Your Own Path

In the January 19th Daily Freedom, “Against The Flow,” I quoted Ayn Rand:

“Men have been taught that it is a virtue to agree with others. But the creator is the man who disagrees. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to swim with the current. But the creator is the man who goes against the current. Men have been taught that it is a virtue to stand together. But the creator is the man who stands alone.” [Ayn Rand, For The New Intellectual - The Fountainhead, “The Soul Of An Individualist”]

If you do the same thing everyone else does, you are not being a creator, your being an “also-ran,” just another of the sheep following the bellwether. It is very easy to be convinced what you are doing is truly your own chosen path, but in may cases, a little thought will reveal you are just doing the “accepted” thing, and exactly what everyone else is doing. Here are three examples of what most people accept as the correct path toward accomplishing what they want in their lives:

  1. Education, for most people means seeking a University degree of some kind.

  2. Producing, for most people means seeking employment by some company. A career usually means a life in some corporate industry.

  3. Social life, for most people means joining and belonging to some “society,” or “organization.

There are many more accepted methods and practices in life that people blindly follow, but these three are the most common I think. Not only are they methods which are simply following the crowd, they are all traps that limit one’s individual freedom.

My last Daily Freedom, “An American Individualist” is an example of one individual who did not follow the accepted path to achievement, and I hope it will also be an inspiration to others to seek your own way, and be certain it really is your own way.

Another Path

I intend to address all three of the examples of accepted methods of achievement, but here I am going to address the question of education.

Almost anyone can, “get an education,” if by education what they mean is some kind of diploma, or what Karen De Coster calls, “credentials,” in her excellent article, “Freedom Loves Autodidacts. The State Demands ‘Credentials’.” This idea of an education is the exact opposite of what an independent individualist means by education. The individualist is not interested in anyone else’s approval or sanctioning. What the independent individualist means by education, is the process of acquiring whatever knowledge he wants or needs to achieve whatever he seeks in life.

However or wherever one is educated, if they have truly learned anything it was as an autodidact—everyone is self-taught. Everything you learn you must learn using your own mind and effort to understand and integrate into the whole scheme of your knowledge. No school, no university, and no course of any kind can do it for you.

Since, as an individualist, you intend to think for yourself and will not accept anyone else’s authority as the basis for what you know is true, academia is perhaps the worst place for an individualist to seek knowledge, since all of academia today is steeped in postmodernism, and cultural Marxism. Attempting to do serious study in any university today will be a constant battle against institutionalized anti-intellectualism.

Endless Resources

If we reject the accepted route to education, how do we obtain the knowledge we want and need? There are almost endless resources on almost any subject or area of knowledge one might be interested in.

Karen De Costa mentions two excellent resources in her article:

One is the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Open Courseware (OCW). There is no degree, or certificate, or any kind of credit for OCW courses—there is only the knowledge. There are over 2000 courses offered in all the following areas:

The other good resource is the Khan Academy with over 2000 video courses in math, the sciences, history, and finance.

Both of these resources are free, except for the students own time and effort, of course. There are many other resources, but perhaps the best are books. The most successful autodidacts in history, Thomas Edison, for example, acquired all their knowledge through the study of books, and of course, the world itself.

[This Daily Freedom will have a follow up with more self-learning resources.]