In this post you will learn what the point of a Liberal Arts Education really is and how to make it profitable. This is done through merging sound business principles with the wisdom derived from a solid foundation in the humanities. Before the twentieth century, these two studies were always interrelated and inseparable. Men and Woman who knew how to merge the two became the most productive members of society. Today, those precepts still hold true. By diligent application, you too can make a liberal arts education into a machine of wealth.
The Liberal Arts (also known as the Humanities) comprise many lesser subjects such as history, theology, literature and philosophy. The knowledge of these subjects ennobles the soul and are among the loftiest achievements of human civilization. Despite this however, employment and earning capacity of this intense and important education is disproportionately low for some reason. This is due to a single major flaw in how Liberal Arts majors are taught to think. They paid no attention to the content!
I wonder how it could be that an English major who has documentation to show he or she has studied Robinson Crusoe could have forgotten the precepts taught. Robinson Crusoe is at it’s heart a book about economics. It’s about a man who is stranded on a desert island and learns how to provide for himself in a society of just himself; that is micro economics at its finest. The book is a blueprint for providing for yourself. Replace stabbing crabs with making sells, and you have a top tier book on business.
Perhaps the English major read it and payed attention to how the native character Friday is mistreated and misrepresented, but they missed the other lessons of the book. Waldon, by Henry David Thoreau is another such book. The English student pontificates on the glory of nature, when half the book is about eking a living without the walls of society! A book is like a prism: it refracts whatever light you shine through it.
The first step to making a liberal arts education productive is to pay attention to and apply the principles and ideas about business. How did the industrial revolution create men like Vanderbilt? How could you use the Internet revolution to do the same? How did Plato become so famous? These are the questions left unanswered by a liberal arts education.
In former days, the liberal arts were used to make money. Thomas Jefferson owned one of the largest libraries in America and was a talented violinist, yet he also owned a profitable Virginia estate. Shakespeare owned the Globe playhouse he preformed in. Leo Tolstoy was an aristocrat, and had an estate and means to live off. People of those days knew how to read a book and extract the business lesson out of it.
They knew how to make a living for themselves in a world that didn't have the luxuries of motors, processors, or oxygen tanks. They weren't just businessmen or just intellectuals; they were both. They did so by means of a simple formula: true idea plus application equals wealth. Many people without degree or status have been able to use this formula to advantage. Steve Jobs, who didn’t have any advanced education or certification was able to gather true ideas and apply them. Books, and philosophy, and language, and everything else on the Liberal Arts catalogue are littered with true ideas that can be applied for a profit.
False ideas however are always lethal. To much of what is taught in the humanities is false and calculated to destroy. Communism was popular among American intellectuals in the eighteenth century as a political solution to solve inequality, but when it was applied across several continents it destroyed what it touched. False idea plus application equals poverty. What we see among liberal arts majors today are false ideas applied, and that is why they are poor.
Find truth, and the journey to wealth and wisdom has been commenced. The more truth applied, the greater the incumbent wealth. This is difficult advice, because it isn’t “apply here, get this degree, talk to this person, put this in your resume” it is rather, read the book you feel you should read, find an idea, test it, and make adjustments. For me it was read Beowulf, learn the true principle of nobility, and apply it by getting a job while I was in school. I adjusted by learning what to do with the excess income which was to invest it.
Wealth and wisdom are within reach, especially to the liberal arts major. Who else knows so much about what literature and history has to offer? The regular business man knows nothing about Machiavelli, but the Humanities Man knows places where great truths can be found. Very great at that, if he can recognize them.
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