Many times, when I start to explain an idea that is new to someone, for example, the idea of unschooling, or of cryptocurrency, they will say something like "that will never work", or they misunderstand the idea to an extent to which it almost seems that they putting in effort to misunderstand, rather than welcoming the new information. This is especially common in developed countries. A Monopoly on Ideas My hypothesis is that this is caused by governments having a monopoly or near-monopoly on education. Many governments provide schooling that is funded by tax money or national debt, rather than directly by the students or their parents. Of course, there are private schools too, but these are also regulated by governments, and so they rarely stray too far from the curricula and methods which are used by the state, methods which are ultimately based on military means, and (at least originally) to military ends.



A Distorted Market The government has caused this severe distortion in the marketplace of ideas, where people have a certain way of thinking beaten or repeated into them, where they even get angry when someone suggests another idea, such as homeopathy, or how a society might function without government, or the idea that the earth is flat, or the rope hypothesis.