My First Step Towards Enlightment and the Idea of Open Source
I wanted to share with everyone my first discovery, that started the journey of expanding my mind and realizing how the world really works and how it could be. It was my first interaction with a source of knowledge incomparable to anything offered to me during my school 'daze'. A place that needed no form of identification to enter, no club membership, no special access card and to my surprise, completely free!
It was my first ever introduction to 'open source' and had the greatest impact on increasing my understanding of a society of free and responsible individuals. A one stop shop for countless topics that, despite its age, are currently re-shaping the world we live in today.
With 1,720 titles, 477 authors, in nearly two dozen categories, it is a place where all its contents are based on the ideas of individual liberty, limited constitutional government, free markets and peace.
The Online Library of Liberty was my introduction to an enormous wealth of knowledge. Spending years pouring over its contents and reading from many different authors, subjects and debates, I had stumbled onto a place where I could finally increase my critical thinking of the world around me.
The site is extremely well organized and offers guides for suggested reading lists on key topics as well as their OLL reader, which is an anthology of selected chapters and extracts taken from the most influential books in their library. The anthology cuts your learning time dramatically while removing the problem of 'where do I start'?
You can instantly download a PDF, ePub or even Kindle, or just read it online.
Unlike the education I received, even through college; where the focus is on ingesting and regurgitating like a Pavlovian puppet on a string waiting for his paper reward, I have now become a critical thinking student of a free society, without fear of becoming a social outcast for challenging the status quo.
These brave authors, some of whom have penned magnificent works, were banned by governments, made me re-think everything!
For me, it was the epiphany I was searching for that assisted me in breaking free from the thought police. For example: The works of the Austrian School of Economics changed my outlook on money, debt, investment and savings. A store of wealth for me is far different than the thoughts of that young man years ago. Gold and silver are much more to me than just jewelry. Debt has become the true sense of the FOUR letter word. And that of FIAT... well, Voltaire said it best, "Paper money eventually returns to its intrinsic value...Zero."
It's funny how you bump into things that resonate with you, then completely changes who you are and then you start seeing it all over the place. For me, it meant that I was on the right track. Even though this was a time before Youtube, as it grew it spawned a horde of new electronic authors spreading the word of those written long ago, with new and exciting perspectives that pushed me even further.
Similarly to those authors of banned books years ago, today's video authors took brave steps in vocalizing the truth whose time has come. They have built a strong voice and a huge following, then found their ad revenue taken away, much like the spoiled child who takes his ball away and stops the game and goes home, when it doesn't go his way. We can't expect to play with their outlets and not expect them to take it away when it doesn't go their way either.
But to those who persevere, I offer you the solace of knowing that you are in good company.
I suggest you to take a look around the Online Library of Liberty and download a few e-Books for some summer reading. The conceptual roots of Augur, the decentralized prediction market platform built on Ethereum, can be traced back to Friedrichs Hayek's "Use of Knowledge in Society", which can also be found there for your reading pleasure, in its entirety or as part of the anthology, it's just ten pages and gets right into the best of it.
-Who knows, it just might create that spark in you to create the next great idea!
