At some point, we stopped believing we were capable of determining truth for ourselves.  We began looking outward.

At face value, this post may not seem like it is connected to what I’ve been bringing up lately on my blog and Instagram. However, they are completely tied together. In this post, I will do my best to lay out that connection.

What does my doctor say? What does my child’s teacher say? What does the textbook say? What does the government recommend? What does the expert say? What does the research say?

But perhaps the more important questions are: Who determined what made it into that textbook? Who decided what research was worth funding? Who established what qualified someone as an expert? And who funded the institutions that eventually became responsible for determining what we accept as truth?

To understand how deeply centralized our thinking has become, we have to understand how we got here.

The Centralization of Education

Public education existed in America long before Rockefeller money entered the picture. But education was once considerably more decentralized, with far more authority residing within families, communities, churches, local schools, and locally governed systems.

Then enormous concentrations of private wealth began pouring into education.

John D. Rockefeller established the General Education Board (GEB) in 1902. Between 1902 and 1965, the GEB distributed approximately $325 million toward education, with money reaching schools, universities, teacher education, medical education, and agricultural and rural education programs.

Money does more than build buildings. Money determines what gets funded, which programs have the resources to expand, which methods are replicated, and which institutions acquire authority.  And standardization followed.

Curriculum became increasingly standardized. Teachers became increasingly credentialed. Educational administration became professionalized. Children’s abilities became increasingly measurable through standardized assessments.  Or so we were taught to believe.

The history of standardized testing is particularly revealing.  During World War I, psychologists used mass intelligence testing to evaluate and classify enormous numbers of military recruits. Then that model was brought directly into education.  In 1919, Rockefeller’s General Education Board provided the National Research Council with $25,000 specifically to prepare and standardize group intelligence tests for school children in grades 3-8. The resulting tests were adapted from tests administered by the U.S. Army during World War I. That history is documented today by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Think about that progression:

Mass testing of soldiers became mass testing of children.  The underlying concept was extraordinarily powerful:  Measure everyone using the same instrument. Compare them. Categorize them.Determine where they belong.

Today we rarely question the premise. Children sit for standardized assessments, receive numerical scores, and those numbers become indicators of whether they are “ahead,” “behind,” “proficient,” or successful.  But perhaps the greatest accomplishment of centralized education isn’t the standardized test or even the standardized curriculum.  It is convincing us that education itself belongs to an institution.

Parents teach their children from the moment they are born. We teach them language, relationships, morality, problem-solving, curiosity, communication, and how to navigate their environment.  Then a child reaches school age and suddenly many parents believe they are no longer qualified to educate them.  Education must happen inside a designated building.  The teacher must possess the appropriate credentials and “experience.”
The curriculum must be approved, the progress must be measured, and success must be documented.  A parent who successfully taught a human being to speak suddenly believes they are incapable of teaching that same child to read.

We didn’t merely outsource education.
We outsourced our confidence in our ability to educate.

And once that happens, the institution doesn’t simply determine what children learn. It begins determining what society considers knowledge.

Medicine Goes Through Its Own Transformation

At roughly the same period, medicine underwent its own transformation.

In 1910, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching published Abraham Flexner’s Medical Education in the United States and Canada – what we now call the Flexner Report.  Flexner examined medical education throughout the United States and Canada and proposed a sweeping reconstruction of medical training around rigorous scientific, laboratory, university, and hospital-based education.

The report completely reshaped American medical education, but arguably for the worse.  Then Rockefeller philanthropy poured enormous amounts of money into medical education, universities, biomedical research, and public health. Rockefeller’s own archives identify medical schools as one of the major areas receiving General Education Board funding.  Because of this, medicine became increasingly standardized, credentialed, institutionalized, and specialized.  And as a result, science became increasingly siloed.

Physics became physics, chemistry became chemistry,  and biology became biology. 
Each developed its own specialists, journals, departments, credentials, institutions, and accepted bodies of knowledge.  While specialization can create extraordinary depth of knowledge, what happens when we become so specialized that we stop seeing the organism as a whole?

Human biology does not recognize academic departments.

Your mitochondria do not stop interacting with physics because you walked into a biology classroom.  Light does not cease affecting chemistry because your physician specializes in neurology.  Water, electromagnetism, metabolism, hormones, circadian rhythms, environment, and mitochondrial function do not operate independently simply because our institutions study them independently.

Nature never separated them.  We did.

Then We Centralized Food

The same Rockefeller fortune that became extraordinarily influential in education and medicine also entered agriculture.

In 1943, the Rockefeller Foundation formally partnered with the Mexican government on an agricultural program focused on increasing agricultural production. The Foundation itself traces the roots of the Green Revolution to this work and the agricultural research that followed.  Agriculture increasingly became something that could be scientifically optimized, standardized, industrialized, and scaled.  Higher-yield crops, greater production, more technology, more inputs, and more scalability.  This model then spread internationally.  Food was increasingly transformed from something inherently tied to geography, season, soil, local ecosystems, and community into something that could be produced and distributed on an industrial scale.  And once food becomes an industry, another variable inevitably enters the equation: Profit.

From Agriculture to the Food Pyramid

Then we arrive at nutrition.

By the 1970s, food wasn’t simply an agricultural issue. It had become a matter of economic policy, government policy, public health, and national nutritional recommendations.  In 1977, the federal government published Dietary Goals for the United States.  In 1980, USDA and HHS published the first Dietary Guidelines for Americans.  Then, in 1992, USDA introduced the Food Guide Pyramid.  At the enormous bottom of the pyramid? Bread, cereal, rice, and pasta: 6-11 servings every day.  At the tiny top? Fats, oils, and sweets: use sparingly.  And then something remarkable happened.  The pyramid entered classrooms. It entered educational material, doctor’s offices, food packaging, and advertising.  Eventually nobody needed to ask where it came from. It was simply the gold standard.  And that may be the most important part of this entire story.

When Institutional Knowledge Becomes “Truth”

Centralization doesn’t require someone standing over every classroom, laboratory, farm, or doctor’s office dictating what everyone must believe.  There is a much more powerful mechanism.  Determine what qualifies as legitimate knowledge in the first place. Fund the institutions > Fund the research > Establish the standards > Train the professionals > Determine the curriculum > Publish the textbooks > Create the credentials > Create the measurements > Repeat it for generations.

Eventually the institutional standard becomes indistinguishable from truth.

Then we begin repeating it ourselves:  “This is what science says.”  “This is what doctors recommend.” “This is what children need to learn.” “This is what a healthy diet looks like.” “This is what successful people do.”

But underneath every one of those statements is a question we rarely ask: According to whom?And perhaps more importantly: How did they become the authority?

Money Became the Mechanism of Control

Overall, Rockefeller and other powerful private fortunes used money to centralize and standardize public education, medicine, science, food, and agriculture. Their funding determined which institutions expanded, which research received resources, which educational models could be developed and replicated, and which ideas acquired institutional legitimacy.  You don’t have to personally write every textbook or design every medical treatment to control the direction of a system.  Control the funding and you control what gets built.  And once those institutions are established, the system begins perpetuating itself.  Universities train the experts > Experts conduct the research > Research informs government standards > Government standards inform curriculum > Curriculum trains the next generation > The next generation enters the same institutions…and the cycle repeats.

Money > Institutions > Standards > Education > Accepted Knowledge > Behavior

And somewhere along the way, we stopped asking whether what was profitable, scalable, standardized, and institutionally accepted was necessarily the same thing as truth.

We Have Centralized More Than Health

Once you recognize the pattern, it becomes difficult not to see it everywhere.  We don’t simply outsource medicine, we outsource our health.  We don’t simply outsource schooling, we outsource education.

We outsource food production. We outsource financial security.  We outsource childcare.
We outsource our understanding of science.  We outsource our careers to credentials.  We outsource our judgment to experts.

And eventually we outsource something much more valuable: our ability to think independently.

Ask what makes someone educated and we point to a degree.
Ask whether a child is learning and we point to a test score.
Ask whether someone is healthy and we point to laboratory numbers.
Ask whether something is scientifically true and we ask whether an institution recognizes it.
Ask whether someone is qualified to teach a child and we look for credentials rather than asking whether they actually understand the child or the subject.

We have become so accustomed to centralized systems that many of us struggle to imagine functioning without them.

Decentralization Does Not Mean Finding a New Authority

But there is another trap.  Rejecting one centralized authority only to blindly follow another is not decentralized thinking.  If you stop saying:
“The government says it, therefore it must be true” and replace it with: “My favorite podcast says it, therefore it must be true,” nothing fundamental has changed.  You have simply selected a different authority.  Decentralized thinking requires something much harder.

It requires you to take the time to read the original source.  Ask who funded the research.  You must learn to understand the mechanism, compare competing explanations, look at incentives, always question assumptions, observe your environment, learn how your own body works, and allow evidence to change your mind. And overall, we must top assuming credentials automatically confer truth.

As Dr.Jack Kruse regularly says, “never trust, always verify.”

Nature Was Never Centralized

Perhaps the greatest irony is that the system we are attempting to understand – human biology – was never centralized to begin with.  Nature does not operate according to government guidelines.  The sun rises whether or not a medical association releases a position statement.  Our circadian clocks respond to light whether or not that interaction appears in a health textbook.  The seasons change, temperature changes, food availability changes, light changes, and our bodies respond. Nature has always been dynamic, interconnected and profoundly contextual. Yet we have attempted to understand it through standardized recommendations designed for millions of people simultaneously.  We’ve completely standardized the individual and then wonder why the individual stopped understanding himself.

Maybe the Greatest Success of Centralization Is That We Don’t See It

The Food Pyramid is easy to question today because we have watched nutritional recommendations change. But imagine being a child when it hung on the classroom wall. It wasn’t presented as one hypothesis about nutrition. It was simply what healthy eating was.  That is the power of institutionalization.  Once something has passed through enough universities, government agencies, textbooks, classrooms, medical offices, and professional organizations, we stop asking where it originated.

We inherit it as truth.  And that extends far beyond food.  The fact that so many of us instinctively look toward centralized institutions to determine how we should eat, learn, work, heal, raise our children, and understand our own bodies demonstrates just how deeply centralized thinking has become.

No one has to force us to think centrally anymore. We do it automatically.

Perhaps the way forward isn’t another institution, another expert, another standardized system, or another person telling us what to believe.

Perhaps it begins with learning how to ask questions again. We must learn how to investigate, observe, connect disciplines that institutions have separated, educate our own children, understand our own biology, and look at nature before looking at a “guideline.”

Centralization taught us to outsource authority. Decentralization requires us to take it back.

Primary Sources & Further Reading

Rockefeller and Education
The Rockefeller Archive Center documents the establishment of the General Education Board and its extensive educational philanthropy.
Open source

Rockefeller Funding of Mass Intelligence Testing in Schools
The Smithsonian documents the GEB’s 1919 grant to standardize group intelligence tests for grades 3-8, adapted from WWI Army testing.
Open source

The Flexner Report – 1910
Abraham Flexner’s original report published by the Carnegie Foundation.
Open source

Rockefeller and the Green Revolution
The Rockefeller Foundation discusses its Mexican agricultural work and its connection with the Green Revolution.
Open source

History of Federal Dietary Guidance
The federal government’s historical timeline of Dietary Guidelines for Americans.
Open source

USDA Food Pyramid Development Records
USDA National Agricultural Library archival records concerning development of the Food Guide Pyramid.
Open source

Listen: Dr. Jack Kruse on Centralization & Decentralization

A lot of the questions that sent me down this rabbit hole came from listening to Dr. Jack Kruse. His work challenges the conventional separation of physics, biology, medicine, environment, and human health and repeatedly returns to decentralized thinking.

Unplugging from the Matrix with Dr. Jack Kruse – The What Is Money? Show, WiM545
A long-form discussion of money, medicine, institutional power, history, nature, technology, and decentralization.

Dr. Jack Kruse – Decentralized Medicine and Natural Law
A discussion centered on decentralized medicine, natural law, and reconnecting health with the environment.

Dr. Jack Kruse – Undoctrinate Yourself
A long-form conversation touching on Rockefeller, institutional medicine, money, and decentralization.

Dr. Jack Kruse’s Writing
For his material on light, mitochondria, circadian biology, water, magnetism, and decentralized health.

I don’t believe decentralization means believing Dr. Jack Kruse simply because Jack Kruse said something. That would defeat the entire point. Listen to the argument. Follow his sources. Read the original documents. Challenge what you think you know. Then decide for yourself.

Don’t exchange one authority for another. Learn how to think for yourself.

John 8:31-32 “³¹ So Jesus said to the Jews who had believed him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, ³² and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”