 So it's always a highlight of our year to present the Gary G. Slarbom Prize for Lifetime Achievement and Liberty in the Tradition of Ludwig von Mises. Many great people have received this award, another great one, of course, to receive it tonight. But let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Slarbom first. He's Managing Director of Palisar Bay Capital Management, LP, an investment management firm in Wayne, Pennsylvania. He's previously a Managing Director of Morgan Stanley and also a first Chicago Investment Advisors. Before that, he was Professor of Finance at Purdue University. Dr. Slarbom is an active supporter of the Mises Institute, serves on the Investment Committee of the Institute. We've much benefited from his advice, am I right, Dad? He's a longtime member of the Board of Trustees of his Alma Mater Co-College and was recently elected a Life Trustee. He serves on the Board of the Church, Farm, School and Independent Church-related School for Boys in Exton, Pennsylvania. And he's a member of the Board of the Independent Institute. He serves on the Investment Committee of both those institutions. He also serves on the Board of the Pennsylvania Trust Company, located in Radner, Pennsylvania. Dr. Slarbom received his undergraduate degree from Co-College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. We're also pleased that his wife, Ruth Ann, could be with us tonight. So, Gary, please come up and everybody, please join me in welcoming Dr. Gary Slarbom. Well, it's always one of the highlights of my year to come and do this particular thing. And we're very pleased this year that the recipient is Butler Schaefer. Butler is a graduate of the University of Chicago Law School, teaches at Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles, is the author of a number of books including Calculated Chaos, Institutional Threats to Peace and Human Survival, and Restraint of Trade, the Business Campaign Against Competition, 1918 to 1938. Does that continue? Boundaries of Order, Private Property as a Social System, The Wizards of Osmaendias, Reflection on the Decline and Fall. He is joined tonight by his lovely wife, Jane, his daughter, Heidi. Do you guys at least want to raise your hand? And their granddaughter, Kalista. Yay. So, Butler, if you'll come forward. Let me take off your glasses. So, it's my pleasure, Mr. Schaefer, to award you the 2012 Gary G. Slarbom Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty. Let me see this fabulous medal. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. The idea of that kind of a commitment to what we're all interested in that I find so encouraging. It's kind of an interesting period of time that we're in. And given that the topic of this weekend session was history, I wanted to make some comments and tie all of this together in that sort of a context. Before doing so, I had a quotation, pardon my reading it this way, but I had written it in ballpoint pen ink, which is the only way I can read it from this angle. I'm a great believer in a lot of informal systems that operate in our world, spontaneous order being one of them, which very often is simply a reflection of our inability to identify causal systems of order that work within conflict systems. But also serendipity. Sort of a serendipity fan. So before we left Burbank, just where we live, for this trip I grabbed a book that I had recently purchased that I wanted to just get into reading and it was a biography of Joseph Priestley, one of the major contributors to the scientific age who was around in the 18th century. And so I was on the plane when I got here, I began reading this and it was so amazing to see how what they were talking about in this biography fit in so well with what we're going to be doing here. But I had one particular quotation that I liked is about Priestley's involvement with an 18th century British group centered in London called the Honest Whigs. And these are people who were pretty much had very much of a libertarian bent. They really didn't like the state for very fundamental reasons. And there's some reference made to the operation of the 18th century coffee houses and how these became sort of centers for discussing and fleshing out a lot of these ideas. And Boswell reported on this. He said, quote, much was said this night against the parliament. I said that as it seemed to be agreed that all members of parliament became corrupted, it was better to choose men already bad and so save good men. I thought that some of you might want to keep in mind when you're trying to figure out which of two evil forces are less evil, if you can imagine that. It's kind of like trying to choose between emphysema and lung cancer. But my comments are really going to be related to an experience I had in the second grade of government schools. My wife taught me some time ago and said stop calling them public schools, call them government schools. That's what they were. And you're flooding my wife, I hope. If by the time I'd gotten to the second grade, we were well into World War II. We got into it in World War I. I've been around for that long. And I can remember in the first grade, we learned all the appropriate things, including the salute that we gave to the Pledge of Allegiance. And I've had people, no, no, no, it was never like that. It was like that. They then changed it after the war started. They figured probably not too good an idea to be using the same salute that the Nazis were using. But by the time I got to the second grade, I had a teacher, kind of a nice gal, and we got into a discussion in the subject of geography. And the question came up as to why oceans were green. And she told me, told the class that the reason for that is it could be related back to the Boston Tea Party. When these revolutionaries dumped tea into the ocean, it turned the oceans green. Here I was, I'm going to keep mine in second grade. I was seven years old, something like that. And, you know, I was growing up in the Midwest. I'd never seen an ocean. I didn't know what they looked like. And so it seemed plausible. I'm all right. Take your word for it. But the next year, I was in the third grade. In some place along the way, my third grade teacher offered a more, they say, sensibly based explanation for why ocean water was green. And at that point, I guess you could say that was when I became introduced to revisionism. And I suppose I could trace back that time, although I didn't think about it at the time, but in retrospect, recalling Mark Twain's observation, never to let education interfere with your learning. And this whole notion of revisionism, and there's been some talk about that. I've got a good deal of presentations on that today. And to me, revisionism is simply a synonym for learning. That we go through a process of revising our prior understanding of the world from infancy on. I've noticed this with small children, you know, when they're just crawling around on the floor and they'll pick up a pen and maybe take this pen and put it in their mouth. And you have Aunt Edith over there in some place who says, ah-ha, look out, baby's gonna eat that pen, but baby's not gonna eat the pen. What baby has found out is that there are certain things that people put in their mouths that taste good and they like to repeat that kind of a pleasure. And so upon realizing that the pen has no taste, baby throws it aside. So baby has really learned two things in this process. One, pens don't taste good. And secondly, the world is filled with a lot of Aunt Ediths who are going to interfere with the learning process. So we have this need for learning from... It's a basic epistemological question. One that my dear friend, the late Jim Martin, and I used to talk about when we were working together out in Colorado, how do we know what we know? That is the question that I think we too often skip over. We just assume certain things. We assume that the circle of learning that we have acquired through our past experiences, whatever they may be will tell us the appropriate, the truthful, the accurate state of nature, what the world is really all about. And I have one of these circles of understanding. You have a circle of understanding. Everyone in this room, everyone in the world has some circle of understanding. On that, we are in agreement. The difficulty arises from the content of our circle of understanding. What you might think of as reflective of the real world, I might not. And the problem that arises here is that, contrary to what some of you may think, and I can get into a discussion with you about that later, we don't see the world objectively. We see the world subjectively. When I look out at anything, what I am seeing is the world being interpreted through the lenses of my prior experiences. This doesn't mean that when we see something subjectively, what we see is wrong. It just means it's very personal. That what I see being filtered through these lenses and what you see being filtered through your lenses may end up being something completely different. This gives us to the question, these lenses of understanding, how are they fashioned? Where do we get them? Where do they come from? Well, the problem has been that, for the most part, we have had our lenses ground by the institutions that have seen to it that they want to take over the content of our thinking. The state, of course, is one classic example. School systems, churches, corporations, universities, and so forth have these expectations of what we as children and as adults should know in order to serve the interests of the people who put these expectations in motion. Yvonne Illich once made the statement I've always found helpful, that school is the advertising agency which makes you believe you need the society as it is. And this can be applicable to any system. The problem is, does our conditioned thinking comport with reality? And the sub-question on that is, how would we find out? I use this approach in my law classes with my students and it just drives them up a wall. You know, if you want to find out what the world is really like, how would you find out? Are you going to ask me? Are you going to ask some other authority that you have in your life? Are you going to try and figure this out on your own? And one of the things that I have discovered in recent years has come about through the study of both chaos and complexity, which by the way is a field of inquiry that libertarians ought to spend more time trying to understand. Because chaos and complexity remind us that complex systems are unpredictable. And what is more complex than human society? Maybe the human brain, but certainly human society. Meaning that when we presume to make predictions about future events, and this is what of course the state does in all of its economic and social and other planning, to be able to do that requires that we have what chaos scientists call a sensitive dependence on the factors that are going to affect the outcome. We have to be able to analyze, be aware of every possible interactive influence that's going to produce some result. And we can't do this. A clear example of this is trying to predict the weather. You can do it pretty much on a day-by-day basis, trying to do it on a 10 or 12-day basis just leads you almost nowhere. And complex systems have too much variability. Too much uncertainty. And we can never know the identity of all the factors that are at work on any given situation. As I've suggested to my students, try predicting what's going to happen to you between now and a week from today. I mean, something specific. Don't just say, I'm going to go to class, I'm going to do this, I'm going to get up and have breakfast, and so on. Be very specific. And you just really can't do it. And so what we often observe in a very complex world is what we see as a lot of randomness and disorder. If we look at something and can't find the pattern in it, we think, well maybe the universe is really just very disorderly after all. And what I think we're really seeing is that because of our limited understanding, we are unable to see the interconnectedness of all of these underlying factors. They're in there. They're in there working. We don't see it. Because we don't see it, we assume it is not there. I think this is one of the things that the computer revolution has helped to do. The computer revolution has really opened up this whole field of chaos and complexity to some analysis. And suddenly you start seeing patterns that before just look like a lot of random foolishness. And I think this holds true, not just in terms of trying to predict the future, which we all would like to be able to do with some degree of certainty, but it also applies to our efforts to unravel Ariadne's thread of history. In other words, going back in time, going back in history is equally fraught with problems associated with being able to identify all the factors that were really at work here. I have for some time been to the view that civilizations are created by individuals. And by individuals, I mean not just isolated individuals, but individuals interacting with one another in a variety of ways. And one of the questions I think that we need to focus on is what are these factors that have worked to provide our past, to really enfold a system of order into our lives that we don't see? Why did the Industrial Revolution, for example, arise in Manchester and not Marseilles? Well, one explanation has been, well, Manchester was a source of a lot of coal and coal was used to fire the factories there and maybe that's the answer to me, that's part of it. I also remember the suggestion made by one person who said, well, the nice thing about Manchester, the city of Manchester had no government. There was no city government in Manchester. Well, maybe that's a factor, maybe the lack of political structure and coal combined. Why did the Computer Revolution center in the Silicon Valley instead of Cleveland? What factors come together to provide all of this? Because if civilizations are created by individuals and by networks of individuals, I think they're also destroyed by collectives and I think that's what our civilization is going through right now. Kierkegaard I think was right when he said that life must be understood backward but must be lived forward. In other words, we have to live in a forward fashion based upon what we know from the past. I remember having that experience one time years ago driving back in the wintertime, driving back from Chicago to Nebraska. It was essentially just a light snowstorm and by the time we got about 30 or 40 miles west of Chicago, it turned into a really bad blizzard and you couldn't see much of anything ahead of you. I remember just looking for these little reflector things on the side of the road just to make sure I was still staying on the road but there was a sense of I had to keep going into a very uncertain future and the windshield wipers were going like this trying to keep the windshield clear but I had to keep going forward but I knew that if I slowed down or stopped I would get hit from the past and I thought this is kind of a perfect metaphor for life that what went before us can cause all kinds of difficulties if we don't accommodate them to what we're doing in the present. This raises the question, why should we care about such matters? Why should we care what the background of our history was about? Is it just a form of amusement? Some people have done a wonderful job on this. Gorba Dahl wrote some interesting novels incorporating both historic fact and pure fiction into his story. Our own Becky Akers in her current novel Hailstorm has done this. She's taken some historic fact, woven it into some interesting fiction and to some extent we get amused by this, we're entertained by it but do we get any deeper understanding about it? One of the groups that comes along and tries to influence us in this regard has been the established order that spent all of its time and spent our time trying to condition us in a particular point of view or particular points of view the way the world should operate. And they're very uncomfortable with someone coming along and upsetting the apple cart. And so people who try to do this, people who say, well, no, this isn't quite the way all of these things happen. They happen in some other fashion. They get labeled as, in one form or another, very undesirable characters. We are, quote, revisionists. And there's nothing that historians probably find more threatening, at least in an academic sense, than to be labeled a revisionist. That means what? You're trying to change the mindset that we work so hard to condition you into accepting. And if suddenly you find that the vertically structured model of society doesn't work as well as the horizontally networked version of society, well, we've got to do something about that. I mean, I think this is what the whole war on terror is about. It's really about a war to preserve the vertically structured systems that the established order has created. I think if our lives are to be both materially and spiritually fulfilling, we need all of the truth that we can get. We certainly see this in our settings other than broader political settings. If you want to operate a business, you can't kid yourself, can you? You can't fool yourself into saying, well, this is wishful thinking will be nice. Wouldn't it be nice if suddenly, we had three or four million dollars of new business come in the front door? It doesn't work that way. Wishful thinking doesn't overcome the harsh facts of reality. Dealing with matters of your health, you want all the truth about that that you can get. Also, with regard to our relationships with other people. And we find that the universe doesn't really cooperate with us that much. The universe operates according to its own ways of doing things. Whether we agree with it or not doesn't really matter that much. One of the things that we learn from the study of history, and I think is present with us today, is how liberating the free flow of information can be. The free flow of ideas, the free flow of communication. You see this with the internet today. But we also saw it a few centuries back when Gutenberg kind of upset the established order with his invention of movable type. And what did we get after Gutenberg? Maybe not just a simple, direct cause and effect relationship, but we did get things like the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Scientific Revolution, and so forth. And all of this came about as people were better able, more freely able to communicate and exchange information with each other. The whole process of brainstorming that goes on. I don't know if any of you use that when I was in law practice, we used to use brainstorming quite a bit. Which means that you and I and three or four other people can sit down and individually try to solve a problem. But if we brainstorm the problem, which is we talk with one another about this problem, how it might be resolved, we're going to come up with a far greater number of possible solutions to be examined than any of us could come up with just individually. And I think this is something that the framers of the Constitution had shared this kind of an awareness in drafting the scope of the First Amendment. The First Amendment, if you read it closely, essentially says that we're going to free up every aspect of people's search for an expression of opinions, truth, religion, whatever it may be, and for people to be able to freely get together, to associate with one another, to engage in these creative methods, creative systems. With his invention of movable type, Gutenberg helped to deflate the institutional monopoly on understanding. And all of a sudden, you get more and more people that are in a position to say, hey, wait a minute, I've read something else. For the contrary, I don't think that that is right. The problem you get into, again with the institutional order, is it can't stand this. Once we have been conditioned into accepting a particular point of view about the way the world should be organized and who should be doing what and so forth, you can't maintain that kind of a static, rigid system when other people are running around questioning it. When the vertical structure, when the top down, I will tell you what I want you to know. And you see this throughout our culture, don't you? Although it's, fortunately, is diminishing. You see it in the media. We will tell you what we want you to know. I have a friend of mine, Jeff Regenbach, who used to work as a newscaster at one of the major news stations, radio stations in Los Angeles. And he told me one time, I was always tempted to go on the air and say, good morning. And here are the lies your government would like to have you believe today. The lies, the contradictions, and other distortions upon which state power in particular depends proves to be somewhat embarrassing to the institutions. George Orwell, I think, did a wonderful job of showing the problems associated with that. You know, that you can just announce some contradiction in reality that other people could see. You know, freedom is slavery. War is peace. Ignorance is strength. All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others. And when these contradictions begin to accumulate, the authority on which the systems that engage in this activity rely begin to diminish. And I think that's really where we are, particularly with the internet. It's not just the internet. The internet is, I think, the dramatic example of that, but it's really just a lot of the technology of cell phones and iPads and iPods, I should say, and other mechanisms by which we can more freely communicate with one another. I've found it telling my students, for the first time in human history, each of us has the capacity to communicate with every single human being on this planet. All seven billion. You have that capacity, provided two things exist. One, every person on the planet has a computer and is hooked up to the internet. And secondly, that they're interested in listening to you. We haven't had that before. We now have this system of everything is sort of horizontally networked. And the activity that goes on there is so quick. It's just like this. States are really slow to act, and by the time they get around to finding out that two or three or four, or 10 or 15 or 1,000 or 10,000 people are communicating some idea it's over and done with, and the state is still trying to figure out how to respond to it. I've often thought that maybe one area that we need to maybe encourage is, or one practice, is the use of flash mobs. I assume most of you are familiar with flash mobs, and they've been used largely in an entertaining factor. Suddenly a couple hundred people converge on a railroad station and start singing Do Re Mi. You've probably seen that on YouTube someplace, and that's cute. But what if it started being used in a more creative fashion? That suddenly 10,000 people are going to converge on City Hall and just say, no, we don't want any more of this. Goodbye. By the time the cops show up, there's nobody there. Then they go someplace else. I've seen this operate as well in the area of something called cash mobs. Are you familiar with cash mobs? Where somebody said, well, let's just all converge on Sally's candy store in Brentwood or wherever it might be and buy some candy. And so at 2 o'clock, everyone shows up at this candy store or a shoe store or whatever it may be, a restaurant. And they go there, do business with somebody who probably appreciates that additional business, and then they go home. It's all over with. It's not an institutionalized thing. We have the food trucks, the food truck industry. You all familiar with the food truck industry? I had one of my students in my informal systems of order seminar at the law school last year did a paper on the informal nature of what was called a Korean barbecue food truck. The existing restaurants didn't like the idea of these food trucks just suddenly appearing someplace in a neighborhood at 8 o'clock in the evening, suddenly you've got 300 or 400 people that are wanting to buy some Korean barbecue and they buy what they want to buy, get back in their cars and go home, the food trucks take off. And by the time the cops arrive from the restaurant owner having called in a complaint, it's over and done with. And there's just so much of this that it's just really been quite untapped of how the informal order really works. Let's say those who pursue truth invariably upset or at least call into question the conditioned thinking that the established order has worked so consistently to create. After all, wasn't the Constitution created as a consensus of we the people? That's what it says. Wasn't the Civil War conducted to free the slaves? That's what our teacher told us. Weren't the antitrust laws enacted to protect the common man from big corporations? Sure. Didn't FDR end the Great Depression with his New Deal program? Yeah. Didn't the Japanese carry out a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor? Oh, yeah. Didn't the Boston Tea Party turn the oceans green? Haven't these and so many other established truths that we're supposed to continue to reflect become so firmly settled in our minds that to deny them is the equivalent to denying the multiplication tables? How on earth can you think something like that? The state cannot abide the unrestrained search for truth. And those who would reveal its secrets along with those who openly question the myths upon which state power depends must be conditioned and controlled, I should say, rather than already been conditioned and dealt with in some punishing manner. And this is really all that the government campaign against Bradley Manning and against Julian Assange has been about. It's interesting that when we talk about these two men whose only crime, the only crime that these people were engaged in, leaving aside the relationship between Manning and Assange is simply an alleged relationship and I don't know, I don't have any more information about that than I get from the media. But history reminds us of the impact of how the free flow of information can have very upsetting results. I'm reminded of how in 1772 a member of parliament was able to get to Benjamin Franklin some private letters from the British governor of Massachusetts and Franklin sent them on to a friend of his for whatever use he thought he might be able to make of them. And of course these letters got published. They became well known, well read throughout the rest of the colonies and these letters revealed plans that the British government had for further restricting the liberties of the American colonists. And when I think about that event in history I'm reminded of what Julian Assange and Bradley Manning are going through right now. I ask, is there anyone here who believes that the United States once Assange extradited to Sweden and then sent to the United States keeping in mind Assange is an Australian, he's not even an American because his condom broke during consensual sex? Do you think anyone really cares about that? Do you think anyone in the government really cares about that? The states need to condition the public in its definition of truth. Also explains why those who question such versions are quickly labeled paranoid conspiracy theorists. I once had a colleague in my law school ask me if I thought 9-11 was a conspiracy. I said, what else? What else could it be? Somebody conspired, whether it was these 17 or 19 Al Qaeda members or whether it was someone in the U.S. government or someone, some other group. Somebody had to have done this, unless of course you want to take the position that 9-11 was nothing more than a couple airline pilots having a bad flying day. And if that's the explanation then who conspired to give us a different story? He didn't understand that. What are you getting at? I reminded him that of the quotation I've always loved it from the late Chris Tame who said, I am not interested in conspiracy theories. I am interested in the facts of conspiracies. Something that I think as libertarians and as historians we ought to keep in mind. By the way, I have to comment for Ron's benefit here. I remember watching a program a few weeks back on C-SPAN and a group that was kind of left of center group that was giving a presentation back in New York City on the Bradley Manning trial. And these people were closely involved. They were attorneys for Bradley Manning and associates of Bradley Manning. And they were discussing how the trial had gone and all of this. And this one guy who was, I guess, sort of the main organizers of Manning's efforts said, yeah, when the hearing was over we went outside and here were the Ron Paul people waiting for us. I just started crying. I really did. That broke me up. And he said, I just took me a long time. I couldn't figure out why. Why would the Ron Paul people care about Bradley Manning? And he said, it suddenly dawned on me that we were all just interested in the right to speak the truth. And I think that's really where we are. In our politicized world truth has been replaced by public opinion polls. Let's share the ignorance. And of course, public opinion polls both reflect and also reinforce the conditioned thinking upon which state power depends. And anyone who knows anything about public opinion polling knows how the way in which you formulate the question can lead to completely different results. The campaign against revisionism against the effort to continue to improve the quality of our understanding to improve the quality of the questions we bring to bear on events in our lives. This campaign is designed to keep us not only us, but our children and our grandchildren in a state of ignorance because all learning is grounded in the past we need to constantly defend the pursuit of what transpired in the past. Not just because our revisionist friends are nice people, they are. I love some of these guys. They're nice characters just to be around. But to guide our thinking for the future the idea that the established order whether manifested as political, academic, or media realms should be able to put fences around the pursuit of truth is destructive of the conditions that are essential to life in its complex world. We require our actions to be as much in conformity with reality as is possible given the fact that chaos and complexity caused so much of nature to hide its secrets from us. To war against revisionism is to war against learning against the mind's efforts to understand reality and for a species that is characterized by and dependent upon conscious intelligence necessary for functioning in a world laced with uncertainty the effort to restrict the questions that may be asked really is to war against life itself. So, thank you. I had one other quote here. I wanted to read, I wasn't able to work it in but it came from this same biography of Joseph Priestley. It was a quote by Priestley. Keep in mind this is the 18th century. So the greatest success in political, I'm sorry, the greatest success in politics seldom extends farther than one particular country and one particular age whereas a successful pursuit of science makes a man the benefactor of all mankind and of every age. Something to keep in mind as we move from political definitions of reality into those factors that can be demonstrated to be of some universal nature. And I think that certainly applies to our understanding about economics as well as to many other factors. So anyway, thank you again.